Alpha

The EMP goes off and in another universe the blast rips through the AI – it tears them apart at the sub-atomic electrical level and obliterates them from existence. In another world, the blast does what it should and tears the gestalt soul of the Meta to pieces and the thing that remains – the shattered, agony-eaten remnant of the original Freelancer Sigma possessed all those years ago – Washington listens to him scream, go down on his hands and knees and come apart completely. In that world Washington sits in the dark, bleeding into his chest until unconsciousness takes him… then wakes in a jail-cell three days later with a new scar over his heart and a new criminal record.

In this world though…

The EMP goes off and tears through the Command HQ, burning out every single electric device in the compound and Washington… he braces one hand against the console, presses his free hand up under the chest plate of his armor, where the bullet smashed through the titanium composite shell and punched through him – through and through – and lodged into the back plate of his chest harness. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be conscious. Everything… every…

What the fuck is that noise?

Wash, in this world, turns around, staggers back against the panel and slumps, gasping, to a seated position at the foot of the console and stares blindly into the dark. Somewhere in the black he nears the sound of low animal breathing, the jerk scrape of someone in body armor moving, then the sound of a MA6 pistol hitting the floor. The Meta is still moving. Wash’s breath bubbles in his throat, bursts into coughs and he slumps, clutches his side, allows the pain the bleed into every part of him and – fuck, ow, ow ow – he hears the wet whine in his every breath, deep spasms of pain rushing through his chest.

He’s dying. It hurts. He’s dying. His HUD is beeping in his ear telling him in the urgent language of biometrics that he is hemorrhaging into his chest cavity. The pain is incandescent and fading though, drowning in adrenaline as he goes rapidly, pleasurably into shock. So it’s with a dull and dizzy sense of uncertainty that he watches a bright white glow – no blue? A white-blue bright blot of light coalesces from nothing and illuminates the towering figure of the Meta, the white of his armor ignited in Wash’s blurred vision.

He’s not looking at Washington. He’s inspecting his hands, flexing them, turning them over.

“Maine?” says Wash. His mouth is full of blood, but he’s too weak to get the helmet off. He coughs liquid into the respirator of his helmet, sucks an agonizing breath. “Maine… are you…?”

“Aww, sweet!” says a voice that is not Maine, the Meta, Sigma, or and of the gestalt AI. The Meta, clenches his hands in front of him in a gesture that, for a lack of a better phrased, ‘totally pumped’. Wash stares as the Meta throws up his fists in a kind of strong man victory pose. “I’m fucking tall now!” Wash stares. The Not-Meta jerks his chin at him. “Sup, shortie? Toldja I’m a ghost.”

“Alpha?” Wash croaks.

“Nope. I’m Leonard Church, motherfucker and I just stopped the Meta. I’m fuckingawesome!”

Washington, stunned, rapidly dizzying from bloodloss, knows that he should really be worried about the fucking hole in his chest but what he says is, “I… don’t understand.”

“Right, because Freelancer fragments didn’t think of installing anti-EM pulse shields in that last two years. Who’s the fucking idiot now, dipshit?” Wash opens his mouth to answer but what comes out is blood. He gags, doubles over, sucks air and blood in equal measure, reaches up and rips his helmet off so he can retch and swallow the copper taste of his lungs. “Wait. You son of a bitch. Are you dying?”

“No, Church.” He pants. “I take bullets… to the chest… all the time.”

The Meta is still glowing. The holo-projection slots are malfunctioning – generating a loose halo of holo-pixels around his body, illuminating the room around him. In Wash’s eyes it makes the white and gold of Maine’s old Freelancer armor impossible to look at. He turns his eyes away when the Meta… Alpha… whatever he is, crosses the floor and kneels down in front of him. He grabs Washington hand where it’s clutching his side, peels his palm from the soaking body suit.

The Meta’s gold helm-ed face lifts to look at him. “You can’t die, asshole.” His voice is coming from all around him.

“Watch me,” says Wash groggily.

“No.”

“It’s over. I’m okay. Just… make sure they… they burn for it okay? I…”

“Fuck that,” says Church, ignoring him completely. Then he grabs Washington’s arm and unceremoniously yanks him forward and rolls the Freelancer onto his stomach. Wash, who was not expecting that, screams in pain. “Sorry, dude.” He’s gets a grip on the back of Wash’s chest harness, starts pulling the back of his armor open at the access panel in the spine. He hears the depressurization hiss of the central power core being accessed. Wash tries, instinctively, to drag himself away, but Alpha holds him in place. “Stop squirming, you baby, I’m gonna fix you.”

Wash sees, through the corner of his eye, the Meta unslot something from the back of his own armor, reaching up behind his back blind and pulling a mod shunt from the spine of his the suit. It’s glowing green, pulsing. York’s healing unit. Church grabs the back of Washington’s neck, shoves him down and Wash feels something jam up into an empty slot between his shoulder blade, his armor suite updating and installing the new bio-functions.

Wash feels a thick rush of chemical euphoria – the healing mod at work.

“Church, stop. What are you…?”

“You can’t die, you stupid fuck. I need you.” There’s a harsh angry series of beep from inside Washington’s armor. “Dammit. Out of power. Need to jump the core.”

“What? You can’t jump a power core.”

“Sure you can. I’ve got this. I’m smart now. I mean, fuck – you know what I mean.”

“Don’t!” Wash squirms. “Don’t jump anything!”

“Stop whining. You’ll be fine.”

“Seriously! Don’t!”

There’s a sound, something slotting into the back of Wash’s armor again, a loud hum, and the stink of ozone suddenly and the last thing Washington hears before his armor shorts is, “Wait, fuck…” The last thing Washington feels is his spine light up like a fucking Vegas roadside and set the ropy grid of his nervous system on fire, ignite his goddamn brain in lights and sound and –

“Well, okay, you can’t jump a fuckin’ power core.”

Chapter 2 Chapter Text

Washington comes back to things in ugly blurs and blacks, in malarial heat and sweat. He hallucinates violently, his memory burning white phosphorous hot and he comes back to his bed of bones in screaming Technicolor and blood. He comes up thrashing consciousness, breathes sub-zero, his bare skin sheeted in ice water, his wrists knotted to a bedframe in the fucking darkness and when the walls of his mind crush in and press him back into the burning grave of his unconsciousness, someone says his name.

Hands on his shoulders. For every breath he breathes he screams it back out three fold.

His mind is a kiln, baking the sanity out through the cracks in his thoughts and he hasn’t broken like this since Epsilon, since the Mother of Invention went down in flames and they dug him out of the wreckage and North… North is fucking ash and bones, just like his sister. Just Like York, just like – Wake up. Wake the fuck up. Get up. Get up, you son of a bitch. Fucking breathe you stupid –!

The room is dark. A single finger of green light coming down through an industrial sized ventilation shaft overhead. There is a fan bade spinning slowly inside it, rhythmically slicing the light away. Washington breathes in, smells the molecular clean alloy tang of his armor’s air scrubbers. He becomes aware, slowly, of his body – that he’s lying horizontal, his hands at his sides. He’s in his body suit, the thick black nano-composite under armor that fits his body like a glove but never binds or drags his skin, is designed for him to literally live in for months if need be. Normal clothes don’t feel right after Project Freelancer. His helmet is on, his chest piece is on. His arms are stripped of armor, so are his legs and hips.

His HUD, dimmed, flickers to a gentle glow when he opens his eyes, a small data readout informing him that his heart-rate his normal, his blood pressure normal, that he’s alive. He can’t tell where he is. There’s a low roar somewhere in the walls, of a generator or some great machine. His mouth tastes foul and gluey. His brow is dry, his body inside the suit likewise cool. It comes to him, slowly, dully, that someone must have kept him in his suit as an ad hoc life-support system. That’s why the chest piece and helmet are on.

He tries to lift his arm.

His wrist stops up short. Washington can’t turn his head, it hurts his neck too much, but he doesn’t have to look to know the feel of some kind of strap around his wrist. He tries his other arm, feels the gentle bite of the strap and, like so many times before the fine burning wires of dread cage his heart and his pulse spikes in his HUD. Something large and white shifts on his peripheral.

“Heeey, you’re awake!”

Nope. His eyes roll back into the top of his skull and goes limp again.

“Oh, you fucking…”

Washington dreams.

He dreams Maine is alive. He dreams a SPARTAN laughing and the stink of plasma on the battle fields of Circumstance. He dreams a woman with a MA5 on her back and a grin like a knife slash, her pale hair knotted back against her skull until she pulls it free. He remembers her exactly. He remembers everything in its greatest minutia and every hyper-sharp detail digs into him. Her tongue against his is a coal in his mouth, her teeth drawing blood off his lip and her fingers hot around his cock, fisting him to an agonizing orgasm and – wake up. hey. wake up. c’mon, just snap out of it, for fuck’s sake – he remembers his grip on his battle rifle. A small body in his arms. The rough scrape of a cat’s tongue on his ear. “Babylancer,” drawls Four-Seven-Niner, her voice silver and sarcastic.

“Washington.”

There’s man standing over him. The man is wearing a Freelancer body suit, the high collar fitted up around the sharp angle of his jaw. His eyes are strange and grey-green, too big in the pupil, his face high-bone and pale, un-creased by age. His head is shaved and his heart knots in his chest This time when Washington lifts his arm, there’s nothing bind it to the bed frame.

“Maine?”’

The figure’s mouth never moves. “Go back to sleep.”

“M’sorry.”

“Go to sleep, you stupid fuck.”

He loses time again, drops into a memory and it’s razor sharp and loud. Carolina tears past him and he’d swear to God she’s here. He remembers the sound of a person moving 30mph, the sound a fist make traveling at that speed. He’d swear to God he can taste pancakes and taffy. Swear to God his hands smell like gun cleaning solution. He could fucking swear to God he’s standing in the launch bay of the MoI and the Twins are elbowing each other. Someone touches his back and Connie passes him and he’s there, he’s there. They’re alive. They’re alive.

And then he wakes up.

The Meta is standing on the other side of the room, arms folded over his chest, leaned up against the wall. His helmet is on. He doesn’t say anything, but Washington is not fooled this time. He grits his teeth and sits up. The Meta watches him move. There’s feeling in his limbs, a low-watt ache, a knot in his gut. Washington swings his feet to the floor, breathes, reaches up and pulls his helmet off. The air in the room is dry, dusty, smells of dirt.

“Are you finally fucking done being comatose?”

The voice is Alpha’s. There’s a flicker and with a small blink of white-blue light there’s a small holo-avatar hovering directly in front of the Meta’s helmet. Alpha’s holo-form is mimicking Meta’s posture, arms folded, looking cross.

“How long was I out?”

A shrug. The Meta’s shoulders move. Alpha’s holo-form shrugs. “Just a few days this time.”

“This time,” says Wash, not surprised, not a question. “How long total?”

A beat. Alpha mutters something indistinct and Wash squints.

“What was that?”

“Three.”

“Three?”

“Three…” He pauses, looks awkwardly around. “…months.”

“WHAT!?”

Alpha’s holo-form blinks forward, holding up two hands. The Meta moves forward too. “Don’t freak out.”

“THREE MONTHS?!” Washington’s voice spikes up and cracks. “WHY THE FUCK WAS I OUT FOR THREE MONTHS?!”

“Because you got fucked up, dude. Remember?”

“I remember you over charging my armor.”

“Hey, that overcharge is what got the healing unit going.”

“It’s also what put me in a fucking coma, you psychotic –!”

“Hey, you. I hear a lot of bitching from a guy who isn’t fucking dead. Just gonna be a dick right out the gate? Not even a ‘thank you’? You think getting you out of Command was easy?” A beat. Alpha is clearly waiting for praise but Washington is still processing literally his entire vocabulary of profanity for an appropriate response and cannot answer. “I mean, obviously I handled it, but it was tricky.”

“I – I – I can’t fucking –!” Wash’s rage propels him to his feet. “Why am I not in a fucking hospital?!”

“Oh. Right. That’s the other thing.”

“What other thing?

“Man,” says Alpha, conversationally exasperated, “I keep forgetting you didn’t hear any of this.”

“What other thing?” grits Wash.

“You’re… kind of a fugitive?”

Washington breathes out through his nose, hard. “What?”

“It’s on UNSC bands. You pretty much destroyed Freelancer Command just as the UNSC military police were on their way to secure the facility and arrest the Director. So, um, the running theory is that you were deployed by the Director to destroy evidence and since the Director went into hiding –” Washington sputters, but Alpha pushes on. “—they think you’re an accomplice. There’s a warrant out for your arrest in every UNSC controlled star system.”

There is a beat.

Wash stares at the Alpha-Meta.

He stares back.

“Uh.” Alpha makes a sound like he’s clearing his throat. “You gonna say somethin’ or –?”

“SO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME —?!” Wash feels himself going red in the face. “—THAT IM A FUGITIVE FROM THE LAW FOR TRYING TO BRING DOWN THE GODDAMN LUNATICS WHO DID ALL OF THIS?”

Alpha thinks about it. Meta tips his head, thoughtful. “Yeah.” A cheery nod. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” Washington promptly becomes white with fury. “To be fair,” says Alpha, crossing his and Meta’s arms again. “Your plan was to fucking die, Wash. Barring dying, it does look pretty bad.”

“NO! Caboose and the Reds were supposed to turn over the Epsilon unit and clear our names! That was the fucking point! The whole damn point was to have evidence to exonerate ourselves after I destroyed the facility and killed the Meta and WHY AREN’T YOU DEAD?!”

“That’s rude.”

“NOT YOU!” He points at the Meta, the body behind the Alpha’s holo-avatar. “YOU!”

“Oh.” Alpha, finally, wilts a little. “Right. That.”

Washington can feel his thoughts catching against each other in that way they do some, the fractured bits grating in his head. “You can’t stay in there.”

“Hey, don’t get on my case. I did what you told me to do. I stopped the Meta and, remember, you had Caboose drive off with my goddamn armor. It’s not like I have options.”

“You can’t stay in there.”

“Maine’s not in here, you know.”

The Meta is looking at him. His helmet is on, the gold reflective dome of the EVA design unreadable and alien looking, but there’s a slight tilt in the chin, the angle in way the arms are crossed… exactly like he remembers. Washington turns away, brings his hands up, meaning to cover his ears before realizing how insane that looks and instead rubbing his face with his bare hands. His face feels worn, lined like crepe-paper.

“I’ll get out,” says Alpha reasonably, “just as soon as I have Epsilon.”

Wash freezes. He spins around, the bright blue of his eyes wide. Then he backs away.

“Wait,” says Alpha. “No. I knew you were gonna do that. Washington, no. I’m not…” Wash bends down, grabs his helmet from the floor and whips it at the Meta all in one lightning-fast motion. Alpha, apparently not expecting that, just stands there as the helmet thumps against Meta’s chest. “Oi! Stop throwing shit!”

But Washington is not throwing anything he’s stumbling into a run for what looks like a corridor on the far side of the room, away from the AI possessed body behind him. He races down the narrow tunnel, slams shoulder-first up against a sealed manual hatch of some kind. He throws his weight against the handle, torqueing his whole body against the rusted pieces of shit, realizing desperately that he’s not strong enough to move it without his armor. That’s when the Meta grabs his elbow.

Wash whips his arm away from the touch. “Get away from me!”

“Whoa!” The Meta backs up, tossing his hands up. “Stop. Just fuckin’ calm down. I’mnot the Meta.” There’s a perfectly loud beat of silence. “Well, okay, I am the Meta, but not like grr, crazy, psycho-pants.”

“Let me out of here,” breathes the Freelancer.

“Not until you listen.”

“I’m done listening.” Wash holds up his hands, not quite in a defensive stance, his back to the door. “You’ve told me enough. Just let me out. I don’t want to know. Just let me out.”

“I’m not the Meta!” says Alpha, his holo-form flashing angrily. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m Church! How many times I gotta say this? Church. Not Meta. Not Alpha. Church. I saved your fuckin’ life. Okay? You were right about everything, about me, about Tex, about… everything.”

“I thought you said you hated me.”

“Oh no, I still pretty much hate you. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill you.”

“Why not? If you want Epsilon you could have just taken off after your friends. You don’t need me.”

“Wow.” Alpha is fucking sulking. “Thanks. Glad to know you think I’m a total psycho.”

“You’re in the fucking Meta.”

“I’m not the Meta though. If I was the Meta do you think I would have spent three months keeping you alive just so I could snap your neck when you woke up? You think you’d be standing here to bitch at me right now? Yeah. I don’t think so. So why don’t you stop freaking out and, I dunno, use your fucking brain. Are you a Freelancer or not?”

“No. I’m a criminal now, remember?”

“I take it back. You know what you are? You’re a smartass, that’s what you are.”

“Yeah. And you just said that you’re after Epsilon.” Washington glares. “The last fragment. Just like the Meta. So, tell me again why I should trust you.”

“Oh,” says Alpha. He laughs. The sound gets eaten by the walls, sinks into Washington’s skin and settles into his skeleton, makes his teeth ache. “You don’t have to trust me, Washington. You blew up Command, remember? You destroyed all the evidence, have been on the lam for three fuckin’ months, and you’re a fuckin’ war criminal. I, on the other hand, am the only the only person in the damn world who can clear your name.” And then, having made his stance perfectly clear, the Meta, Church, Alpha, whatever he is… leans forward. He’s so close Maine’s visor fogs just slightly when Washington breathes out, the glow of the holo-light bone white and eerie when Alpha says, cocksure and condescending, “Maybe you stop acting like I owe you explanations and start thinking about how you’re going to stay on my good side.”

Wash didn’t think hate had a taste. It does.

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

“Morning to you too, Agent Wash.” Alpha steps back. “Get your armor on."

Chapter 3 Chapter Text

Forty-eight hours later, Washington tries to put a bullet – well, actually, ten bullets – into the Meta’s skull at point blank range.

It’s raining.

Washington cannot remember the last time he saw rain like this – it comes down in humid sheets so thick that, eventually, they have to pull over because Wash can’t see a goddamn thing and the rain is playing hell with topo-scans.

Washington hasn’t said a word since they left the ancient hydro-electric plant some 100 miles back, knotting his hands around the steering wheel and keeping eyes forward. His passenger, to his credit, only accused him of ‘sulking’ for a few hours before lapsing into erratic bitching about the countryside, the weather, the Warthog being too small for him, the weather again, Washington’s driving, Washington himself. When they finally park, night has fallen and, on this planet, night is brief but deep and moonless. Alpha is climbing out of the Warthog, the white-blue glow of his holo-avatar perfectly haloing the silhouette of Meta’s head.

Washington’s got his sidearm, a single full magazine snapped to the mag-holster on his hip. He pulls the weapon, stands up in the truck, aims, and the hair-trigger semi-auto puts ten bullets into the back of Meta’s head.

Or rather, into his over shield, which eats the kinetic force of the bullets, the energy barrier flaring gold and hissing hot in the downpour but Wash just keeping shooting. He keeps firing for the split second it takes Alpha to torque around like a struck bull and ax-kick the Warthog. He hits the fucking vehicle like a freight train, sending the car skidding ten meters spinning in the mud, flinging Washington from the driver’s and bowling him end over end into a watery ditch near a hedge of trees. Wash loses the pistol in the soupy muck, finds it, lunges back to his feet, spins around and –

Washington turns around directly into Meta’s hands.

He’s faster, thinks Washington dully, as two massive fists close on his wrist and throat, hauling him up effortlessly into the air. Washington curls and kicks out, his titanium-armored boot smashing directly into the Meta’s chest, but the monster is unaffected. He immediately bends Washington’s gun-arm the wrong way until he screams and releases his grip on the pistol. Then Meta hurls him back into the mud to hiss and nurse his aching wrist until the water splashes and the Meta is standing over him.

“Are you kidding me?”

Alpha’s holo-avatar sparks white directly over Washington, burning dwarf-star hot.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

The Meta steps down into the ditch, grabs Wash by the elbow and yanks him up half out of the water. The rain thunders down around them, sheeting Washington’s armor in water and maybe that how Alpha misses it: when the Freelancer pulls his combat knife from the sheath at his lower back and slams it into the meat of the Meta’s shoulder. Alpha screams – shouldn’t have tapped Meta’s nervous-system, asshole. Wash just yanks the knife out, whips his arm back and drives it home again, the blade missing its mark and skidding off the titanium plating, snapping. Meta twists, hard, hurlsWashington who hits the ground rolling and comes up in a crouch with nothing but the broken ka-bar in his fist.

“Washington!” says Alpha, his voice splintering into eight voices. “Stop!”

Wash switches hands and charges out of his crouch, feints right, leaps and slashes, the jagged metal cutting silver arcs through the rain as Wash darts forward, drives the knife at Meta’s belly and –

Meta side-steps, grabs his knife arm, and uses Washington’s momentum to throw him forward into a somersault so Wash slams flat on his back in the mud. Meta grabs his wrist, spins him on his back, snags his ankle, yanks Washington across the ground toward him then jams his own blade up into the Kevlar composite material at his throat, pinning him into the mud, his other hand gripping his chest armor at the shoulder.

“Yeah?” says Alpha. “Yeah? Great. Good. You done?”

“Fuck you, Alpha.”

“You know what, jackass, remind me never to save your life again.”

“Go to hell.”

“Rude.”

“Get off me.”

“Oh no. I don’t fucking think so Mr. Teamkill McGee. What the fuck was that about?”

“You’re an idiot,” says Washington.

“I,” says Alpha with a snort, “am not the dickhead on his ass in the mud.”

“You know what my plan was at Command?” There’s an edge in Washigton’s voice. Perhaps Alpha is aware it, maybe he isn’t. He does, however, ease up incrementally on the Freelancer’s throat. Washington’s voice in the rain is raised but even. “You were right – my plan was kill Meta, get evidence to the jail the Director, die with my name clear. That was it. I had three fucking things I wanted to happen at Command.” The rain is thunderously loud. “Three things.”

Rivulets of water course down Meta’s visor, dripping from his chin. Alpha’s glow, so bright before, flickers a little, dimming. “Wash…”

“You took Maine,” grits Wash. “None of the evidence got to the UNSC, and as you fucking pointed out I’m a goddamn fugitive and not only is my name not clear, but I’m not even fucking dead! And it’s all because of you! You and your shitty friends who can’t follow simple fucking directions! Well fuck you, I’m gonna get at least one thing right.”

“Uh, I’m kind of a super powered weapon of mass destruction now. Don’t know if you noticed. Attacking me just get gets you killed.”

Washington’s smile behind his helmet is so uneven is hurts his mouth. “One thing right.”

Alpha says nothing.

The headlights from the Warthog are throwing dim beams of light across the muddy field, the grass beaten flat into the sludge and somewhere far away there’s a rumble of thunder. Washington waits, but Alpha just sits there, the Meta just sits there while the water rises around them, engulfing his knees and sliding up Washington’s ribs even as they sit there in the flash flood. His pulse against the knife blade, one knee between Wash’s thighs, a fist around the upper shoulder of his chest harness.

“I lied,” says Alpha. “I’m better at that now.”

“Gamma,” says Wash.

“Yeah. Before when I said I need you – I don’t.”

“Then do me, Alpha, and go cannibalize my AI. See if it makes you a fucking person.”

The fist on his shoulder tightens. “Shut up.”

“You’re code with a bad attitude.”

“Shut up.”

“Fuck you, Alpha. You’re just a rampant fucking –”

The blade slams into the mud by Wash’s skull, splashing water over his helmet and Alpha grabs his shoulder and , in Omega’s voice, he flares white and: “Shut up, Washington!”

“Oh, I’m sorry does that fucking bother you? What’s the matter? I thought you were a fuckin’ ghost.”

“Wash… I am goddamn warning you…”

Washington leans up in Meta’s face. “Boo, motherfucker.”

Alpha must stop himself at the last minute because, honestly, if he’d hit Washington with everything Maine and Meta were truly capable of, Washington’s cranium would have exploded in his helmet and popped the base of his skull from the top of his spine like a broken bobble head. For now, though, he hits him so hard Wash’s teeth snap together and his body torques right into the blow, a right-handed haymaker that knocks Washington’s brain around inside his head, blinds him in pain and impact.

York’s healing mod flares – a blaze of green heat that rushes up and down his spine and bleeds through his skull, hammering regen into his damaged body, dosing his blood in adrenaline and chems and for a dull glorious moment the pain gives way to a glow of thick, warm heat… then scrapes away into a nerve-raw burn of a concussion. He moans, opens his eyes, becomes aware of hands on his shoulders, of the rain still beating against the shell of his armor, his muscles slack so when the hands holding him shake him, once, twice, gently, his head just wobbles loose at the end of his neck, fallen back like a dead thing. He grimaces.

“Shit.” A voice is saying softly. “Shit… shit. Fuck. God dammit.”

“Ow,” says Wash. “You fuck…”

“Wash?”

Washington groans. “Can you stop almost killing me and just actually kill me?”

“Can you stop being a cunt for two seconds you Freelancer fuck?”

“Can you stop possessing the body of my old teammate like a fucking monster?”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m not Meta. He’s not here anymore, Wash. It’s just… armor.”

“Fuck you.”

Alpha doesn’t move, just kneels over him, the rain dripping off the battered white of Maine’s armor, running over the alien gold dome of the EVA helmet. Wash lies there, waiting. And when Alpha doesn’t move he opens a neural-to-text HUD COM-frequency to Maine’s old channel and sends the text-message he’s had queued up for the last two hours because he was too chicken-shit and angry to send it until now.

WA-13: he was my friend.

“I was in your head, Washington. I know what he was. What the fuck do you want?”

“To bury him, you stupid fuck.”

“Not yet. I – I need him.”

Washington reaches up, grabs the collar of Meta’s chest plate, yanks himself up, face to face with him. “You don’t get fucking turn,” he hisses. “The minute we have another option you fucking get out. You let me bury Maine. At the end of this, you let me bury him or you bury me right now: that’s the fucking arrangement if you want me to help you. Yes or no?”

Alpha says nothing.

“Yes or no?”

“Jesus. Fine.”

Chapter 4 Chapter Text

“We’re going to Valhalla,” says Alpha at last.

Washington, for his part, does not look up from where he’s seated in the back of the Warthog, his helmet off, halfway through a stale energy bar. Day break took the rain with it and brought the sun. The metal is warm against the back of his neck, his chest plate in the bed of the truck beside him. He doesn’t look up, not because he’s giving Alpha the cold shoulder (which he is) or because he’s trying to be rude (also something he’s doing) but rather because Alpha has taken Maine’s helmet off and he’s sitting up front, eating a stale energy bar of his own and Washington doesn’t (can’t) look.

“That’s where the Reds and Blues were reassigned. Intercepted their orders a two months ago. Reassigned to Outpost 17A and 17B. Kinda fuckin’ stupid though, assigning Caboose to the Blue Base on his own.”

The air on this planet smells strange after the rain, a sweet metal stink, like dirty copper, mud, and crushed jasmine. Washington’s scans tell him nothing about what combination of alkali earth and local minerals could make a smell like that.

“I’m not worried though. You know, Sarge? He fuckin’, like, always talks a big game but the truth is he never fuckin’ really attacks us unless the teams are even and they’re never goddamn even. They haven’t been even since Captain Flowers died.” Alpha is, categorically, unaffected by Washington’s refusal to uphold his half of the conversation. “So, there’s no way they’ll actually go after Caboose, unfortunately.”

Stale energy bars are the only thing Alpha managed to salvage for them to eat. That and the remains of the intravenous nutrient stims, but they only have a half a dozen of those, a handful of bio-foam pens, a couple tranquilizer darts – the remains of whatever supply closet Alpha raided. Everything he used to patch Washington up was clearly stolen, but Alpha won’t say where. Leaves it to the Freelancer to silently speculate.

Washington wonders what Alpha did at Command. Did the AI carry him out? Literally carry him, unconscious, barely stable, a bullet wound though his chest, his body blitzed with medi-chems and bio-gel? Did he throw Wash over his back, hump the weight for miles to the nearest outpost not hit by the EMP? Did he highjack a vehicle, knock the place over for medical supplies? Kill anyone? Church’s apathy toward killing had been there before he ever suspected he wasn’t human. But the notion that he might have killed people just to get supplies to save him…?

It bothers Wash.

“Hey.” Washington has spoken before he can think better of it. “Alpha.”

“Will stop fuckin’ calling me ‘Alpha’, dickhead? It’s Church.”

“Alpha,” says Wash, and takes a petty satisfaction in the sound of the AI grumbling. “Did you attack anyone while I was under?”

“What? No. Why would I do that?”

“Where’d you get the supplies?”

“Okay. I robbed some people while you were out. I didn’t attack anyone though. I’m ninja. Cloaking technology motherfucker.”

Wash grunts.

“Really? That’s it? Back to ignoring me now?”

Wash ignores him.

“That’s what you’re gonna do? Really? Sulk some more? You already tried to shoot me in the head and stab me in the face – which hurt, by the way, asshole – but you’re still gonna be a bitch?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I dunno. Something.”

Washington buys himself a minute by taking the stale bar between his teeth and tearing off a chunk. Chewing in silence. He can feel Alpha looking at him. There’s a faint glow coming over his shoulder which tells him that Alpha’s holo-avatar is lurking near his shoulder – the slight static of the hologram making his skin prickle like a hand brushing along the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. Wash gives up on the energy bar, tosses it back in the ruck-sack next to him, and picks up his chest piece. He glances at Alpha, finally, through the corner of his eyes. The blue-white SPARTAN avatar has its arms crossed, looking petulant.

Wash looks away.

“Oh, c’mon,” says Alpha. “Really?”

“At what point will you get that I don’t want to be here and you blackmailing me into helping you doesn’t make us friends?” Washington doesn’t look at Alpha. He grunts, hefts the weight of the chest armor up onto one shoulder, activates the auto-locks and the harness slots into itself at the shoulder and flank, internal mechanisms catching and locking in. He picks up his helmet. “I’m not even entirely convinced you’re not the Meta.”

“And that’s why, you don’t get your gun back.”

“And this is why,” says Wash, hopping from the Warthog, “I’m not talking to you unless absolutely necessary.”

“Fine. You know what?”

Alpha blinks away. The Warthog shifts and Wash hears Maine’s boots hit the ground. A small jolt of dread laces the dark around Washington’s heart wondering if Alpha put the helmet back on or not. He stands still, back to the Warthog, feels the other Freelancer come up behind him, feels him reach forward, anticipates the vice-grip around his bicep, being spun around and – Tap. Tap. Wash blinks, looks down. Alpha is holding his Magnum by the barrel. He was tapping the grip against Washington’s arm. Wash takes the pistol, checks the magazine, half full where it was last night.

Wash looks up at Alpha/Meta. “You think that means something?”

“No. I’m just saying, if you want to die, then do it yourself.” Alpha shrugs Maine’s shoulders. “Don’t try and get me to do it for you, Washington.”

“I’m not suicidal.”

“Remember that part where I was in your head and you tried to Death-By-Meta yourself last night?”

“I was trying to kill the Meta.”

“Which is suicide.”

“No,” says Wash, “It’s just hard to do.”

“Do you listen to yourself?” Alpha asks. “Like, as you say things out loud, do you hear them or just…?”

“Being willing to die is not the same as being suicidal, Alpha.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Or what?”

“You know what, David? Do what you want. I’m sure it’ll work out.”

A beat.

“Fuck you, Church.”

“Yeah,” chortles Alpha, smugly. “Okay, Wash. Whatever you –”

BANG!

“Holy shit! What the fuck?!”

Washington snaps the gun back to his hip, strides past the sputtering AI, who clearly had not seriously expected the Freelancer to shoot him point blank in the knee. The over shields catch the bullet, of course, but that doesn’t undo Church’s shrill burst of profanity at being shot. For Washington’s part, the vicious surge of satisfaction that spreads through his body is better than a dose off York’s healing unit, completely warms him up in all the places the morning sun could not.

“Let’s go,” says Wash. “The sooner we know what happened to Epsilon, the sooner we can wrap this up.” He climbs back into the Warthog, turns around and cocks his head at Church who is obviously glaring, helmet or not. “You coming or…?”

“Fucking, Freelancer.”

Wash thinks about smirking. He doesn’t. It crosses his mind though.

“Where the fuck is everyone?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t get Caboose on long or short-range radio, dude.”

“Huh.” Wash flips his combat knife idly, catching it. “Maybe they did kill him.”

“Shut up, Wash.” A beat. “You’re a dark motherfucker, you know that?”

“Go fuck yourself, Church.”

“Where’d you get that? I didn’t give you another knife.”

“I had another one. You missed it. Aren’t you supposed to be a hyper-intelligent super weapon now?”

“You didn’t have another knife.”

“I stole yours.”

“What? You…” He checks his empty side holster. Turns, glares up at the Freelancer from where he’s crouched. “You cocksucker.”

Wash flips him a salute with the blade, jerks his head toward the pair of bases down in the valley. They’ve parked the Warthog up by the wall at the end of the gulch overlooking the gully all the way to the lake a mile out. At the beach head is the Red Base, Outpost 17-A, and about half-way into the valley is the Blue Base, 17-B. It’s a scenic location. It’s an isolated location. Which is good because two of the most wanted fugitives in UNSC controlled space are about to waltz in looking for a beaten up old memory unit and its psychotic AI contents.

“If anyone sees you –” Washington starts to say.

“They’ll run screaming and it’ll be fuckin’ hilarious?”

A beat. “I don’t know what I expected you to say, but in retrospect it was stupid to expect anything else.”

“Yeah, that was pretty stupid,” mutters Alpha, trying another radio frequency.

Wash, annoyed, retorts, “You’re stupid.”

“Shut up. I think I see someone in Blue Base.”

“But they aren’t picking up hails on Blue Team’s COM-frequency?”

Alpha mutters. He does that when something bothers him and when he mutters, Maine’s breathing changes and the low broken growl sends fingers of cold loathing siding down Washington’s spinal column. His got his knife in hand and his fingers tighten on the hilt – do it, just fucking do it, the over shield won’t catch a knife, just put it through the back of his fucking neck – then relax again. Alpha stands up.

“Fuck it,” he says. “I’m not sitting here anymore. Let’s go kick the door down.”

“That’s a great plan.”

“You’re coming with me.”

“Right. Because they fucking love me.”

“Stop bitching. Let’s go.”

Washington begins to follow Alpha down the hill, stops short when he turns suddenly, grabs his chest piece at the shoulder with on hand and brings his face close to Washington’s.

“Don’t try anything,” he says in a voice that is not quite Alpha’s.

“I won’t.”

“No,” he says. “You say it.”

“I won’t try anything.”

Alpha grips him still just a minute longer. Then lets him go and starts down toward Outpost 17-B. Washington anticipates that nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan. He keeps his knife in hand.

Chapter 5 Chapter Text

“Oh, hiii there! You scared me! I didn’t know anyone was over here at Blue Base.”

Washington and Alpha exchange a look.

They are, of course, wearing full body armor so when Washington’s eyebrows do a good job of getting halfway up his forehead into his hairline, Alpha cannot possibly see it but he, nevertheless, detects the mien of Washington’s first impression of the sim soldier in bright pink armor that they found cleaning Blue Base. And, though Washington cannot see – and does not want to see – whatever expression Alpha might impose on his host-body’s face, he can feel the annoyance from here. Wash opens the neural-to-text HUD interface and, before noticing he’s done it by instinct, snaps on Maine’s old COM-freq.

WA-13//: u kno this guy?

ME-1//: Yeah, I fucking know this guy. He’s a Red.

WA-13//: threat?

ME-1//: No. Donut’s alright actually.

And while Washington tries to figure out what the hell donuts have to do with anything (and why he’s using his and Maine’s old HUD shorthand), the soldier in pink armor says, “Strong silent types, huh? That’s cool. Don’t mind me.” He perks up, his voice brightening, “I’m just keeping the base a little tidy. A clean base is a deadly base! That’s what Sarge always says. Sarge is our commander. You’ll get a sarge over here I’m sure, but he won’t be like our Sarge; he’ll be Blue!”

“Aren’t you a Red?” says Washington, confused.

“Yup. That’s right. Red Team! Man, the rest of the guys will be so happy to have someone to fight. They’re gonna be so relieved to see you! What did you say your name was?”

“I – I’m Washington.”

“That’s a cool name. I’m Donut. Who’s your friend?”

There’s a beat. Wash glances at Alpha who still hasn’t said a word. He’s left the conversation in favor of investigating what looks like a broken combat android on the floor nearby. It appears, to Washington, an ad hoc compilation of robot parts that have been painted the same shade as Private Church’s old sim solider armor. Wash doesn’t pretend to comprehend the psychology behind a fragmented AI, partially reconstructed, possessing the body of long-gone Freelancer but he thinks it might be a little… weird to find someone was clearly trying to rebuild him out of spare parts. Wash clears his throat loudly.

“Your name is ‘Donut’?” repeats Washington, buying Alpha a minute.

“Yeah.” Donut, refusing to take offense, seems unbearably happy to have people to talk to. Even in the armor he’s beaming at Wash who feels uncomfortable and wishes the Red would do that screaming and running thing Alpha was talking about. Then he thinks it’s kind of fucking sad he’d rather deal with running and screaming than small talk. “It’s Franklin Donut, actually, but no one calls me Franklin. In fact, no one uses first names around here. Washington’s not your first name right?”

“Uh, no.”

“What’s your first name, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Wash is getting unnerved by having a normal conversation. He’s not sure he remembers how to do this. “If no one uses first names, then I’ll just stick to Washington.”

“Got it, Wash. It’ll be fun fighting you.”

Donut offers him a hand, to shake obviously, as though they’re on competing sports teams. Wash, dumbfounded, glances again at Alpha as though he’ll have some fucking insight into whether or not this kind of friendly sportsmanship is goddamn normal or just this guy. When Alpha persists in ignoring this conversation in favor of pulling the back of the android’s helmet out, Wash coughs again, awkwardly, and shifts his weight.

“I, uh, actually worked with the Reds and Blues a bit before? About three months ago. You weren’t there at the time and, uh, your Sergeant and teammates kind of tried to riddle me with bullets.” A beat. “Are you sure you should be in Blue Base… cleaning?”

“Oh,” says Donut dropping his unshaken hand. “Well, since Caboose left he asked me to housesit and then Simmons decide to take the base and blow it up. But now that you’re here I guess we’ll just have to take it from you the old fashioned way.” A (cheerful) beat. “With bullets,” he clarifies, as though Washington might miss that. “Red hot bullets.”

“Okay,” says Washington quickly. “I got it. No – no need to expand on that.”

“It’ll be fun!” says Donut. “You both look really athletic. We’ll have to be sneaky with you two.”

“Yeah,” Wash says, a little uncomfortable at being called ‘athletic’. “I guess. Sure.”

“Yup. We’ll def take you from behind.”

“Okay! That’s – I got it. You don’t need to expand on anything. Look, can you just tell us where Caboose went?”

“Oh, he had to go look for Tucker.”

“Tucker?”

“Yeah, he got reassigned to special projects with me. That’s how we got stuck in the desert together. Diplomatic Corp, treaty enforcement, negotiation and alien relations. And speaking of alien relations –.”

“No, no, no!” says Washington, panicked. “I don’t need to know. I’m okay. Just can you tell me where he went? I, uh, want to make sure we get the team reassembled before we start fighting each other. You know, the whole… Blue versus Red… thing.”

“Eeeeh,” says Donut, tilting his head. “It’s Red versus Blue. It sounds weird when you say it the other way.”

“Whatever. Can you please tell me where Caboose is?”

“Sure. I’ve got the coordinates. Tucker gave them to me to give to Caboose so they could get a bunch of soliders together to go give him back-up at the temple. I’m sure they radioed Command and got us help ASAP. I kind of passed out after trekking across the desert alone with no rations, so I didn’t see him get all the soldiers together…” He beams. “But I’m sure he got an army and Tucker is appreciating the cavalry right now.”

“Caboose,” repeats Washington, slowly. When Donut doesn’t react he goes on. “Caboose… got back up for one of your stranded teammates who is in life-endangering circumstances in the desert? And you think that went…” He looks for a description that isn’t ‘on fire’. “…well?” he decides.

“Is your friend okay?” says Donut, leaning a bit to the left.

He’s staring behind Washington.

Alpha has been really fucking quiet this whole time.

“Oh, yeah,” Washington says, “he just, um, loves robots. Seriously, just tinkering all day.” Washington has no idea what Alpha is doing. He’s no longer pulling the robot’s insides out, he’s instead gone completely still, kneeling next to the robot with his head bent. Donut tilts his head and Wash – he quietly thumbs the safety off his pistol and looks over his shoulder at the Meta. “Hey… buddy.” He grits his teeth at the moniker. “You okay there?”

“I’m fine,” says Alpha. He says it in his own voice. He stands and turns around. “I’m fucking great.”

“Waaaaaait,” says Donut, dragging the word out in a bright, delighted thread. “Church? Is that you? Hey, man! You got buff! And tall. How’d you do that – that’s kinda…?”

“Yeah, thanks. Wash, you got those coordinates?”

“Yeah, I’ll sync to your HUD.”

“Great. Donut. Okay, you were cleaning up in here. Did you find an AI unit? It’s a kind of long glowing blue tube thing. You move anything like that while you were cleaning?”

“Oh, you mean that thing Caboose had? Yeah, it was cool. I was telling Simmons about it earlier. Caboose has been using it to build a new best friend.”

“Wait, what?!” Alpha’s voice goes high with offense. “What do you mean ‘build a new best friend’?”

“Sorry, Church,” says Donut, crossing his arms and sticking his nose in the air. “That’s what happens when you just take off and don’t keep in touch… pretty rude if you ask me.”

“Ugh, whatever!” Alpha tosses his hand up and Washington’s hand tenses on his pistol grip. “Was it still functional or not? I don’t fucking care what Caboose was doing with it, I just want to know if it was still working.”

“Well, I dunno. It was glowing. Does that mean it was working?”

“Then it didn’t get hit by the EMP?” says Washington and, for a moment, he cannot fathom the violent battery-acid disappointment that spreads across the back of his tongue. He doesn’t look at Alpha, though he can hear the tension sliding into his voice like a needle into a fucking vein. “He just… kept it? He didn’t turn it in to anyone?”

“I… don’t think so?” says Donut, not sounding very sure. “Simmons said something about that, like, it was supposed to get turned over to someone or something. He got mad and ran off to call Sarge, but our radios are down and I didn’t understand anything cause… well, you remember how I said I passed out? Thaaaat was a fib.” He’s still very positive. “I was in a coma!”

Wash resists the urge to say ‘me too’ and instead says, “Where’s the AI unit now? Is it here at the base?”

“Nah, I think Caboose took it with him to the desert.”

“Dammit,” says Alpha, the bio-light in his armor flashing briefly white in temper. “Fine then. Couldn’t be so goddamn easy could it? That could never happen. Things going my way. C’mon, Washington.” Alpha, rather unexpectedly, grabs his arm at the elbow and pulls him a step toward the door. Hate hits Wash in pins and needle burning out from the place where Alpha puts Maine’s fingers on his arm. “We’re going after them.Now.”

“Hold on.” Wash twists his arm free, snags the shoulder guard of Alpha’s armor andyanks hard enough to stop the juggernaut stomp of Alpha’s momentum toward the door. “Wait. Did you hear anything he just said? There’s a team of hostiles out there. We have no idea what we’re walking into.”

Alpha cocks his head at him. “You think it’s something I can’t handle?”

Washington’s hand is still on his sidearm, fine muscles twitching his fingers around the grip. “I think you shouldn’t tell me what to do.”

“Uh…” says Donut. “Do you two hear that?”

They both stop and listen. Sure enough, there’s a low rumbling. Washington pauses, frowning for a moment before identifying the sound as some kind of engine pulling up outside. Alphas shrugs Washington’s hand off his shoulder and Wash lets him, a falling momentarily silent as headlight beams throw shadows down the ramp into the base.

“Hey, Donut! Are you in there? Lopez built you a motorcycle!” The motor noises cease. “It’s broken.”

“Hey! Yeah, Simmons!” Donut is yelling before Wash or Alpha can say anything. “I’m inside the Blue Base! Guess what? Blue Team got new soldiers!”

“What? They sent team members?” The voice is familiar, one of the Reds from before and getting closer. Alpha ever so casually swings the Brute Shot off his shoulder into his hand. Washington watches, a mixture of dread, indifference, and dull curiosity, as Simmons comes strolling up to the entrance, stepping onto the landing at the top of the ramp. “Why would they do that?” he demands, “That doesn’t make any sense.” He notices the Meta inside. “OH, FUCK!!!” Simmons darts away, the fading babble of his voice trailing him like a cartoon dust cloud. “Welcometotheneighborhood, seeyoulater!”

“Uh,” says Wash.

Alpha laughs, high and gleeful. “Oh my god! Oh man, did you see him run?! Pffffft, okay. Change of plans, let’s go check out Red Base. Okay? Because, there’s no way I’m going anywhere until I beat the shit out of those guys. Be right back.”

“Wait, Church. No. Fuck.” Wash sighs, the Alpha already charging up the ramp after Simmons.

Donut waits, then: “Yeah, Church is kind of bossy, isn’t he?”

Washington grits his teeth and resists the urge to shoot the talkative soldier in the face. He resists the urge to shoot himself in the face. He resists the urge to double over and scream out every ounce of shapeless frustration taking root in his guts because this whole thing is so goddamn stupid. What he does is reach up and rubs the back of his neck, close his eyes and breathe in, holding it, then slowly exhaling, shakily.

“Three things,” he says softly. “Three things.” He checks his pistol again, shucks the mag into his palm, counts the rounds, slaps it back in. “Three things, three, three, three…”

“You’re kinda weird,” says Donut.

Washington just looks at Donut, hard, for a minute… then follows Alpha out.

“Welcome to Valhalla! See you later, Wash!”

Chapter 6 Chapter Text

“Simmons, I have to say, I never thought I’d go out like this!” sobs Donut.

“Yeah, whatever, that’s nice.”

“You’re not curious how I thought I would go out?”

“No. No, not in the least.”

“How about you? Did you think you’d go out like this?”

“Unarmed, smacked around, tied up with people I hate, the decapitated robot head of a teammate in my lap, while Agent Washington eats the last of the goddamn pizza before the Meta fucking eats me alive?” A beat. “No, Donut, I didn’t fucking think I would go out like this. This is not how I thought I would go out.” The decapitated robot head in his lap says, “dejar de quejarte, pendejo,” but Simmons pretends not to hear. “Hey, Washington, if you’re gonna kill us just do it already. The suspense is awful.”

Washington, who is sitting on the counter in the Red Base kitchenette, eating aforementioned pizza, looks up at the Reds who are sitting on the floor, hand-cuffed to each other back-to-back where Alpha left them about half an hour ago. In that time, Washington has eaten his way through two candy bars, a snack bag of Oreos, two sodas, and some left over pizza he found in the Red Base refrigerator. It’s strange, but sitting cross legged on the kitchen counter, eating stolen food, candy wrappers and soda cans around him, is the best Washington has felt since waking up in that basement.

“We’re not going to kill you,” says Washington. “We’re just taking all your supplies and, I dunno, your flag I guess. Also, the Meta doesn’t eat people.”

“Wow,” says Donut, “these Blues are good.”

“They’re not Blues! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Washington a fucking Freelancer and the Meta is the giant monster that was trying to kill all of us.” Simmons thrashes with indignation, which only jerks Donut around and jostles the robot head, Lopez. “Washington! Why are you working with the Meta?!”

“Considering you’re the fucktards who didn’t turn in Epsilon and clear my name, I don’t feel I owe you any explanations. Suffer in ignorance.” Washington takes another bite of pizza. “This is really good. I can’t remember the last time I had pizza.”

“You’re an asshole!” says Simmons. “Grif is gonna be so mad. He made me swear not to eat that while he was gone. That was the last of the pizza!”

“Perfect,” says Washington, taking a bigger bite.

“Where’s Church?” says Donut.

“It’s not Church! It’s the Meta!” shrieks Simmons for the dozenth time.

Washington licks tomato sauce off his gloved thumb, shrugs. “I dunno. His mods are glitching out and he’s trying to fix them, but the problem is he’s crazy, not the mods. The mods don’t malfunction. AI malfunction.” He stuffs the last of the crust in his cheek and chews, speaking with his mouth full. “See, he reabsorbed all the other fragments and he’s trying to act like that didn’t cause him a bunch of problems, but I’m pretty sure it fucked him up, but he’s too chicken-shit to admit it.”

“Aww,” says Donut, “poor Church.”

“WHAT?!” howls Simmons. “POOR CHURCH?! HE BEAT US WITH THE BUTT OF HIS BRUTE SHOT, TIED US UP IN OUR OWN BASE, THEN DECAPITATED LOPEZ, AND RAN OFF WITH THE SPARE PARTS TO DO GOD KNOWS WHAT SOMEWHERE ELSE IN OUR BASE. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN ‘POOR CHURCH’?!”

“Well,” chides Donut, “he’s obviously working through some stuff, Simmons.”

“Yeah, like his encroaching rampancy,” says Washington, picking up a soda by his knee.

Simmons groans. “Seriously, though. Why are you working with him?! He’s probably gonna just go crazy and kill you. He’s already tried to kill you! There’s a pattern! A pattern of crazy! Pay attention!”

Wash laughs.

“Okay, so maybe you’re crazy. That explains this team-up perfectly.”

“Hey, Wash?” Donut is leaning around Simmons, peering up at him. “You’re really notgonna kill us right? Because Church is scary right now and I’m not sure I trust him.”

“Why on earth would you trust me?” says Washington, picking up his helmet from the counter.

“I dunno. You don’t seem like a guy who’d just shoot someone in cold-blood.”

Washington doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just sits there, with his helmet heavy in his hands, reviewing Donut’s statement in his head over and over and over and wondering about South and wondering about the Alpha and wondering about the half-spent clip in the gun on his hip. He can’t help but think of taking it from his hip and blowing both of them away. He imagines doing it, the aftermath, how it might settle into him and fester the way shooting South rotted things out inside him.

Then: “You don’t know me very well.”

“So is that a yes or a no…?”

“We’re not going to kill you. There’s no point in that. Just don’t give me a reason.”

There’s a beat. “Grif has a stash of Pringles beneath the sink,” volunteers Simmons.

“Ooh,” says Washington, hopping off the counter to investigate.

“Come in Valhalla Outpost Number One. Come in!” Washington who has full access to the Reds’ COM channels now, hears the hail and freezes. Simmons and Donut, who also hear the hail, immediately freeze and stare at Wash in petrified silence, not daring to answer. “Red Base, do you read me? Come in! Give me some more power, shotput.”

Washington has his M6 out again instantly, has it leveled at Simmons’ skull. “You. Answer that hail on your inter-radio. Right now. Keep it on open channel.” He crosses the room and crouches down in front of the Red. “You try anything and I’ll show you cold fucking blood. Got it?”

Simmons whimpers and snaps on the channel.

“Uh, Sarge? Yeah, hi.”

“Who is this, identify yourself.”

“It’s me, Simmons. Sorry Sir.”

“How is everything going there, Simmons?”

“Here? Uh,” Wash jams the muzzle up against Simmons’ jaw. “Fine I guess. Everything’s good. How ‘bout you guys?”

“Mission is complete. We’re preparing to head out soon.”

“What was that? Sorry, some static here. This radio’s a little messed up.” He swallows hard, visibly shaking.” Been a bit rainier here.”

“I said,” Sarge speaks up, “we’re comin’ back soon.”

“Oh, that’s great. Hey, when do you think that’ll be, exactly?”

“Hard to say, Simmons. We’ll let you know.”

“Okay Sarge, sounds good.”

“Over and out.”

Sarge snaps off the channel and Washington moves the muzzle of the pistol from Simmons’ jaw. “Good,” he says, ignoring the way Simmons cringes back from him. He holsters the gun. “Don’t either of you try to radio them back. If you do, we’ll hear it and I’ll shoot one of you and leave you handcuffed to the dead guy. Got it?”

“You’re kind of fucked up.”

“Loco puta,” says Lopez.

Before Wash can respond, the thump of heavy footsteps signals Alpha’s return. Wash turns his head in time to watch the Meta walk back into the rec room. There’s transmission fluid and motor oil on his hands, dirtying the white of Maine’s armor and when he turns his head to look at Washington, the Freelancer detects a slight pull to the right, an incremental cock to his head that he knows was not there before because Washington – his memory is razor-edged and perfect and he remembers the way people move, the details, whether he wants to or not.

He slowly turns around and moves to stand in front of Alpha, between the AI and the huddled Red team.

“Hey,” he says carefully, settling his hand on the grip of his sidearm. “The Reds got a radio call. They might be back soon. What do you want to do? Wait them out and see if Caboose comes back?”

“Wash,” says Alpha, in a voice that glitches. Washington blinks, then steps back immediately from Alpha because that’s not Church’s voice. It’s a child’s voice coming from the Meta’s voice modulation unit. There’s something wrong. The color of the armor’s hard-light generators is wrong, is a bright neon pink instead of blue-white as it usually is. “You remember North right?”

Washington swallows, thumbs the safety off his weapon. “Yeah, I remember him.”

“He was nice.”

“Yeah. He was.”

“You kinda look like him. Right now.”

“No,” says Washington, very, very carefully, because the voice the Alpha is speaking with is small and sad and hopeful and it makes his guts churn in on themselves and is teeth tighten like screws in the lock of his jaw. Washington shakes his head, wishing really hard that he’d put his helmet back on.“I don’t. North was really tall and he sunburned if you put him in a room with lights that were a little too bright. North was giant blond white boy. Remember?”

“Your eyes are the same color.”

“Alpha,” grits Washington, horrified that his trip-gene eye color is spiking Alpha’s rampancy. “Get a grip. I’m not North Dakota.” Panic is electric in his fingers when the Meta moves toward him, snaps his hand from his hip to the grip of the gun and he’s got it leveled at Maine’s head as fast as a blink and he says, again, desperately, “Stop. I’m Agent Washington.”

And when the Meta keeps coming, Washington absolutely fucking means to shoot him, but it’s then when Alpha’s holo-avatar spawns up, suddenly, between them an inch from Washington’s face. He’s blinded by neon, bright blue and magenta, the static from the holo prickling against his face and mouth, crackling in his hair and it’s not Church. It reaches for him, glitches, flickers, says, brokenly, “I missed you.”

Washington freezes. “I’m not…” The Meta grabs his hand around the M6G, gently pushes his arm aside and Washington realizes too late that he’s let him do it. He should lunge back, he should lash out, he should do anything but fucking stand there frozen and possessed by the fragment of North’s AI calling him by the wrong name. His grip on the pistol slackens and he just…

“Oh my god, we’re gonna die,” whispers Simmons.

“Hold me!” cries Donut.

Alpha stops. “I know you’re not him,” he says, in a voice that has edge and belongs, certainly, to Church. Wash opens his eyes. “I’m not crazy.”

“Then let go of me,” hisses Washington.

It’s only then that Alpha seems to realize he’s got Washington’s gun-arm in one hand, gripped at the wrist and the other hand tight against the side of Washington’s face. He’s holding him so tight that his thumb, set against the corner of the Freelancer’s eye, is pressing into the freckle-mottled skin, dark olive under his fingers and nothing like North’s perfectly translucence complexion. He’s getting motor oil on Washington’s face. He lets go of the Freelancer as if burned and Wash staggers back, furiously scrubbing the motor oil from his cheek and breathing through his teeth.

“Sorry,” says Alpha.

“Go fuck yourself,” snaps Washington, trying to hide the slam of his heart in his chest, trying to ignore the thunder of blood through his body, the cold in his fingers around the grip of the pistol. He forces himself to holster the M6G on his hip. “You do that again and I’ll put a fucking knife through your skull you rampant son of a –”

“Shut up, Washington. I’ve got this handled.”

Wash laughs, loud and barking. “What? You’ve got it handled? What was that? That was Theta.”

“No, just a… a glitch. I’m good now. Stop being dramatic.”

“No. You’re not fucking ‘good’. You’re just like the Meta.” He jabs a finger at the AI. “You are the Meta and you’re going rampant. Is that why you… wait. That’s why you need Epsilon isn’t it? You know you’re going rampant. You know it and you’re hoping Epsilon will fix it.”

“That’s not why. Shut up, Washington. You have no idea why I’m doing anything.”

“Yeah, because you don’t tell me. You just blackmail me and joyride my best friend like –“ Wash hears his own words played back to him a split second later, the words jamming themselves up into his ribs like a fucking knife – what he just called Maine, out loud, in front of the idiot crowd. “Fuck you, Alpha! Just fuck you. Go back to whatever the fuck you were doing and just get away from me.”

“I’ve got a working android,” says Alpha.

“What?”

“I said, I’ve got a working android.” Alpha’s tone is petulant, he’s clearly trying to derail Washington’s focus on the rampancy. It’s working and Washington hate himself for that. “Almost. I still need a few more components, but once I have it I can transfer over. That’s what you fucking want right?”

“I – yes.”

“Then stop freaking out and guard the idiots for a bit longer. I need to think. The AI component I need isn’t gonna just be lying around and I need to finish what I’m doing here. Then we go after Caboose. Once I have Epsilon then we bury Maine. Just like I said. Okay? You done bitching.”

“Fuck. You.”

“I guess that’s as close to a ‘thank you’ as I’ll ever get, isn’t it?”

“I could give you another fucking bullet if you want.”

“Right,” says Alpha, then turns and goes.

Washington waits until Alpha is gone before reaching down to grab his helmet off the floor. He fits it back over his head, sealing it. Eating pizza and Pringles is no longer an option. He can feel Donut, Simmons, and the dumb AI solider staring at him and it makes his face burn and yet, in the same breath, he instantly ceases to give a fuck what they think about his partnership with Alpha. It’s Simmons who finally speaks up.

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” says Wash as he leaves to stand guard in the hall. “That’s the problem.”

Chapter 7 Chapter Text

“Washington, get up here.”

“What is it?”

“Idiots.”

“Oh.”

Washington leaves his post by the rec room where Simmons and Donut managed to make themselves much worse off by trying to shift positions and ended up falling over. After that, they were unable to coordinate well enough to get back upright and resorted to fish flopping on the linoleum. Therefore, Washington didn’t have overwhelming concerns about them getting loose, and left them flailing and swearing on the floor. Alpha is on the roof of Red Base observing something out toward the wall behind Blue Base, arms folded, head tilted in a way that suggests he’s using VISR tech in his HUD to zoom in on some distant point down the valley. Washington joins him, though, standing slightly away from him.

“The Reds and Blues are back?”

“Nah, just looks like one of them.” Alpha unclips a battle rifle from his lower back, beneath the Brute Shot, and holds it out to the other Freelancer. “Take a look,” he says.

Washington doesn’t take the rifle for a moment, stopping a beat to stare at Alpha. The Meta remains facing forward, has not seemingly taken his eyes off whatever it is he’s looking out beyond the base walls. The MA5B Assault Rifle he’s handing over is Washington’s primary weapon, the one he rated with among the Freelancers and the one that Alpha has been careful not to give him up until now. The M6G Magnum, more than half empty now, and the stolen combat knife were all the armament he figured he would get out of the Meta-Alpha gestalt.

He takes the rifle, checks the mag blatantly for ammo, then tucks it against his shoulder, sighting down the scope.

“Looks like the Sergeant,” says Wash.

“Yeah, because if it was both of them, that would make a real big difference,” snorts Alpha. “Any fuckin’ chance retard has the Epsilon unit?”

“I don’t know.” Wash lowers his rifle. “I can’t see from this far.”

“Welp,” says Alpha, unnervingly cheerful as he swings the Brute Shot off Maine’s back. “Let’s go beat it out of him. If Caboose and Grif are hiding somewhere that would make this a lot faster.”

“No, you stay here. I’ll go out there. If he sees you he’ll just give us trouble. If I go, I can tell him that I’ve been sent to recover the Epsilon unit.”

“Psssh, yeah but… that’s no fun.”

Washington rolls his eyes, turns at the waist to glare at his unwanted partner. “Just…” He holds up one hand, palm spread. “Wait here. If he gives me any trouble, then take the grav lift and come help me. Don’t make this difficult if we don’t have to. Besides, I don’t know if I trust you in a fight the way you’ve been acting.”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.” Wash tucks the butt of his rifle up against his shoulder. “Then just stay here and be my look out instead of beating people’s faces in for two minutes. Okay?”

Alpha grumbles but swings the Brute Shot back over his shoulder and onto the clamp at his back again. Wash gives it a moment, carefully watching him before turning to the grav-lift. Contrary to how it might seem, there was a bit of a trick to getting a grav-launch to do what you want. Wash takes the slight ramp at jog so his momentum into the launch propels him more smoothly, but he still sets his teeth and tenses as his heel hits the anti-grav, the bottom of his boots rocketing across the frictionless hard-light sheet at and throwing the Freelancer high into the air at a long trajectory.

Wash admits: he likes that moment of weightless, where he’s hurling through the air, the wind ripping past, his body instinctively curling, knees bent, arms out to steady himself just before the downturn of this arc begins to drop him. His stomach jumps a bit and he hits the ground crouching over 200 meters out from the Red Base. He breathes and stands up. Checks himself. Sarge was prowling near the wall at the back of Blue Base and that’s where Washington goes, keeping his rifle in hand, but at rest. He reviews, quickly what he’s going to say as he comes up on Sarge.

“Simmons! Oh, Simmons! Yoo-hoo!”

“Right. This guy…” Wash hops a small stone ridge, comes up the rise toward the Red CO. “Sergeant!”

“Well, if it isn’t our good friend Special Agent Washington. What brings you out here?”

“You do,” says Wash brusquely, assuming the authoritative grouse of a man in a hurry and none too pleased about it. If Sarge is surprised by Washington’s attitude, he doesn’t say so and Wash goes on as he approaches. “UNSC Command did a major investigation into the Director and Project Freelancer and they are still reporting the Epsilon AI Unit as missing. They’ve sent me to pick it up. I’m not in a good mood so just hand it over.”

“Well, I don’t have your AI thinga-ma-jig.”

“Simmons and Donut said that you, Grif, and Caboose took it with you into the desert. Where is it now?”

“Son, do I look like a Blue Team Commander to you? How dare you. I don’t know anything about what Caboose and his crazy blueish brain gets up to.”

“Ugh, shut up. Caboose had the memory unit. Where is Caboose?”

“I just told you, I don’t keep track of dirty Blues. You listenin’?”

“He’s still in the desert isn’t he?” When Sarge just continues to grunt ambiguously, Washington sighs, careful to maintain a level of casual bureaucratic annoyance. “Look, stop being obtuse. I’m just here to pick up the unit and leave. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Right. The last time I saw you, you were runnin’ around re-assembling blue teams, getting chased by monsters, and blowing up military bases. Sorry if you seem like ‘trouble’ is just kind of your thing, Washington. Also, how come Simmons didn’t call me up to let us know you were here in the first place? Could have saved you some time.”

“We just got here,” Wash fights down the urge to punch this guy. “You got here just as I finished interviewing the Reds back at base.”

“Uh-huh,” says Sarge.

A beat. There’s a long uncomfortable beat in which Sarge just continues to level his silence at Washington the way most men level a gun and into that silence is a disbelief so thorough it’s molecular. Washington judges, at about the fourth beat of silence, that this isn’t going to work. He sighs, heavily, then swings his rifle to his shoulder.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m lying. Curious though: What gave it up? Something Simmons said on the radio?”

“I know my team, Agent Washington. I can tell when something aint right. Speaking of which — anyone ever tell you you’re just about as ‘not right’ as it gets?”

“Shut up. Drop your weapons.”

“All my weapons?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?” Sarge slings his shotgun to the ground, backs up so Wash can bend down to pick it up. “Maybe I can just keep the pistol. You know these things aren’t effective as they used to be.”

“Drop it. Now!”

Sarge drops his M6 as well. He shrugs, steps back again so Wash can pick it up and snap that to his opposite hip.

“That’s what people say.”

“Whatever.” Wash jerks his head. “Stop talking and march.”

“Son. You can insult me, you can ambush me, you can even take away my weapons. But if you think I’m going to set one single pinky toe inside Blue Base without myshotgun, you must not know who you’re dealing with.”

“I’m dealing with an idiot.”

“Testy.”

“I said move.”

“And I said ‘shotgun’.”

“Look.” Washington’s grip on his rifle tightens. “I’m trying really hard to do the right thing and not literally shoot you in the face. So far the worst thing I’ve done to anyone on your damn team is eat all their pizza. So stop acting like… like…” He stops, distracted suddenly by what sounds like a muffled revving, loud but distorted, coming from nearby but from nowhere he can see. “What is that noise?” He looks around, confused. “Do I hear a…”

And that’s when Grif smashes a 5000 pound Warthog through the concrete wall to his left.

“CAAAR?!”

And then Grif hits Wash with a 5000 pound Warthog. The impact of the front of the vehicle slamming into Washington is such that it smashes at least two ribs inside the titanium cage of his armor, knocking the Freelancer off his feet and instantly dragging him under the front fender. Wash screams, almost allows the car to run him over completely, dragging him under the chassis to be ground along between the earth and undercarriage, but in the splits of seconds before first impact, Washington manages to hook his right elbow over the pully ‘tusk’ under the headlights.

“How’s my bumper taste, you pizza stealing son-of-a-bitch?!”

Wash throws his left arm up over the hood. (“Uh oh.”) He grabs wildly, panicked, for a hold on the hood, finds the shotgun knocked from his hand into the windshield. Hooking that arm up over the hood and jamming his foot up between the headlights and the front fender, the Freelander claws his way up over the hood of the fucking car. A bump nearly throws him under again. Fucking son of a -! But he grunts, muscles screaming, ribs a busted wire-work of pain, and hauls himself up until he can get his knee into the fender, then up onto the hood.

It’s then that he fucking unloads an erratic one-handed spray of bullets into the windshield, then a shotgun blast immediately after. The driver, the orange soldier, Grif, immediately dives down behind the dash and Washington just keeping fucking shooting because he really tried to play nice with these assholes and –

Grif does the obvious thing and hits the brakes.

The sudden stop launches Washington off the hood, still firing his battle rifle relatively accuratey at Grif’s head because fuck you that’s why. With his other hand, in the half-second he’s in the air, he cocks the stolen shotgun in his left hand, fully intending to use it when he hits the ground – only to have it yanked from his fist. Startled, he almost misses Sarge standing on the rocky outcropping, at the perfect height to snatch the gun out of Wash’s hand.

“See? Told you I’d get it back.”

Washington crashes into a pile of Fusion Coils, screams in pain as the cracks in his ribs light up in white-hot veins of fire and heat, crush the air from his lung and leave him curled up in the grass, gasping shallowly, clutching his flank just below his chest piece. He forces himself to his hands knees, groans. Get up. Fucking get the fuck up! York’s healing mod kicks on, floods his ribs with a dull chemical numbness, flash-fusing the bone and Wash screams from that too, tear-blinded before blinking it away, staggering to his feet. Dizzy, brain fogged from impact, he reels.

“Washington?!” Alpha’s voice on his radio, speaking directly into his ear, into his head and for a dull, panicky moment he thinks the AI is back inside him, living in his skull and he clutches his helmet over his head. Terror chokes him silent and – “Washington! What the fuck just happened? You’re hurt! What –?!”

“Agent Wash!”

He looks up. Sees Sarge coming at him in the Warthog, Grif driving, his battle-rifle leveled. “Son of a bitch.”

“You just got –!”

The explosion rips consciousness out of Washington’s skull, rip his voice out of his lungs, rips his thoughts apart, obliterates the world in red. The last thing he hears is Alpha screaming his name on the comm. The last thing he feels is his back slamming into a wall. Then static. Then nothing. Again.

Chapter 8 Chapter Text

“Shut up! Shut up, I can do this without you! I can – I’ve got this.” A pause, hazy, far away. A flash of green. “Agent Washington is in critical condition. Detecting severe ventricular tachycardia. If we do not act now his heart will stop again and we may not be able to revive him.” Swearing, hands on his neck, under his chin, the hiss of the pressure seal coming undone. “Why the fuck isn’t the healing mod working? It is working, it simply is not operating at full capacity since we overloaded its safety parameters three months ago. Shit, right. Gotta reroute primary functions. Washington is not breathing, we should…”

Someone’s mouth is over his, breathing down his throat. It’s only then he realizes he can’t breathe, that his lung are burning slabs of meat in his chest, and he jerks, inhales raggedly against someone’s teeth, swallows the bitter taste of their tongue and – not the first time you’ve been on your back with his mouth on yours, Agent Wash –someone shoves him onto his side. They do it quickly, but carefully, ignores the noise he makes when the jostling jars his ribs inside him. They’re messing in the back of his chest harness. Something whines active inside the armor, locks his limbs in place, and his spine starts to heat up, a dull warmth building from the back of his neck and running down every vertebra, sliding threads of slow heat through his blood.

“Washington?”

Hurts. Jesus fuck everything hurts. Hand on his shoulder, another cupping the back of his neck, the rough Kevlar material of someone’s glove against his face, their thumb a tucked up against the place where his ear meets his temple. He breathes in, shallow, rapid, hurts too much to take a deep breath. He keeps his eyes closed.

“Fucking Christ. Big tough Freelancer. Fuckin’ flying off alone to get hit by a fucking car and blown up in the two fucking minutes you’re unsupervised. Motherfucking badass. Right. Sure. Stop dying, you asshole.” Wash feels a needle, an inch long, surgical steel, .05mm in diameter, push carefully and agonizingly between his ribs through the material of his suit just beneath his chest piece. “Bio-foam. It’ll set your ribs.” It burns briefly, intensely, then cool to a dull tingle in his chest. The needle slides out. “Washington. Hey, asshole, you gonna live?”

“I’m gonna… kill those… idiots.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna live.”

“Get off me.”

The hands on his shoulder and neck let go, but Washington doesn’t open his eyes, just rolls onto his side, levers himself up on one knee. Behind him, he hears the hiss-click of Alpha’s helmet resealing and quickly drags the back of his hand across his mouth, as if that will undo Alpha using Maine’s lungs to breathe into him, as if that would undo anything Alpha is using Maine’s body for. Washington is aware that he’s still injured, of his ribs creaking in his chest, but the healing mod and chems are killing his nerves. Rage and dread in equal measure have him staggering back to his feet.

“Where are the Reds?”

“I dunno, dude. I was kinda running over here to make sure you didn’t fucking die.”

“Right,” pants Washington. He bends down, grabs his battle rifle off the ground, tries to ignore the nauseous throbbing radiating up through his whole body. Dizziness again, the blood rushing out of his head until his face prickles pins and needles and his vision swarms spots. “Fuck…” He braces one hand against his knee, doubles up, violently retches up bile, pizza, and soda. Pants. Spits, picks up his helmet and puts it back on, forcing himself to ignore the vile taste. “I’m fine. We should… get back to the vehicle.”

“Your, uh, bio-metrics are pretty fucked up, dude.”

Wash breaks into a jog, every step jarring his skeleton from heel to head. “You needed access to my bios to tell that?” He can hear the raggedness in his own breathing. It takes all his focus just to keep moving forward, keep his rifle in his hands, remember how to stay upright. The Meta matches his pace, hovering near his right elbow, just behind him. “Just go, Alpha.”

“I’d prefer to stay with you,” says Alpha in this carefully metered tone. Washington jerks, looks over his shoulder, immediately unnerved. Alpha, sensing that what he just said was odd, adds, obnoxiously, “You know, because you keep almost dying when I leave you alone to two fucking minutes.”

“Fuck off. Just go and – shit, there they are.”

Sure enough, as he and Alpha come up the rise, the fully assembled Red Team has parked their Warthog in front of the hole in the wall behind Blue Base. They appear to be, as usual, arguing at length about something, pointing at the hole in the wall, punching each other. Washington can hear Donut shrilling ‘I’m scaaaaaared!’ from over 100 meters out. Washington doesn’t even have to tell Alpha – the AI has the Brute Shot out and with terrifying accuracy he sprints forward twenty meters in an instant, puts seven grenades directly into the nose of the Warthog, and blows the damn thing through the hole as flaming wreckage.

“Well, okay, I feel a bit better,” says Washington as they approach the smoking hole in the wall.

“Oh, crap here they come!”

“Uh oh,” says a voice. Something swings down from behind the top arch of the hole in the wall. Washington things it’s a hover-module of some kind, silver, an orb, great blue pupil staring out from a chrome-armored eye. He has no idea what the fuck it is, but it’s speaking. It says, “look out, it’s the big guy! And there’s-“

Washington stops. “Epsilon.”

“WASHINGTON!”

Washington flinches. He pretends he doesn’t flinch but he does, not outwardly of course (because Freelancers don’t fucking flinch in a fight) but the part of his head thatknows that fucking voice curls in on itself like a stabbed animal. He flinches and when he does, he misses Alpha move. He’s so goddamn fast now. He snaps across the gap between the wall and them, sprinting like a fucking freight-train across the gap because if Washington recognized the AI fragment then Alpha knows it too and he lunges and –

The eyeball thing blows up the wall.

“Whoa!” Alpha pulls up hard, skidding to a stop at the foot of the smoking rubble pile. “Oh, that’s just great. Are you kidding me? What the fuck was that?” Washington ignores him in favor of hunkering down into a crouch, leaning on his rifle stock while Alpha bitches. “That was him! That was Epsilon.” Alpha’s voice has gone high and shrill with disbelief. “Those dumb fuckers woke him up! Why would they wake him up?! You told Caboose he’s a fucking wackjob and they still woke him up! Unbelievable. And what was that giant eyeball thing? Wash. Washington, you saw the giant shouty eyeball thing right? That wasn’t just me?”

“Alpha…”

“Would you stop calling me ‘Alpha’? Jesus, what is it with you?” Alpha hops lazily up the side of the rubble pile. Washington watches him, Maine’s body bounding easily up, kicking a few loose chunks of smoldering stone from the top. “Man, okay, but at least we fucked up their jeep. No big. We just hop in the Warthog, drive out to the coordinates where Caboose is. They gotta be headed back that way. It’s our best shot at finding Epsilon again. Man, we were so close and, wow, you’re quiet. No smart fuckin’ remarks, wiseguy? Getting hit by a car finally shut you up? Wash?” A beat. “Oh… well, shit.”

Washington, who is sitting on his knees with his arms around his middle, breathing shallowly, still manages to roll his eyes at the AI. Alpha stows the Brute Shot on his back, hops down the rubble and comes to crouch down in front of Washington, the hulking mass of him looming familiarly and Washington knows he should still be uneasy around him but it’s hard. It’s hard with years of muscle memory and mental memory and bone-deep recollection telling him it’s Maine and not the monster – certainly not Church. Wash breathes slowly.

“You know what this means?” says Alpha. Wash can hear the grin in his voice.

Washington glares. “What?”

“It means Grif kicked your ass.”

“I hate you.”

“Grif.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Right. Welp.” Alpha tilts his head, giving the impression he’s looking at something inside his HUD or instead his head. “You’re not bleeding internally or anything. It’s just the bones and the healing mod’s got those mostly knitted up. That healing unit should keep up with the regen and you’re stable. So you good to move?”

“Why is Epsilon awake?”

“I dunno. Caboose was ‘building a new best friend’. Maybe he fucked something up.”

“He’s not supposed to be awake,” grits Washington.

“Huh?”

“He’s not,” repeats Wash through his teeth, “supposed to be awake.”

“Uhh, what the fuck does it matter? I mean, other than making my job a pain in the ass.”

“It matters to me,” snaps Wash.

He grabs his rifle, levers himself to his feet, swallows the instinct noise of pain that rising up through his chest and bites it back between his teeth and behind his tongue, like biting a bullet. Washington waits until the pain fades to a manageable level of intolerable, then starts back toward Red Base at a pace that doesn’t suit the brokenness of his torso very well. Alpha lets Wash get a bit of head start before catching up with him, Maine’s long legs carrying him across the space in just a few strides. He walks behind Washington, at arm’s length back.

“Why did he go all laser-face at you?”

“No idea. When you fucking eat him like you did the other fragments, you can ask him yourself.”

“Hey, asshole. It’s not like that.”

“Oh? And what’s it like?”

“It’s not… violent.”

Wash laughs, stops because it hurts. “Right,” he says, readjusting his rifle against his shoulder. “Okay. I think Carolina, North, South, and every dead Freelancer Meta fucking ripped apart might fucking disagree.”

“For the fragments I mean. And I’m not the fucking Meta, I didn’t do any of that, okay? Meta’s gone. What I mean is it’s not bad when we re-integrate, for the fragments. Youget that it’s fixing us right? It’s not gonna be bad for Epsilon.”

“I don’t care about Epsilon.”

“You just said –”

Washington heel-turns, snarls, “I don’t care. Why would I care about the fucking AI that went crazy in my head and nearly killed me? All Epsilon ever did was go crazy. Why the fuck would I care?”

Alpha stares. “Because he was your AI.”

Hearing Alpha say it brings bile back up against the back of Washington’s tongue, brings the screaming back that he never through was going to ever fucking stop, that childish animal sound encoded in pain and Euclidian code burning through his brain in synaptic lightning. Not everything translated. AI pain isn’t like human pain but AI emotion is a patterned after human emotion and AI agony is, to some degree, a ghost of a human mind somewhere and it translated well enough. Well enough. Well enough to crack his head open, well enough to lay his veins open in arsenic, well enough to lace his blood in gasoline and static. Epsilon trying to die in his head made him want to die with him and that’s a part of him that…

One thing right.

Is there anything about my behavior that suggest I expect to survive this?

This is my AI.

“Not anymore,” says Washington calmly.

“So.” Alpha, still following Washington. “You’re not gonna fight me on Epsilon’s re-integration?”

“No.” Washington slings his rifle into its mag-strip at his back, climbs into the passenger side of the Warthog. “You want him, Alpha? Then have him. I hope he tears you apart from the inside.”

Alpha sighs. “It’s Church.”

“I don’t care.”

“I remember you, you know.”

Wash turns in his seat. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“January 24^th,” says Alpha. “Year: 2551, GST 10:23 PM. Mother of Invention. Theta liked your skateboard. You showed him and North how to do a noseslide on deck three, wing D-4 and you didn’t fuck it up like you did on January 2^nd, 2551, GST 8:44 PM, on deck two, wing B-2 when you wiped out in front of Agent Maine.” Alpha shrugs Maine’s shoulders and does Washington significant damage. “It was his fault. He snuck up on you. He wasn’t good at sneaking up on people until he got Sigma.”

“Stoppit.”

“They remember you.”

“Don’t talk about the Freelancers.”

“I’m just saying, I know a lot more than you think I –“

“Stop saying. Stop thinking. Stop talking. Just get in the fucking car and stop doing whatever you think you’re doing because I don’t fucking have time for it. You and the rest of the fuckin AI have burned enough of my goddamn time so stop wasting more of it and just get in the car or I am going to shoot you again, so help me God.” When Alpha doesn’t move, just stands there looking at him, Meta’s gold-visored face staring back at him, Wash raises his voice. “Get in the fucking jeep!”

“Wash.”

“What now?”

“Remember how I said you weren’t bleeding internally?”

“…”

“I think you should lie down.”

“I hate you,” says Washington.

“Yeah,” says Alpha, a little sadly, watching Wash get out of the jeep “I know.”

Chapter 9 Chapter Text

Washington falls asleep in passenger seat and he has a dream like he usually has dreams – vividly real, so convincing and lined in detail and color that he could not, if he tried, distinguish it from the real thing. This is how he dreams after Epsilon burned through the folds of his brain and strafed his memories in electric recollection – he remembers like a computer. The problem is, he’s not a computer and forgetting is essential to survival and sanity.

He’s managing both of these things, but not very well.

He dreams like this: The air on Circumstance smells like smoke, plasma, and burnt earth. The sky isn’t quite the same color as the skies of home and somewhere to his left there is a soldier in power armor that stands seven feet tall and never says a goddamn word. A smear of black smoke is drawn across the horizon – cities burning in the west, fallen frigates and drop ships igniting in atmo crashing down and burning radioactive on the far side of the world and that is where they are headed. Washington dreams the give of the grass beneath his bare fingers, still green, dreams pulling up from the dirt and breathing in the smell just to get the stink of war out.

There is a man in MJOLNIR armor crouched beside him and he’s been wearing that armor so long the dark green paint’s flaking silver at the corners and angles. There’s a battle rifle on the SPARTAN’s back and he doesn’t say anything, he just watches, silently head turned toward Wash, watching him and Wash remembers the inhumanness of the armor design. How easy it was to think there wasn’t a person behind the visor, just a machine, and how little that fucking mattered because…

“Yeah, I know,” says Washington, though his name wasn’t Washington back then. “We should go.”

The SPARTAN nods and stands up and Wash remembers the sound, the clack of the pieces against one another, the fucking weight in every shift.

“Ready to be big damn heroes?” says Washington.

He gets a headtilt for that remark.

“Roll with it. The whole lone badass thing works for you.”

He gets a huff for that. The other soldier reaches over, puts a fist on his helmet shoves down and he says, “Hey, Wash, wake up. Washington! Oi, sleeping fucking beauty, wake the fuck up.”

And Wash snaps back to reality, jerking from his unconscious slump and for a moment of wild panic he forgets which world he is on and what year of the war it is and he forgets the war is over and for a moment, far worse than any of the other moments, he looks at the driver seat and sees Agent Maine tilting his head at him and he can’t remember which memory he’s living in – the one with the SPARTAN, the one with the Freelancer, the one with the Meta, the one with…

“Eyyyyy, princess joins the living.”

Oh. Right.

Washington shakes himself fully awake and squints around. It’s the middle of the day and even with brightness dampening in his visor, the sun off the endless sand dunes is hard to look at. The dull ache in his ribs is just that – an ache indicative only of bone-bruising and muscle strain rather than hair-line fractures and perforated internal organs. It took half an hour of just lying still with the healing mod on full blast to get back to functional but he’s there and he’s still exhausted.

“How close are we to the objective?”

“Welp,” says Alpha, as the Warthog crests the next dune. “Pretty close.”

The Freelancer has to sit up a bit in his seat. “Oh.”

Washington, in his military career, has been responsible for the destruction, detonation, and extreme ‘with prejudice’ bombing of many alien technologies and a few alien cultural sites not worth naming. He has worked with men and women responsible for blowing up alien relics of actual worth. He has never seen anything quite like this, however. It’s a temple. Or at least that’s how it appears: an edifice of stone jutting up from the scorching dunes and spiking high, about three stories tall at its highest point.

From the looks of it there’s been… trouble. Several wrecked vehicles lay in various states of wreckage around the site, an abandoned M312 Heavy Recovery Vehicle parked near the far entrance. Alpha parks the jeep near the back of the Elephant and they both climb out, Wash slinging his battle rifle from his back up against his shoulder, Alpha taking the Brute Shot in hand. It’s silent, no movement but the sand blowing at the base of the stone monoliths.

“No way they’re here,” says Washington. “We lost too much time boosting the healing mod.”

“Yeah, well…” Alpha give a laconic shrug of Maine’s shoulders. “It was that or drive around while you bleed into your internal organs and that’s a lot of bitching I just didn’t want to put up with.” Wash doesn’t respond so Alpha huffs, the little spark of white light spawning his holo-avatar directly in front of Maine’s face, just the way Sigma used to do when speaking for him. “Okay, welp, let’s look for clues. See if we can find, like, I dunno tracks or broken twigs or… something…” A beat. Wash says nothing. He whispers, “Yes, I know we’re in the fuckin’ desert, smartass.”

“You still don’t have a good reason for keeping me around, you know.”

Alpha, startled by the change in subject, stares at Wash. “Look, buddy. You can take off whenever you want, but if you do I’m not gonna come looking for you. Have fun being a fugitive.”

“Why didn’t you leave me at Command?”

“I told you: seemed like a dick a move.”

“No,” says Washington coldly. “You’re a bastard, Church. You’re not a hero. Spending three months keeping me alive doesn’t make any goddamn sense. You don’t need me to look for Epsilon. You have the fragments and you have the Meta’s equipment. You don’t need me so why bring me with you? Any combat benefit I might be is bullshit. Having an extra man on your team doesn’t make sense if it takes three months to even get him moving. You lost time waiting on me. You lost time again at Valhalla. If you meant what you fucking said about leaving me, you’d just do it, but you keep waiting for me and fucking yourself over. Why?”

Alpha doesn’t answer.

“Delta is in there. Let Delta bullshit you a reason. He can’t though, can he? Because it’s illogical. You shouldn’t have let me slow you down. You should have left me behind.”

“You don’t understand Delta very well, Washington.”

“Why am I here?”

“Why do you care? If this works and I get Epsilon then we bury Maine and figure out how to get the Director.”

“Get him?” repeats Wash. He’s aware he is allowing himself to be derailed, but why Alpha is partnering up with him is of less immediate importance than Alpha changing plans. “What do you mean ‘get him’? I thought the plan was get Epsilon, then turn ourselves in. You’re the only evidence, the only tangible proof of the shit he did.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“You were never going to turn yourself in.”

“Hey,” snaps Alpha, defensive finally. “I don’t want me a lab experiment, Washington. I think I fucking had more than enough of that with the Director. They could just fuckin’delete me because, just like you, they think I’m just some rampant goddamn program instead of a fucking person so excuse me for having some self-preservation. We can’t all be hell bent on self-destruction like you, Washington.”

“I am not –”

“Just…” Alpha sighs dramatically. “Go look for clues. Okay?”

“You have to answer me eventually, Alpha.”

“Oi, it’s Church.” Alpha turns his back on Washington, circles around the Elephant to investigate the vehicles. “You called me Church before. Just stick with it, why don’t you? Stop being a jackass. See what that feels like for two minutes.”

“I’m not a jackass,” says Washington, mostly to himself though, Church… Alpha is already gone.

He shoulders his rifle again and leaves to investigate the centre-piece of the temple. The tallest point of the alien ruins the jutting stone building, standing out above the rest of the compound. There’s a massive metal door, an oblong vertical sheet of strange metal hoisted up and jammed open it appears, explosive rounds bent the metal out of shape. Washington’s temperature regs have kicks on against the heat, so he’s comfortable, even slightly cool inside his armor. He queues up a series of energy scans.

He keeps thinking about Circumstance. His dream. He can still smell the grass and the dirt in his fingers and the nostalgia is fucking toxic. Memory poisons his present and, for a moment, he drifts. There’s an abandoned playground in the shelled out city, untouched by orbital fire or plasma shelling. The grass is green and he swings his rifle to the ground and jumps up to hang off the monkey bars, grip the metal and hang there for a moment and he imagines he’s dead, like the people strung up along the roads into the city and he feels the heavy steps of a SPARTAN behind him.

“This is a nice jungle gym,” says Washington. “Not a shitty one, like the one in my neighborhood.”

The SPARTAN who is not Maine (not yet) moves to stand behind him where he is hanging, the bars just high enough to clear his ridiculous height. When Washington continues to hang there, a sigh follows and Wash feels a fist press into his spine between his shoulder blades, gently, but firmly, enough force to swing him a little and he can still –

“Washington! Hey, Washington. Earth to Agent Washington.”

He blinks, clicks on his radio. “What, Alpha?”

“I’m not finding anything. You?”

Wash’s scans are registering a very low residual energy, a familiar one, somewhere inside the temple “Nothing,” says Washington, entering the narrow tunnel into the temple. “I’m still looking.”

The temple is light inside, is bright with bio-lamps. The wall capture the light somehow, illuminate the room despite the dim glow. His scans aren’t precise. He plays hot and cold for about five minutes, wandering the interior atriums before finding the source. There’s bullets in the walls, plasma burns, signs of a fight, but that’s not what Washington is looking for. What he’s looking for is lying in the sand near the wall, almost buried.

It’s the memory unit. Epsilon’s memory unit.

Washington picks it up gently. He doesn’t know why he does that. It’s just a piece of machinery, empty, nothing inside it. Epsilon’s transferred, but he holds it like it’s an animal, warm and alive. It’s damaged, dented, scuffed, and just barely functioning. It glows just a little in his hands, slowly pulsing and Washington finds himself breathing in time with it… finds himself thinking and moment later he finds himself pulls his omni-tool from a compartment in his belt, kneeling in the sand, pulling pieces off the unit, peeling it open.

“Okay.” He murmurs to it, like there’s someone to hear him. “Plan B.”

The memory unit collapses a little, the outer shell folding in on itself into a mobile module. Washington snaps it to a mag-strip on his lower back at the base of his spine and fabricates his excuse when Alpha asks him what it is. If they remember, if the fragments suspect…

“Uh, Wash?”

“What?”

“There’s some giant angry aliens out here. You wanna come out here? I don’t speak space lizard.” Wash can hear offended snarling from the other end of the line. “Oh wait, shit, I think they can understand English.” The sound of explosions and shooting from the other end of the line should, probably, concern Washington more but it’s with a casual interest that he listens to Church swear up and down. “GET OUT HERE AND HELP.”

“I thought you said you could handle anything.”

“STOP BEING A SMARTASS AND JUST HELP.”

Washington jogs for the temple door. The weight of the memory unit on his back is a comfort, somehow, warm against his spine, humming very slightly against his back. Plan B.

Chapter 10 Chapter Text

“They’re still in there,” says Washington, “aren’t they?”

The Freelancer is sitting on the hood the Warthog, eating a Snickers bar that is not stale and significantly does not taste the bottom of someone’s boot, unlike the energy bars Alpha obtained. It’s mostly melted in the heat, but Wash has worked up an appetite riddling aliens with bullets so he’s not picky. Alpha is standing out about ten meters out from the jeep, back to Wash, staring out over the sand and has been doing so for the last half an hour or so. He’s scanning for ‘residual heat signatures’ he says.

“No,” says Alpha eventually, “it’s just me. They were all me, remember?” A beat. “Why the fuck did you pack all those candy bars anyway?”

“To spite the fat yellow one.”

“He’s orange. And it’s Grif.”

“Right.” He takes another bite, finishing off the bar. “Fuck that guy.”

Washington runs his fingers through his hair, grimaces because it’s pretty dirty, rubs his neck and lays back against the windshield, closing his eyes. It’s scorching hot but the burn feels good against his skin, the sun against the black material of his undersuit slowly absorbing heat, but cooled immediately by his internal temp regs and it’s, actually, the perfect temperature for a nap. Exhaustion is starting to catch him now, sliding fingers into his muscles and kneading deep aching lines of stiffness into his shoulders, back, and… well, everywhere.

Alpha’s cloaking device shorted out while he was fighting the aliens. Only for a moment, of course, and Alpha is playing it off as a hardware issue but Washington… he is tracking the minute twitch in Maine’s fingers, the way Alpha keeps jerking his head a little to the right, the way he’s sitting there, crouched, his spine bent and tight. Occasionally, he twitches and says very softly, “Shut up,” to no one at all. Washington takes another bite of his stolen candy bar, chews, swallows.

Alpha is glitching.

“Maybe you should get out of Maine and into that robot body,” says Washington. “You know, the one in back of the fucking jeep. The one you said you were gonna use.”

“I told you, it can’t handle mod integration.”

“But you could jump into it. You could, if you wanted to, if you were willing to give up the mods.”

“Shut up, Washington. I’m not keeping this body because I want to.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m the fucking Meta. You still think I’m him don’t you?”

“Them,” says Washington mildly. “The Meta was a ‘them’.”

“Well, I’m not. It’s just me now.”

“Sure,” says Washington, taking another bite of candy bar. “Whatever you say.”

Alpha doesn’t react for a moment. Then he stands up, turns around and walks back to the truck. Washington, sitting there with his back against the wind shield, only registers what Alpha is about to do as he steps up to the front fender, grabs him at the back of one knee and yanks him forward.

“Hey -!”

Alpha drags him forward to the end of the hood, almost yanks him over the front completely, stops him so he’s sitting on the edge, leaning back, Alpha leaning over him so close Wash’s knees are on either side of Maine’ torso before he has a chance to react. His helmet goes rolling. Wash immediately twists, curls his right leg up to his chest and jams his opposite boot up against Maine’s ribs, grabs at the metal beneath him, snarls when Alpha grabs indistinctly at his hip and lower back.

“What are you doing! Get off of me!”

Alpha ignores him, grabs his right knee and with the Meta’s terrible strength, easily flips the Freelancer over onto his stomach, snatches one arm and twists it up between his shoulder blades, using the leverage to pin Wash chest-down over the front of the jeep. The pain wraps up from his torqued arm up into his spine and all down his body, locking him in place, swearing, his other hand grabbing the hood, trying to push himself up to give his arm some slack. He’s uncertain, as always, if Alpha knows what he’s doing or not. If he’s executing perfectly, or only thinks his new found AI intellect is fully operational.

Basically, there is a real uncertainty about whether Alpha is about to break his goddamn arm by accident.

Wash feels a fist close on the memory unit strapped to his back, yank it off his spine with a twist. Alpha briefly examines the unit — pinning Wash between Maine’s near 1000 pounds of armored weight and the 5000 jeep, the headlights jamming up under his chest harness into Wash’s bruised ribs. Maine’s knee is up between his legs, jammed up against the back of his right inner thigh, pinning it against the underside of the jeep so he can’t kick back. Alpha reaches over his shoulder, holding the unit in hand, shoving it very close to Wash’s face.

“Thought I didn’t notice?”

“I wasn’t hiding it.”

“Just didn’t mention it.”

“It’s a piece of junk, Alpha. It’s just an AI unit.”

“Yeah.” He thumbs the trigger along the bottom and a metal spike deploys from the base, sparking slightly. It’s so close to Washington’s face, the heat radiates against his cheek, static jumping along his jaw. “Junk until you mod it into a capture unit. So, when did you want to try and use this, motherfucker? After I jump into the armor with no weapons or mods, right?”

“That’s not what I was going to use it for.”

“You’re a shit liar, Washington.”

“It’s for Epsilon.” Wash tries to turn his head far enough to glare back at Alpha. “I told you before – he shouldn’t be awake. He could be a problem if he’s in an autonomous body and moving around, especially a floating orb that shoots lasers. Let go of me.”

The hand around his wrist tightens, tugging slightly upward and Wash jerks up against the jeep, bites his tongue. Maine’s knee is pressed up between his legs, uncomfortably heavy and every time Alpha shifts his weight, the armored edge of the knee guard digs into his right inner thigh and Wash becomes peripherally aware of this only when Alpha leans up against his back close enough to hear is still holding the capture unit near his face. He shifts his weight, Wash inhales, hard, twitches forward and –

“You get that I’m just fixing the shit the Director did to me, right? You get that?”

Alpha’s voice directly in his ear, low, too low for Church’s usual tone of voice. Washington doesn’t move. There’s dirty orange burn of holo-light around the Meta, pulsing slightly, like a heartbeat or dying embers in a fire pit. Alpha pulls up on his arm again and Wash hooks his free arm up over the hood, levering himself up on that elbow to take the pressure of his other arm, sweating now, his breath shallow and rapid. Maine’s knee between his legs is shoved up against his balls, crushing him against the nose of the car.

“I’m taking back every fucking part of me that psychopath ripped out the name of a fucking shadow!” The voice sounds like Alpha’s now, not the growl from before. (Not Omega.) “You know he didn’t even do it in the name of war right? Near the end there? That it wasn’t about the war anymore. That he fucking slotted the Freelancers with pieces of me because he needed more data to replicate the fucking process. He tore me apart because he couldn’t just —”

Alpha stops.

Wash stands there listening to Maine breathe, the thump of his own heart in his head. The orange light dims a little, then fades.

“You know, Wash.” His voice is quieter “At Command you weren’t the only motherfucker who walked in there not expecting to come out.” A slight huff. “EMP plus AI gets you a dead AI. I knew that. You never said it directly, but you asked me to die in there. That’s what you were asking me to do and you didn’t have the fucking right to ask me to do that, but I still went in there with you.” Alpha’s grip relaxes. “I didn’t wantto be erased, Washington. I still don’t. Is that so fucking wrong of me not to want to make it easy for them?”

He doesn’t let go of Wash’s arm, but his grip on it has lowered to the middle of his back and he’s no longer holding the memory unit in the Freelancer’s face. Wash hears him retract the extraction shunt and sigh. Meta steps back, latches the mod back to Washington’s armor at the base of his spine. Then he lets go and, for a moment, Washington doesn’t move from where he’s standing, half lying against the front of the jeep, sweating cold, his hand fisted against the hood.

“You were right, Wash. I’m not a fuckin’ hero. I don’t want to die.” A beat. “I don’t want you to die either, actually, asshole. I’d also like you not to try and stab me in the face with a capture unit, but you know… do whatever you’re gonna do, Wash. I’m just not gonna roll with it this time. Got it?”

“I told you.” Wash doesn’t turn around, just stands there, leaning on the jeep. “It’s not for you. It’s for Epsilon.”

“Fine. I’m gonna get back to looking for the stupid heat signatures or whatever.”

Washington waits until Alpha is gone before exhaling, slowly and shakily. Wash drops his head against his forearm, loops his other arm around his stomach and just stands there with the Epsilon unit warm against his spine and the bruised bone cage of his ribs throbbing. He breathes. Lifts his head, presses his mouth against the back of his knuckles, his hand still knotted against the metal and tries to ignore the dull ache in his belly.

“Fuck.”

The word is muffled against his glove. He doesn’t move for a moment, but eventually Wash scrubs a palm over his face and stands up, braces both hands against the hood. Panic is painful. It knots you up, wins your muscles tight like a garrote wire around a person’s throat. Wash fights down a rush of dread, lets the syllable build behind his teeth and, “Fuck…” He bends his head down, breathes ragged, lets his shoulder blades knot up. “Fucking dammit, god…”

He doesn’t have a chance to finish.

Because that’s when a recovery beacon goes off.

Chapter 11 Chapter Text

“So this feels like a fucking a trap,” says Alpha.

Washington, who is sitting silently in the passenger seat, his battle rifle in his lap, a series of grenades strapped down his thighs, says nothing and sits there staring forward as the jeep rumbles across the snowy wasteland. The fog lights cut ineffectively through spun sugar white-out. They’re still four hours out from Sidewinder but the cold is already starting to bite. Washington’s temp-regs kicked in ten miles back, keeping him at a comfortable warmth inside his armor. Outside it’s a little below freezing. He can imagine the bite of it – bitterly painful, sparking a rush of goosebumps up his arm and across the rest of his body, the cold in his arm infecting the rest of him like a poison in the blood.

“Thanks, Wash. I guess I’ll come up with a plan to avoid the fucking trap on my own then.”

Washington ignores Alpha completely. He shifts his weight a bit in his seat, braces one foot against the dash and leans back, closes his eyes. He can feel Maine’s body in the jeep next to him, knows through instinct and familiarity alone that Alpha is looking at him, likely hoping he’ll detect the judgmental stare and offer up some insight into whathe would do to avoid a trap set by idiots, but Washington is sticking to his resolution not to speak to Alpha until absolutely necessary.

“Fuckin’ Freelancer cockbite jackass…” mutters Alpha, trailing off into inaudible profanity.

He should focus. Wash knows he should focus. He should be thinking about the fight they are likely driving into. He should be thinking about anything else than the past.Stop thinking. Stop remembering. Remembering is what’s killing you. Memory is what’s destroying you.

But memory is all he’s got left, isn’t it?

Perfect recollection is what Epsilon gave him.

His dead friends and their details.

Connecticut’s smirk is a ghost of synaptic replication, the palms of her hands on his fingers, showing him how to hold a knife, her grip on his chin, yanking his head back, the knife on his throat, her voice saying, “Like this, here.” She pulls the edge up against his throat, the blunted training blade against his pulse, and her mouth against his ear. “Remember that spot. Now do it on me.” Her hands on his is a memory of the mind, like the way to flip a blade and throw it is memory of the muscle. Connie lives in the recollection of his body – her only fucking cenotaph.

Washington grits his teeth. His grip tightening around the stock of his M5.

York says, “Dude, I’m just fucking with you.” And North shakes his head, says, “Okay, now I don’t wanna talk about it.” And South’s got her elbow in his ribs and she’s grabbing him from behind, screaming, “BUICKS, AGENT WASHINGTON!” And Florida tells him to stop dying his hair because, “You’re not doing it because you like it, you’re doing it because you think others will.” The sound of Wyoming disassembling his rifle in rapid snaps and click. Then Agent Carolina loops an arm around his neck, grins, smells of sweat and heat and says, “Good job out there, Washington,” and he is –

Drifting again.

He’s got his back to a locker, the door is digging into his back a little, his fingers looped through the fine metal grating of a storage rack directly next to it. He grips it so hard the tips of his fingers ache red and go numb. His spine curls up off the locker, his shoulders pinned back to the wall and his tongue caught against the roof of his mouth. Hand on his jaw, another hand against the front of his fatigues, rubbing him roughly. His mouth is dry against theirs, their tongue on his teeth, breathe in his mouth and the moan catches against the back of his throat and holds there as a low tone, hitched with breath.

Grips the grating tighter. The back of his head bruised against a hinge in a door behind his skull, but he doesn’t notice, too busy breathing slow and arching up, too busy bracing one boot against the bench behind the Freelancer holding him against the wall, letting his knees fall open and he smells like copper and tastes like skin and he eclipses Washington against the lockers. There’s a scar in his palm. Wash can feel its shape against his neck when he pulls him up and –

“Washington! Hey!”

He opens his eyes. “Huh?”

“I said I’m pulling over so we can fucking chart this out.” They are, indeed, pulling over. The snow has stopped falling and the world is a long white flat broken with jagged glaciers of rock and ice. There’s a rocky overhang off the road where Alpha parks the jeep and climbs out of the vehicle. “Okay, so, they’re definitely at this old Freelancer installation. It’s got personnel stationed there and there’s probably UNSC stationed there since the investigation, so that could be a problem.”

“Why was there even a recovery beacon?” says Washington, not getting out of the car. “None of them are Freelancers.”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. It’s gotta be a trap.”

“The ID tag says it’s an untagged piece of Freelancer armor. It could just be UNSC trying to get us to respond to the beacon.” Wash looks at Alpha, who crosses Maine’s arms impatiently. “Maybe they’re trying to draw out the Meta.”

“Now? Three months later? At the same time that we’re chasing down Epsilon and the guys?” Alpha snorts. “No, this is them.”

“What? This? This is them?” Washington does not skimp on the disbelief. “Your gang of idiots acquired Freelancer tech, set off the recovery beacon, and are drawing us into a trap? Are we talking about another group of Reds and Blues or are we still talking about the morons who literally deleted the Blue Army records in the ten minutes we left them alone and forgot to turn in the Epsilon unit despite that being literally my only direction to them? The same idiots? They want a fight against you and me?”

“Well, okay, no. But it’s got something to do with them. I know it.”

“No, you don’t. Nothing about this is right. It’s just the only lead we’ve got.”

“So what? We just ignore it?”

“No. I’m just saying the fight we’re walking into is not against the Reds and Blues. It’s something else. Maybe they called the UNSC for help and there’s a whole fucking army waiting for us at this goddamn base. If we just drive up there we’ll probably walk right into a fucking mine field.”

“Well, that’s why we’re not going to do that. We’re gonna ditch the vehicle nearby, go on foot. I’ll scout ahead using my cloaking and get an idea what’s going on. If it’s an army, then we regroup. If it’s something else… then we’ll improvise.”

“I hate improvising.”

“I know,” says Alpha.

“Shut,” says Wash, “the fuck up you insufferable blowhard.”

A beat. “Okay,” says Alpha, “we skipped a few levels. What are you –?”

“Don’t tell me you ‘know’,” snaps Wash. “You don’t know.” Wash braces one hand against the frame of the jeep, uses his other hand to hold up three fingers. “We’ve known each other three weeks in total. The three months in a fucking coma do not fucking count. Back on the Mother of Invention you never spoke with me or any Freelancer. You don’t know me. So shut the fuck up. We’re not friends.”

Alpha snorts. “Yeah, because I’m just lining up to be your pal. Melodramatic basket of crazy is my favorite.”

“Call me crazy again and I will fucking test those over-shields.”

“Oh. Okay. ‘I’m not crazy, but shut up or I’ll shoot you.’ That’s right up there with ‘I’m not crazy. Excuse me, I have to go blow up this dead body’ and, wait…” Alpha holds up a hand, tilts his head like he’s listening. “Yeah, the Delta part of me thinks you’re not operating within standard deviations anymore. Just a heads up.”

“Fuck you, Church.”

“Ha! You called me ‘Church’.” Wash starts getting out of the jeep. “Wait, no, stop. We need the ammo. Sorry. You’re not crazy. Sorry. Can we just talk about the trap we’re gonna sneak into? Please can we skip the part where you try to stab me or something?”

Wash hops out of the jeep, sets his rifle down in the seat behind him. “Take off your helmet.”

“Why? So you can literally stab me in the face?”

“Just do it.”

Alpha stares at him. Then, in a quieter, different voice: “I think that’s a pretty bad idea.”

“Yeah?” says Wash viciously. “And I think your sneak into a trap and improvise plan is not the best thing I’ve ever heard of, but here we are. So let’s trade one shit idea for another why don’t we?” He steps directly into Alpha’s space and Alpha, in the body of a monster, a 1000 pound killing machine, unfolds his arms, takes a step back from the way the Freelancer angles his head. Steps back from how he slants his shoulders and says, “Take off the fucking helmet.”

A hesitation.

“Fine.” Alpha reaches up, thumbs the seal at the jaw of Maine’s helmet. “But I warned you.”

Alpha bows his head, pulls the helmet off, straightens up and…

Washington regrets it. He regrets like he regrets a fucking knife to the gut. He regrets the grey-green animal-shine of Maine’s eyes – too big in the pupil, slightly too wide in the iris, an almost feline composition and shape, bright and staring. Washington regrets his lack of imagination. He regrets that Maine’s face creases with Alpha’s ghostly impulses of pity, regrets the heavy line of his brow wrinkling slightly and the way Maine’s lips part slightly on a word that Alpha won’t use Maine’s mouth to say. And he regrets remembering the freckles in Maine’s too-pale skin, the color old wheat and pale from lack of sun. The scar is still there – cheekbone to cheekbone across his nose. Maine doesn’t look any older. He looks the same as he did the day he pulled his helmet off on a battlefield on Circumstance and that Washington is –

He’s drifting.

He pulls his helmet off and the air is so cold it hurts, it makes a fog of his breath and fills his chest with cold. The snow crunches beneath his boot. He hears it when he takes one step forward, reaches up and fits his hand to the back of Maine’s neck. He hears his breath hitch, his heartbeat hitch, then pulls Maine’s mouth to his and – he remembers how to do this. Maine’s hands fit against his skull, grip his head, fingers dragging though his hair and gripping tight where it’s grown out enough to hold and his mouth tastes like he remembers. He smells like Washington remembers. His right hand slides down his neck and follows the same path from his throat to his belly and hooks his hand down the front of his belt and – Washington wakes up.

“Fuck!”

Wash slams his hands against Meta’s chest, shoves, staggers, hips hitting the jeep behind him. He rolls, turns his back to Meta and grips the frame of the vehicle. Hedoesn’t dry heave. He grits his teeth, screws his eyes shut until the back of his eyelids light up with lights and color and the knots wringing his guts like a towel in his belly subside to bearable. Behind him, he hears the hiss of a helmet resealing and the crunch of snow as Alpha moves behind him and he doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t fucking move. He hears Alpha set his helmet down on the hood of the car.

“Sorry,” Alpha says quietly, in the voice that isn’t quite one voice. “You surprised me.”

“We should go,” says Washington.

“Okay.”

Wash waits until Alpha is moving away, scrubs his face with one hand, and grabs his helmet, pulls it back on and accepts the damage he just did to the fucking composition of his soul and gets back in the jeep. He does not drift for the rest of the ride to the outpost. He doesn’t remember anything. He is wide awake.

Chapter 12 Chapter Text

“Everyone’s dead.”

Washington supposes he should be just a little unnerved by that, but he’s not. He can no longer tell if it’s simply because he’s too exhausted to spare the energy or if nearly two decades of war have made it impossible for him to feel any other way than, “Oh.” Which is what he says on the radio before realizing just how fucking indifferent that sounds.

“Who are they? UNSC or Freelancer?”

“Freelancer. UNSC hasn’t found this place yet I guess.”

Washington thinks that he asked because it would be less unfortunate if the dead were part of Project Freelancer – “Wait. Freelancer. Aren’t they the bad guys?” – but the fact of the matter is Project Freelancer was a UNSC backed and funded program and the dead are soldiers are, likely, just like him: Clueless. Following orders. Just doing their job. Washington preoccupies himself wondering who’s responsible for the dead.

“Man, these guys got fucked up.”

“Any sign who did it?”

“Man, I don’t know. They got shot with bullets. It’s not exactly a calling card.”

“You think the Reds and Blues would do something like this?”

“Shoot some dudes? Yeah, sure. They’re space Marines. They’ll shoot whoever the fuck if it shoots at them first.” A beat. “Or looks at ‘em funny.” Another beat. “Or if Caboose thinks he’s helping.” Washington’s ire must transmit silently via the radiowaves because Alpha coughs and says, quickly, “Look, I’ve gone through the whole base and everyone in here is dead. Any movement on the obvious lure in the snow front?”

“No.” Washington sights down his scope again. “Just twitching and probably moaning.”

The ‘obvious lure in the snow’ is Epsilon. He’s not in a floating laser eyeball anymore. He’s lying gut-shot in the snow, wearing a set of blue armor identical to the kind Church was wearing the day Washington first met him. He is, understandably, not doing so hot.

Washington’s been watching him, for about fifteen minutes now, alternate between trying to crawl toward the outpost and just lie there clutching his belly, shuddering. Washington – crouched behind cover some 200 meters out from where his old AI is lying – watches Epsilon roll onto his back and just lie there, gripping his stomach. That recovery beacon has been going off for nearly five hour now. So… someone shot him and left him there five hours ago. Washington’s got Epsilon’s head in his crosshairs.

“Well, now we know why no one’s helping him. Everyone’s dead.”

Washington lowers his rifle. “Are we going to help him?”

“Uh, no, Wash.” There’s a beat. “We’re not.”

“We’ve been here twenty minutes already.”

“You think someone really just left him here?”

“Maybe the Reds and Blues gave him up.” Washington does not disguise the cold in his tone. “Maybe they were more logical than you are and ditched the dead weight.”

Alpha ignores Washington’s insinuation about his former teammates so Wash tucks the butt of his rifle against his shoulder again and looks down the scope. Epsilon is staring at his palm. There’s red in the snow but it’s not blood. If a real human had lost that much blood and laid with their suit breached in this cold, they’d be dead. Washington speaks through his teeth.

“I could just walk up and ask him who shot him.”

“Tried hailing him on your radio again?”

“Still no response. I think someone pulled the transceiver out of his helmet. I can see where someone ripped it open.” Wash sighs. “Which means they want me to walk out there and help him. I don’t know. If there’s a sniper in the area, I can’t see them. Unless the literally climbed the cliffs straight up a wall of sheer ice and rock to get a high point. And you said there’s no one in the base so what’s the deal?”

“Maybe we’re over thinking it?”

“Maybe.”

A beat of silence.

“Fuck it. Okay. I’m at the base entrance right now. I can see him from here. I’ll cover you.”

Washington stands up, checks his rifle. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

“Wait, Wash. Just stay put. I’ll do it. I’ve got over shields so if there is a sniper I’ll just – Washington. Washington. Christ, you fucking…”

Wash is already out in the open, crossing the ice field toward Epsilon. He is peripherally aware of Alpha swearing into his radio but the rest of him is entirely focused on Epsilon who sees him coming across the ice. Epsilon, to Washington’s surprise, makes no move to get away. He rolls onto his side, grips his stomach tight, a slush of red and black dripping from between his fingers. That’s not what surprises him though. What stops Wash is when Epsilon raises his head, lets go of the wound and using that arm to violently wave Washington off. That stops the Freelancer. He falters a step, hesitates and halts where he is.

“What is it? Why’d you stop?”

Washington taps a thumb against the stock of his rifle. “He’s trying to warn me, I think.”

“Get out of there. Let me do it. Just go back.”

“No,” says Wash mildly and resumes walking toward Epsilon.

“Wash. Knock it off. Please.”

“Shut up, Alpha.”

“No!” Epsilon is close enough that Wash can hear him now. He’s shouting at Wash, making a clumsy slashing motion with his arm, holding up a hand palm out to stop him, shouting, “Are you an idiot!? Get out of there! She’s booby-trapped the –!”

Something beeps loudly. Washington freezes. The snow around him lights up. A ring of yellow lights, muted by the snow, blinks on beneath the powder. The high chiming of remote triggered land mines – nearly two dozen of them – immediately eclipses all other sounds and for a moment he cannot tell which Church is shouting at him. They are both saying the same thing.

“Wash! Washington move! What are you doing?! No, don’t –!”

Wash dives left, hits the ground rolling, comes up sprinting and he has enough time to think – “Not yet.” – before the explosion takes him off his feet. His armor takes the brunt of the shockwave. He’s deafened instantly, hits the ground hard, rolls, skidding until his shoulder slams into an uneven groove of ice, knocking him bouncing, jarring every part of him. His head snaps against the ground until he manages to ball up into a fetal position, arms over his head, skidding across the ice on his flank before grinding to a stop.

The world whites out.

A rest between one beat of his heart and the next.

He breathes in and the pain rushes down every line of his nervous system from his ribs out through to his fingertips and toes, lights him up in heat and nausea. Ow. Fuck…

“Washington! Are you –?!” Static. Garbled radio noise. Wash moans and rolls onto his back, clutches his shoulder, bones throbbing molten red. “—coming out to – Hey! Knock it off I can handle – no, you can’t, Church —!” Static. A high G-tone whining in his head, deafening everything. His armor is beeping in his ear, high and repetitive. “He’s my teammate and she’s my —!” Static. Wash is hyper- aware of blood pounding through his head, of his ribs in his armor, of his tongue behind his teeth, bitten, pulsing heat and copper. His rifle is in the snow far too his left. “Washington!” The voice in the radio isn’t Alpha’s – it’s low, urgent, female and he can’t… he can’t… “Move, Washington! She’ll kill you!”

“She?”

“Me,” says a voice.

And that’s when Agent Texas pins his arm into the snow with her boot, puts the muzzle of an MA5 in his face. Washington forgets, briefly, how to breathe and how to move and how to do anything but lie in the snow and stare. Here’s how he remembers Agent Tex: In motion, a kinetic force, muscled and slim, never out of her armor, skinned in black titanium and caustic. He remembers her in punches thrown, in re-directions of force and the way she braced herself for impact. The Freelancer standing over him is as he remembers, the armor is different but she holds herself like he remembers. Her voice matches the one in his memory, lays down on top on it pitch for pitch.

“You’re…” Wash shakes his head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Not-Tex grinds her boot down on his wrist in retort. When Wash finishes shouting she says, calmly, “Don’t sound so disappointed. You’ll make me cry. Where’s the Director?” When he doesn’t answer she picks up her foot and slams it down on his elbow instead. “I said…” She is speaking over the sound of Washington swearing. “Where is the Director?” She ignores the way Washington shoves at her ankle, the blood in the snow. “Answer me.”

“Fuck! How would Iknow that?”

She clicks her tongue and her fingers tighten incrementally on the heavy weapon in her hands. “Wrong answer –”

Alpha hits her like a fucking freight train.

They’re both gone instantly. Alpha was moving at some 30mph and the collision sounds like two cars wrecking, Tex grunting as they both hit the ground but here, in this world, the Meta doesn’t just tackle her. Meta body checks her, grabs her by the arm, rolls and body slams her into the ground with such fucking force the whole ground fragments and craters out beneath her. He doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t wait a goddamn second; he is on top of her and punching her over and over and over, driving the two-ton gravity hammer force of his fist into her helmet with a brutality that Washington can’t attribute to Alpha. He moves like Omega… but not quite like Omega. He attacks with too much precision, too much intent.

But Not-Texas can, apparently, take a hit like Real Texas.

She catches Meta’s fist, twists and yanks him down. Grabs him by the collar of his chest armor, tugs his head down and smashes her helmet into his, stunning him. A snarl. She mount breaks and grabs Alpha at the belt and in a single spinning torquehurls the 1000 pound armored super weapon nearly fifty meters. He doesn’t fall though. He twists in the air, skids back on his feet in a starter’s crouch and rockets out from this position, sprinting back at Not-Tex. She’s ready. She’s in a boxer’s defensive stance.

Ten meters to contact.

Five meters to contact.

They hit each other with the exact same fucking swing, two fists slam into two jaws and they both rock back, staggering identically, shaking it off in tandem and it’s only in the moment that they both square off with the exact same stance that Washington realizes what he’s seeing – Texas in two places. Texas in Not-Texas and Texas in Maine. They both move with the kinesthetic patterning that, for Washington, is what comprises the woman in his head and then…

“Who the fuck are you?” says the Meta. The words are in Agent Texas’ voice. Not Alpha’s.

Not-Texas laughs, circling slowly in the snow. “Heh, I could ask you the same fucking thing, bitch.”

“Is this the Director?” Alpha-Tex is direct, militant in tone. “He still trying to ‘get me right’? Is that what you are?”

Not-Texas laughs again, loudly, a vicious wild sound. “Oh, yeah,” she say and he can hear the grit in her teeth, the molecular edge of rage. “It’s the Director alright. Just like it’s always the Director, but I’m goddamn amazed. It’s you isn’t it? It’s actually theTexas. You’re the fucking reason for all of this bullshit. You, his fucking shadow.”

“Yeah,” says Alpha-Tex, quietly, calmly, “but if I’m a shadow, what the fuck does that make you?”

Not-Tex attacks.

This time, Alpha-Tex is waiting for her. She side-steps Not-Tex’s attack, tricks her momentum and punches her in the back of the head, knocking Not-Tex into to snow where she rolls, slams her fist into the ice and spins back around to attack again. She snaps across the ground between them and Washington cannot follow the speed with which they accelerate, the blur of fists and the rhythm of velocity and the trajectories of their combat defy his eyes. Meta-Tex is moving, spinning, juking, blocking. Not-Tex is attacking, retreating, twisting, faking, torqueing. They throw punches that make the air shake.

Alpha-Tex vanishes. Cloaks herself. Not-Tex immediately puts a 12-inch combat knife through her shoulder and pulls her hand gun, firing with machine precision… directly into Meta’s over-shields.

Washington is on his feet. His battle rifle is in the snow. He can feel York’s healing mod knitting him back together in slow, steady pulses of green and dopamine. He’s sure he has a concussion. His body throbs, drags a low moan from his guts and he’s blinded briefly, the healing mod taxing him to the point of dizziness and when the blur of adrenaline passes, his rifle is in one hand… and the memory unit in the other.

The Texes are ripping each other apart.

They are ripping the mountain down.

Washington runs. He snaps his rifle to his back and he runs, sprints out of the combat zone as the two AI – and they must both be AI, the Not-Tex could not match Meta-Tex if she were not herself an AI – attack each other with this inhuman holistic totality of violence. The Not-Tex sets off another series of explosions. Wash checks his six and she’s got a mini-gun – Where the fuck did she get that? – aimed at Meta-Tex who answers by activating North’s bubble-shield. Washington gets another twenty meters. This time the explosion is so loud, he spins around completely just in time to watch Not-Tex bring the fucking mountain down on top of Alpha-Tex.

For a moment he stares, staggered.

He steps back. The avalanche continues. Steps back again, and again, then turns and runs and this time he doesn’t stop until he reaches his goal. He’s shaking, but his hands are steady. He’s breathing hard, but he can’t feel the burn in his lungs. The capture unit in his hand is already activated, the 12-inch metal shunt live with charge.Plan B, Wash. He crosses the snow, bends down and grabs Epsilon (who sees him coming, rolls onto his back like a real person, hold up a hand, panting like he actually breathes, says Washington’s name) by the throat and…

“Let go of me! Don’t! Don’t, please! Washington, listen to me–!”

Wash slams the spike through Epsilon’s visor. It punches through the gold shielding like bullet, splinters it and the AI’s body seizes up violently, jerking and spasming wildly in Washington’s grip but he just keeps holding on. He forces himself to hold tight as Epsilon’s helmet spits sparks and he forces himself to keep going until Epsilon stops moving and the capture unit chimes, retracts the shunt and goes into lock.

There is no explanation for the sudden violent urge that Washington feels to scream.

Insanity comes like a knife to the brain, penetrates his thoughts and…

No. No. Not now. Move. Just move!

Wash is already running again, this time for the caves that lead out to the other side of cliffs, where he and Alpha parked the jeep. Behind him he hears the fight still going, the Texes so absorbed in destroying one another that they don’t see the moment where Washington’s made his decision. He runs with the memory unit hot in his fist, his thoughts light up with panic and nausea, every inch of skin tight with goosebumps, his guts knotted ropes. He races through the narrow tunnels that Alpha used to enter near the base and comes out the other side into a snowy clear.

It’s so quiet.

Snow is falling again. It’s quiet save for the sound of his own breathing, the hum of the memory unit and the distant muted sounds of battle. The Warthog is parked where they left it and Washington climbs in, starts the ignition and drives. His hand around the wheel ache to the bone from the pressure. He can’t stop hyperventilating. He keeps waiting for the bullet, for the explosion, for the act of violence or God that’s going to stop him. He keeps waiting for someone to stop him from doing this because he’s trying to save himself and why would anyone let him do that.

But nothing happens.

He drives away and when he looks back there is no one following him. He keeps waiting for the bullet that doesn’t come. He waits for that bullet for the next four hours and into the night that he drives through into the desert. The Epsilon unit glows in the seat next to him, the only light for miles because Washington uses scanners instead of highlights to navigate the dunes. Washington keeps driving now because he’s not sure where he’s going.

It’s not until dawn begins to break along the far horizon that he stops the car, slams on the brakes and puts it in park. Then he sits there, gripping the wheel, aware of how his bones ache and his muscles feel numb, how his eyes burn, and exhaustion has him dizzy. He lays his head against the top of the steering wheel and listens, for a moment, to the rumble of the engine through his armor. It’s comforting. For five glorious moments he just sits there and nothing happens to him. He closes his eyes.

Then:

“Okay.”

Washington opens his eyes.

“Good job, asshole. Now we’re in the fucking desert.”

The memory unit is pulsing.

“What’s your plan?”

Chapter 13 Chapter Text

Washington is gone.

He’s been gone for hours and his history suggests that he is capable of being gone for days and that he may, very well, intend to be gone. His helmet is in the front seat next to Epsilon’s memory unit and Washington is sitting in the sand with his back against the jeep’s driver-side wheel. The engine is still rumbling quietly, the vibrato humming down his spine and setting a pitch in the marrow of his skeletal structure. It’s been hours. The sun is rising in a molten haze against the far curve of the planet, spreading slow orange light into the dips and grooves of the dunes.

“Washington.” There is a long silence. “Wash, can you answer me?”

He can’t.

He’s not in the desert with Epsilon. His eyes are closed, his head bent, unconscious of the slow slide of warmth across the back of his neck, the sun spreading fingers of light against his skin and through his hair. His arms hang draped over the bend of his knees and, occasionally, his fingers twitch and his eyes move behind closed lids. He breathes slowly, then rapidly. Grits his teeth, grinds them until his jaw aches and his tongue is dry.

Memory is a fucking abyss.

For Washington, it’s a deep pool filled with the wreckage – the bones of bodies and weaponry glinting beneath the surface, headlights like eyes glowing out of the murk. Every fucking day is treading this fucking water, keeping high enough not to touch the things beneath. But… on days like today, he is one of the things in the water. Not struggling back to air, but pulling himself down into the dark on hand holds of old bike handles and battle rifles, plunging blindly deeper, slicing himself open on razor wire and broken bottles and with no plan to come back up for air and he is –

– letting her fuck him against the floor, his face pressed into his forearm and he breathes, shakily, and her hands burn paths slick with sweat down his back and her fist in his hair tugs back as she pushes forward and he says her name and she fucks him in slow painful strokes, over and over and over until he has forgotten any language that isn’t her name falling apart on his tongue and she grasps his cock, she fists his hair, she makes him scream her name like it’s God’s until he’s begging her to stop, not to stop, and she shoves his head down again and –

– Maine flicks a candy wrapper at him. It hits him in the forehead. Washington glares. Maine does not pay it any mind. He flicks another wrapper at his partner. Wash swats it away this time and Connecticut giggles and joins Maine, throwing small kernels of popcorn at him. Very shortly Connie is hurling fistfuls of popcorn at Washington and Maine is flicking hard candies at terminal velocity at his head and, “FUCK YOU GUYS! FUCK YOU! I’M GONNA – OW! THAT’S IT!” –

– “Stop saying things like that,” he says and when she turns away he doesn’t know what to do. Panic seizes him, a wild dread when he sees the back of her shoulders, when she turns away with that disgusted, disappointed curve in her lips. Like he refuses to see. Like he cannot find the other side of the equation. He is failing the proof and he catches her shoulder, pulls her around. “Connie, will you fucking talk to me?” She knocks his hand away and says –

– “You worthless fucking, patch! I give you a fucking roof and this is how you repay me?” His forehead cracks into the corner of the table, splits his brow, blinds him with blood. He smears red on the linoleum, grabs the chair leg and yanks himself under the table. A fist on his ankle, big enough to close all the way around. He kicks, thrashes, knocks the chairs over, dragged out under the kitchen lights. Hands closing on his shirt, his hair and –

– the bullet punches through his shoulder armor, slams him into the wall, his rifle hanging off his numb fingers as a next spray of bullets rips concrete from the wall just above his head and he goes down to the sound of plasma fire and the scream of a Sangheili Zealot. Can’t move his arm. Uses his other arm to pull his side arm and unload the M6G into a Grunt’s head, blows its skull open, and –

– “Don’t say good-bye.” Her fingers on his jaw are warm. “Don’t. I mean it. It’s bad luck and I hate good-byes.” He has something to say but she fits her mouth to his and, like usual, steals every word off his tongue and swallows them. She presses her forehead against his. “See you soon. Just remember to –”

– “Breathe you stupid fuck!” Alpha’s voice. Maine’s hands. They pull his head back, fingers on his jaw and nose and Maine’s mouth against his lips, breathing air back into his lungs and –

– Connie pulls him forward and kisses him. She smiles against his mouth. So –

– the next spin of the knife from his fingers sends it sailing on a perfect fucking arc. The blade thunks home through the man’s eye-socket, punches through the visor and lodges deep in his head and the relief, god, he feels. Washington stands straight, one hand fitted to the wound in his ribs and –

– “Leonard. I have to tell you something.” –

– “Wake up, Wash. Jesus Christ, just wake up.” –

– “Hot damn, Agent Washington!” South is shouting, a fireball igniting the skies behind her. “Remind me not to fuck with you, combat engineer! How much C-4 you got on you, you motherfucker!?” And Carolina says, “Probably not much now.” North is laughing over the roar of the jeep and –

– he tries not to scream. Bites his lip and jams his head back against the locker, holds his breathe and tries to ride out the next drag of his teammates tongue. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to care about being quiet when it’s 2AM and his ribcage is a mural of black and blue, when he stinks like plasma and sweat, a puncture in his thigh knitted by bio-foam. When he’s dirty and tired and head-fucked by the mission and the tang of blood. When his partner his mouth around his cock. Wash slams his head back against the locker again, throat working around the scream he won’t let come. His spine is knotting and his fingers curl and he bucks up into his squad-mate’s mouth and –

– he’s screaming. There’s a needle in the back of his skull, drilling up into the back of his eyes and someone has set his nerves on fire to the sound of her voice. She is saying his name and she is not saying good-bye and her voice is gasoline and nitroglycerin, pulsing in the flayed roadmap of his veins but, god, there still is not enough battery acid in his blood to let him die. There is static in his head, a nest of fucking white noise in his eyeballs, eating through the back of his retinas until he’s blind with blood and salt, until his skull is a pool of saline and shit.

He’s screaming so loudly but it’s not loud enough to drown out the obliteration of her voice. He can’t hear himself screaming over the sound of the AI, over the sound/taste/color/feel/smell of Epsilon ripping parts of himself off in chunks of red and black that taste like bile and he’s pissed himself, he’s clawed his own arms and throat trying to get it out of him. Epsilon is ripping pieces of himself out, like a man cannibalizing his own arm to eat out an artery, like a women giving herself a lobotomy with a fucking knitting needle, his AI possesses every synapse, nerve, and molecule inside him and uses his body to fucking kill itself. He screams but the only thing he hears is Epsilon. He –

“Wash, will you please wake up?”

Washington opens his eyes. The sun is up but he’s shivering, his body a map of knots and goosebumps. His jaw aches and his teeth are grinding. His whole body hurts with exhaustion and when he lifts his head a surge of pins and needles rushes across his face from the back of his forehead and he immediately covers his eyes with his hand. Breathes. He breathes but the air tastes like bleach.

“I don’t know if you’ll hear me this time, but, uh, I’m sorry for shooting a giant laser at you. And, uh, I wish you’d at least tell me your diabolical plan or something. You know, instead of just sitting there like you’re dead. Kinda freaking me out.”

It takes literally every ounce of Washington’s will power not to just lie down in the sand and go to sleep. He reaches up, grabs the edge of the driver side door frame and uses that to lever himself up right. He leans against the vehicle, his elbows braced against the hood, head bent against his hands pressed to the hood. The nano-composite of his gloves against his face is rough, like Kevlar, smells like dirt and blood and metal.

“Hey! There you are. Okay. Great. You’re not dead.”

“No.”

“Fan-fuckin-tastic. So, you ready to let me outta this thing?”

“M’not letting you out.” Washington pushes off the hood, uses the frame of the car as a guide, hand running over the sides of the jeep until he finds the back and digs around for a bottle of water. He drinks half, dumps the rest over his head. “Stop talking to me.”

“Uh, no. Not until you tell me where you’re taking me.”

“Stop talking to me.” Washington digs around in the duffle bag, shoves the empty android over to get the strap out from under it. “I don’t want to listen to your fucking voice.”

“Too bad, bitch. Should have disabled the audio functions.”

Washington digs a hypo-chem from the duffle, tugs the collar of his undersuit down a bit. The bite of the hypo against his neck is nothing. He wipes the blood and tossed the used chem into the bottom of the bag, shakes his head at the dull rush. It’s about ten seconds before the dizziness starts to go, leaving him awake but… still exhausted. The impulse to sit back down in the sand and sleep is mind-numbingly strong. He forces himself to get back in the driver’s seat. Moving his body is like hauling bags of concrete.

“You don’t look so good.”

Wash picks up his helmet and puts it back on.

“Washington…”

“I’m turning you into the UNSC.”

“Oh.”

Washington is so tired. He’s so fucking tired. He closes his eyes behind his helmet. Breathes. C’mon. I can do this. I’m almost there, just this last leg and I can stop. Just gotta… I’m a fucking solider. I’ve been through worse. I’ve been through so much worse. Just move… just…

“If you keep sitting here Tex and the rest of them are gonna find you.”

“I know that. Shut up.”

“Look, I don’t know about your Meta pal, but if Tex catches up to you, she’s probably gonna pull your guts out through your throat.” When Washington does not immediately rise to this threat he adds, “So you’re just gonna sell me out? That’s that? Me for you? Period?”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“No. I… didn’t say that you did.”

“Stop talking.”

“Okay. Fine. I will but before I do I just wanted to, uh, say something. I guess. I mean, if you turn me over to the UNSC they might just delete me, okay? So I think I get to say something at least. You know, considering that the UNSC are the ones who gave me… gave Alpha to the Director in the first place.” A beat. “I dunno, I think I should get to say something.”

"Fine." Washington sits back in his seat, lets his hands slide off the wheel. "Say something then."

“I’m sorry.”

Wash turns his head slightly toward the passenger seat, toward the absurd lump of circuitry glowing at him. He stares, a dull, numb mass lodged in his thoughts like an old shrapnel shard. Epsilon makes a throat clearing sound.

“Uh, I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m — I’m sorry they put me in your head and I’m sorry about what happened when they put me… in your head. So. Yeah. That’s it. You can cart me off or whatever.”

Wash faces slowly forward again.

“You know he used to use your fucking name,” says Epsilon. Like he intended to be done, but can’t help it. “In the simulations, I mean, when they put Alpha through scenarios to break him. When he tried to convince me – convince Alpha that someone had died. He used your name. Told us you were dead.”

“Why?”

“Well, I guess, because Alpha liked you the most. ”

Washington closes his eyes, drops head back against the seat.

“The Director never allowed Alpha to talk to any of the Freelancers but I—“ Epsilon falters. “Alpha, I mean, was still on the ship.” January 24^th. Year: 2551, GST 10:23 PM. Mother of Invention. Theta liked your skateboard. “He and Tex… Beta. They watched you a lot, you know, just around the ship. Alpha asked the Director about you and that’s why…” January 2nd, 2551, GST 8:44 PM, on deck two, wing B-2 when you wiped out in front of Agent Maine. “He used you to break us. The same way he used Tex. That’s why I was your AI — I was supposed to, uh, protect you. Guess I fucked that up.”

Washington gets out of the jeep.

“Wash?”

Washington climbs into the back of the Warthog, grabs the AI unit from the front seat, then kicks the android onto its stomach in the bed of the jeep. He pulls the back of the helmet open, pulls his own helmet off and uses his knife to pop open the radio, rips out a few components necessary for an ad-hoc hardline. Sweat drips from his hair, running down his temple as he works, stinging his eyes. He bites the knife blade between his teeth, hooks the AI unit to the AI slot in the back of the android’s neural interface.

“Wash? What are you doing?”

“Fucking myself,” he grits, then activates the transfer process. It’s almost a relief really. “Do what you want, Epsilon.” He gets out of the jeep. “I’m your collateral.”

Chapter 14 Chapter Text

“We should kill him.”

“No,” say three voice simultaneously.

Washington doesn’t open his eyes. He hasn’t opened his eyes since he sat down and closed them this morning and allowed himself to slide out of reality again into the fever-heat of his memories, let the things in the water rise up and pull him down and down and down until the only thing that brought him back to the desert was the moment about ten minutes ago, when Private Simmons knelt down in front of him, fit his gloved hand to his forehead and checked his pulse. He remembers the hesitancy in the sim soldier’s touch, like a flicker of bird wings, trying to decide where to land on the Freelancer. It was Simmons who told the AI that he was definitely stable, but ‘looks pretty sick’.

The AI have been arguing about what to do with him ever since.

“We’re not killing him.” Epsilon.

“Wise up. He fucking turned on you to save himself. On both of you.” Not-Tex.

“It’s not like you gave him much reason not to.” Meta-Tex. “It’s not ‘turning on’ someone if you were coercing them in the first place. That’s called ‘wow I saw that coming for miles’.”

“If you saw it coming, then why didn’t you stop him?” Alpha.

“I said I saw him turning on us coming,” says Meta-Tex, annoyed. “Not the details.”

“Just let me kill him,” snaps Not-Tex. “He’s got a deathwish anyway.”

“Yeah,” says a voice Washington doesn’t know, “if we’re voting on the whole not killing people thing I vote for not killing the dude just sitting there not doing anything. Just putting it out there.”

“No one cares about your vote, Tucker.”

“Uh,” says Caboose, “but there is no room at Blue Base now? Tucker, me, two best friends, and Tex is five people. Also, if glowing Texas gets her own body too, then that is six people and we do not have enough bunk beds.”

“Caboose, shut up!” Alpha and Epsilon shout in tandem.

“Best friends,” Caboose whispers gleefully.

“Hey, Epsilon,” says Alpha. “Shut up. You’re not the real Church. I am.”

“Fuh-uck that,” says Epsilon. “You’re not even the real Church. You’re just an AI, motherfucker.”

“I swear to God I don’t even want you back in here and it’s not just because Tex thinks it’s a bad idea now, it’s because you’re a fucking tool.”

“Yeah? Good! I’d rather shoot myself than join up with you again!”

“Oh well, if you do at least this time it won’t be in Washington’s head, yeah?”

Dead silence.

“Wow,” says a low, dangerous voice. Tex’s voice. From the direction of the voice, it’s coming from nearby Epsilon so that means it’s the Not-Tex, the one from Sidewinder that blew him up. The one that said they should kill him. “Really?” she drawls. “Okay. Let’s go there. You’re the motherfucker who couldn’t handle it and fucking fractured us off in the fucking first place you piss-poor piece of –“

“Okay,” says Tucker loudly, “Let’s all just chill the fuck out. Let’s all just… not start fighting again because the Texes might start fighting again and, you know, that wasfucking terrifying. How about this: You’re both Church. Now, stop fucking bitching whenever I say your damn name.” He mutters. “It’s like dating twins without any of the fun parts of dating twins…”

“Yeah, but, Tucker,” says Alpha, sounded vaguely wounded. “I’m the Church that was stationed with you at Blood Gulch. You actually know me. This motherfucker is just a chunk of compartmentalized memory. He’s, like, a backup of me. He doesn’t even remember you.”

“Hey! I remember Tucker!” says Epsilon, offended. “It just… you know, took me a while.”

“What?! You kept calling him ‘the teal one’ for forty minutes of the drive here!”

“That’s not true. I called him ‘aqua’ and I remember that the distinction is important.”

“ARGH!” There’s a sound like Tucker shoving people in armor. “Stop crowding me! I’m just gonna call you Asshole and Bowling Ball from now on! Asshole, stop antagonizing Bowling Bowl before Texas starts beating us to death with her bare hands again.”

“Actually,” says another, significantly calmer, Tex voice. Meta-Tex. “I’m actually the Tex that was on Blue Team. That Tex is a binary AI created by Epsilon-Church, the same way I’m a binary AI for Alpha-Church. And since Epsilon-Church is a version of Alpha-Church, that makes her kind of a version of me.” Tucker sputters so she rephrases. “We’re the same, just separate.”

“Yeah,” says Not-Tex, sounding significantly less psychotic. “So are Asshole and Bowling Ball, but they’re too stubborn and stupid to admit it and stop slap fighting about it.”

“I just call them best friend and bestest friend,” squeals Caboose.

Tucker screams in frustration.

“You lot are giving me a headache!” declares Sarge, cocking his shotgun for effect. He’s standing at the head of the Warthog with the rest of his team. Grif, who found his stolen Snickers bars in the trunk, is nervously eating his way through the bag — Wash can hear the wrappers crinkle and smell melted chocolate. Simmons and Donut are quietly arguing about something under their breath. Sarge blusters. “Stop your tongue-wagging and focus on what we’re gonna do about Comatose McSleepylancer. I thought the whole damn point of coming out here was to catch him.”

“Yeah,” says Simmons sardonically, “that was real hard. He’s just sitting here.”

“I think he needs a medic,” says Donut anxiously.

“No!” says everyone else.

“Look, I say we all go back to Valhalla and regroup,” says Alpha. “We can just… go back to pretending to fight or whatever while I figure out what we should do.”

“What’s to figure?” says Not-Tex. “We go find the Director and kill him for what he did to us.”

“Oh right and how are we gonna do that? Your plan was beat it out of Washington, despite the fact he doesn’t know anything. None of us have any idea where the hell he could be.”

“Some of us might,” says Texas.

“I don’t remember everything!” says Epsilon loudly. “I already told you. Stuff is… hazy.”

“Look, that’s why I’m saying we go back to Valhalla, regroup, then figure out what our plan is. No one knows about us and no one is looking for us in a fucking simulation trooper outpost. We’ll get Washington and the Director situations sorted out. Just trust me.”

“Trust you?” snorts Not-Tex. “Just yesterday you were chasing us down so you could eat us.”

“Oh, don’t be melodramatic.”

“Dibs,” says Sarge suddenly.

There’s confused beat of silence.

“What?” says Alpha.

“Said Dibs.” Sarge sniffs insolently. “Calling dibs.”

“On what, you crazy fucker?”

“On Washington, Blue-tard. You Blues have five people now. Six if the original Tex gets herself a body. Me, Grif, Simmons, and Donut is only four and you decapitated Lopez and stole his body! If we get Washington, then the teams are even. So: Dibs.”

Alpha sputters falsetto. “You can’t call dibs on a person!”

“Just did, twinkletoes.”

“You fucking shot and ran over him!”

“Oh that was days ago.”

“It wasn’t even forty eight hours ago!”

“Can’t possibly be holding grudges for that long.”

“No one is calling dibs on Washington.”

“No. I’m calling dibs on Washington. Suck it, dirtbag.”

“Oh, right. Right.” A laugh. “Okay. Sure. Hey, did you miss the part where I’m the most badass solider ever now?” Not-Texas immediately laughs but Alpha ignores her. “Remember the time with the ship and the tank? In this scenario, I’m the fuckin’ tank. You don’t get to call dibs or next or shotgun or whatever the fuck. There’s no dibs. Washington is coming with us.”

Washington lifts his head. “I want to go with the Reds.”

Everyone stops. Washington doesn’t move from where he’s sitting, eyes closed, head against the wheel well behind him. He can feel everyone looking at one another and quietly, Simmons whispers, “Suck it, Blue,” and Alpha hisses, “Shut the fuck up,” and Tex says, “Church, shut up.” and then Alpha doesn’t say anything else after that. Washington cracks his eyes a little, looking sidelong at the gathered groups of Reds and Blues.

“Wash.” It’s Meta-Tex this time. “Are you sure?”

“Sounds sure to me,” blusters Sarge cheerily.

“The Reds?” pipes up Alpha, a bit shrilly. “You want to go with them? The fucking idiot brigade?”

“Uuuuh,” drawls Donut, “I think Mister Washington was pretty clear. So, like Simmons said: suck it, Blue.”

“But… but…” Alpha seems to be physically struggling with this. “Why?”

“Because,” says Washington dully. “I’m fucking sick of you, Alpha.”

“Oooooh,” sing-song Grif and Simmons simultaneously.

Not-Texas starts laughing so hard she has to brace her hands on her hips and folds over laughing. Tucker and Caboose are edging slowly away from her to stand behind the Meta-Alpha/Tex. Epsilon, still in Lopez’s brown armor and mis-matched blue helmet, is standing next to her, quiet. He’s just looking at Washington with his arms folded and not saying a damn thing.

“Welp, that settles it,” declares Sarge over Church’s sputtering and the sound of Not-Texas laughing. “Wash comes with us and you and your freakshow can sort itself out on the road. Also: dibs on the jeep.”

“What!?”

“You blew up our old jeep. We get the new one. Fair’s fair. Dibs.”

“That’s not –! No, you fuckers –!”

Washington gets up and climbs up into the bed of the jeep’s machine gunner position, sits down with his back against the back of the driver’s seat. Not-Texas laughs even harder, laughs so hard she falls against Epsilon laughing, forcing him to hold her up slightly while she howls. Alpha’s holo avatar throws its hands up and flickers, flashes so it spawns up directly in front of Epsilon’s helmet.

“Seriously? Epsilon? Not even you?”

“He stabbed me in the face and Tex here wants to kill him. Yeah, I really don’t have a problem with Wash bunking away from us. Also, sounds like you were a dick.”

“I was not!”

“You were,” says Meta-Tex.

“Don’t you start.”

“Shut up or I’ll kick you out.”

“You can’t do that anymore.”

“Wanna bet?”

“I – you – Fine. Take the jeep, take the Freelancer. Whatever.”

“Shotgun!” Simmons shouts half a second faster than Grif.

“Fuck!”

Washington closes his eyes. Washington drifts.

Chapter 15 Chapter Text

Washington falls asleep on the ride back. They have to shake him, somewhat violently, to wake him and even when awake he moves like a sleepwalker, bleary, and unsteady. He hops out of the Warthog, doesn’t even notice Sarge casually taking his rifle and side-arm off his back and hip. Grif takes the combat knife. Simmons nabs the grenades. By the time he gets to the Red Base entrance, the team has collectively and wordlessly disarmed the Freelancer and spirited the weapons away on their own persons. Simmons has Washington’s helmet under his arm.

“Maybe we should lock him up,” says Grif, completely audibly. “You know, as a trial period.”

Sarge grunts ambiguously.

“Oh, c’mon. Just because I said it instead of Simmons doesn’t mean it’s not a legitimate suggestion.”

Sarge just grunts again.

Simmons coughs. “Sir, since Donut is probably gonna do that thing he does, why don’t we just make him Washington’s guard or something? That way, we’ve got someone officially babysitting the dangerously unstable Freelancer you adopted and you can still ignore Grif’s suggestion.”

“Excellent idea, Simmons!” Sarge booms cheerfully, “Donut, you’re on Freelancer duty. The rest of us will take stock of Red Base and devise a plan against the Blues for their inevitable attack.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Christ,” says Grif.

Washington offers up no opinions about their plans. He’s too tired. Dizzy spells paired with a dull low-grade migraine are making it difficult to… navigate the interior of the Red Base. Donut grabs his arm when he misjudges the distance to a room and smacks his shoulder into the door frame, grunting slightly. After that Donut just handles him like a drunk and rather unnecessarily loops his arm over his shoulders, grabs the armor at his hip and uses both as leverage to haul Washington into one of the back rooms.

“Just put him in the spare bunk,” says Simmons somewhere behind them.

“We should get his armor off first.”

“Who cares? Just dump him.”

“Rude, Simmons.”

Donut eases Washington down onto the edge of a low metal shelf padded with an old cot and a blanket, carefully lets him catch his balance and sit there, hands gripping the edge of the cot until his fingertips go numb. It’s difficult to keep his eyes open. He’s hot. And tired. His eyes burn. Donut squats down in front of the Freelancer, peers up at him through his visor, then fits a hand to Washington’s forehead. He’s unoffended when Washington turns his face away. He says something but Washington can’t understand him. It’s as though he’s speaking through glass. Donut tilts his head. Repeats himself. Wash shakes his head.

“What?”

Donut sits back, seemingly thinking, then reaches up, thumbs the bottom of his own chin-guard, hitting the seal release. He tugs the ridiculous pink helmet off and Washington blinks. The right side of Donut’s face is heavily shrapnel scarred, pale jags of scar tissue zig-zagging across sun-bronzed skin, dragging ragged back into the hair beyond his temple. Clean heals, smooth, but discolored. The shell of his right ear is shorn almost entirely off, but there’s a black stud through his tragus and a smiley-face in his lobe.

He does not seem self-conscious about it. Wash can’t guess his age exactly – young, a doe-eyed boy with sun-bleached hair buzzed short over his ears, a shorn Mohawk running up the centre of his head and the moment he breaks the seal Wash smells sweat and lilacs and hair gel. When he turns his head to set his helmet down there’s a series of steel studs running along the un-scarred shell of his left ear, winking in the light when he turns back to Wash and tries again, face-to-face.

“Do you. Want to. Use the. Shower?”

Wash shakes his head.

“You probably should,” says Donut, scrunching up his face a little. “You kinda smell?”

“I don’t care.”

“Yeeeeeeah,” says Donut, scratching his scarred cheek, “Well, we already have one Grif so if you don’t wanna take a shower we’ll pretty much hose you down like we do with Grif when he gets unbearable.” He rocks back on his heels a bit, whistling. “It’s nooooooot pretty, but if you want me to toss you in a trough of soapy water and rub you down I’ll do it. It used to be one of my chores back on the farm.” He beams. “It’s like tossing a screaming swearing really smelly haybale.”

Wash is not even remotely surprised that Donut is a farmboy… he’s mildly perturbed by Grif, apparently, not washing for weeks at a time but can’t work up words to question it. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to be ‘rubbed down’ though.

He grunts a dull compliance and reaches under his right arm, slowly thumbing the armor releases, a process made difficult by the need to hit all three releases along the seam at once to pop the clamps. Donut watches him struggle lethargically with the release before just reaching in under Washington’s hand and thumbing down all three, easily popping the release. He does the same to the opposite side, then wraps one hand each around the shoulder straps of the chest harness. Wash ducks his head, loops his thumbs under the straps, helps Donut pull it off over his head.

The heavy chest piece thumps down on the floor.

“Want me to…?” Donut points at Washington’s lower leg armor, shrugging.

Washington is too fucking tired to argue. He just nods and works on getting his gauntlets off. Donut gets both his greaves and boots off before Washington is even done with his first gauntlet. He is dully aware of the fact that the cheery blonde sim solider is undressing him but cannot seem to connect to the prerequisite parts of his brain that would allow him to feel any particular way about that. The only fucking emotion he possesses is the numb ache of his tiredness.

He gets his gauntlet off. Unhooks his hip-holsters and pelvic armor, starts to unstrap his thigh guards. He feels drunk. It takes all his focus to get the last of his armor off. He sits there, feeling dizzy in his metal-alloy under-suit, like the room is starting to tilt, like he’s a fixed point while gravity shifts and –

He doubles up and vomits on the floor between his feet.

“Oh.” Donut is standing there with a fluffy towel. “Uh, I got it.” He pulls Wash to his feet, pushes the towel in his arms. “Go get cleaned up. Seriously. Now you smell like barf. Showers are through that door on the right.”

Wash nods, scrubs a hand over his face. There are shower stalls so he takes one of those. Stripping out of the body suit is agonizing and he’s not sure why, pulls every muscle in his body and by the time the suit is thrown over the top of the stall, he ends up leaning up against the wall. Focus. Christ. He turns on the water. It’s ice cold, slaps him awake gasping. Good. He rinses his mouth with the water, spits it up until the acid burn in the back of his throat and nostrils is all that’s left.

Shower. Right.

Wash scrapes up a sliver of soap caked into the side of the shower’s soap dish with his nails. Works it into a lather between his hands and runs his palms back into his filthy hair and soaps his head and shoulders. The freezing water is warming slowly against the back of his neck, running down his spine. Focus. Just focus. One limb at a time he scrapes the watery soap solution across his bare skin. Pins and needles prickle across the back of his eyes. He starts to drift again, sliding sideways in his head toward theMother of Invention.

No. No. Just stay. Just focus. Don’t –

“Uuuuh, Agent Washington?”

He jolts awake.

“You okay? It’s been almost an hour.”

Shit.

“I’m fine. I’m done.”

“I… uh, brought you some clothes.”

Oh shit, that’s right.

Washington shuts off the water, then leans suspiciously out from behind the stall. Donut is holding up a pink T-shirt and pair of slightly ragged pair of fatigues. The T-shirt says ‘Party Time!’ in giant cartoon bubbles.

“No.”

“But…”

“I’ll just wear my drive suit.”

“That’s not very…”

“It’s self-cleaning. It’s fine.”

“But it’s still armor…”

“I’m not wearing that.” Washington grabs the towel from the top of the stall where he hung it, starts toweling his head and patting down the rest of his body. He notices long angry red lines running along his inner forearms… like he clawed himself when he lost time. He ignores it, starts to pull his drive suit on one leg at a time, promptly falls shoulder first against the wall. Hisses, keeps getting dressed. He becomes aware that his eyes are blurred about ten seconds into fumbling at the spinal seal.

He wipes his eyes, scrubs his face, his damp hair. Then he thumbs the trigger at the back of the suit’s collar and feels the spine knit itself together from the middle of his back to the base of his skull. He checks the suit habitually for a puncture or sign the seal is not working anymore before remembering it doesn’t fucking matter.

“Are you going commando?” says Donut when he walks out of the stall.

Wash takes the pair of fatigues from him, pulls them on. “That’s how these work. You don’t take them off, Private.”

“I have some spare underwear if you —“

“No.”

“I said spare. As in unused. Gross.”

“No.”

“Well okay, but there’s water and Advil by your bed and an MRE and also scented candles.”

Washington squints at the little candles lining the wall over his cot. The room smells faintly of vomit and vanilla now, but Donut did scrub up the puddle of sick from before. Wash takes a seat on the bed again, picks up the water bottle and the single tablet of Advil (Does Donut not trust him with the bottle?), downing both. He ignores the MRE.

“You should eat that,” says Donut.

“I’ll throw it up,” says Washington dully.

“You feel sick?”

Washington resists a psychotic giggle, sudden as a knife wound to the gut. He bites down on it. His guts in knotted ruin has been a constant state for him since the moment Alpha took his helmet off on Sidewinder. Wash hasn’t stopped being nauseous since he kissed his dead best friend in the snow and let himself forget, even for an instant, who was riding his partner’s skin. Wash is rotting from the inside out with the taste of Maine’s tongue in his mouth and Alpha’s voice in his head. Does he feel sick?He rubs his face again.

“I’m just gonna sleep.”

Donut picks his helmet up. “You’re doing that a lot.”

“I’m tired,” Washington says and it’s so fucking true he wants to swallow arsenic in frustration. “I just want to sleep.”

Donut shrugs. “Okay.”

Wash looks up.

“I’ll turn out the light,” Donut says. “But you should eat the MRE when you don’t feel so icky, Wash. No rush. It’s fine. That’s what Simmons does when his stomach gets all weird.” He frowns. “Unlesssss, you just don’t like MREs? Grif hates them. Says they taste like sawdust, shit, and sadness which, I think is a bit dramatic.” When Washington continues not to offer insight, Donut powers cheerily on, “Okay, I’ll just make chicken soup and dig out some crackers. That always does the trick for upset stomach.”

Wash is already lying on his back, eyes closed. “You don’t have to take care of me.”

“I dunnoooo,” says Donut, scrunching his face up. “I don’t think you’ve done such a great job taking care of yourself so far.”

Wash acknowledges that Donut is not incorrect. He doesn’t respond though. He just tucks his arm under his head, loops an arm around his middle and closes his eyes. He is momentarily surprised when something soft nudges his shoulder. It turns out to be Donut poking a pillow at him. Nonplussed, he accepts it. Donut gives him a thumbs up, crosses the room, turns out the light, and closes the door behind him. Wash can hear him humming outside the door. So, the Freelancer sits in the dark, pillow in his hands, for a full minute before finally laying down with it under his head, feeling absurd for finding it such an extreme luxury.

Washington closes his eyes.

He dreams about the Mother of Invention.

Chapter 16 Chapter Text

Washington drifts. There is reality and reality is static on a television set, buzzing pins and needles in his thoughts and in his chest. Reality is pressing him into the mattress and fucking him in silence and horror until he can’t breathe, until his bones are vibrating like struck bands of metal inside him, tuning him up to an unspeakable panic. Reality he visits long enough to register a hand on his forehead, fingers on his pulse, a voice saying his name until his silence pulls silence back into the room and he’s alone with the static again. He can feel it inside him, humming in his blood, in his fingertips, and teeth.

He’s much better off drowning.

He’s so much better off unconscious, dragged off his feet into a Technicolor undertow of perfect recollection and he forgets that he is communing with ghosts. The phantom smell of Connie’s hair when she hugs him is realer than Donut’s hand on his arm, shaking him. North’s hand on his shoulder is real. The fingers on his neck are not. Maine’s forehead against his is real. The palm against his sweat-sticky brow is not. The kick of a rifle against his shoulder. Real. Carolina’s fist slamming bruises into his ribs. Real. The slick friction of an orgasm jarring through his nerves in a violent heat of pleasure, hands on his hips, a mouth pressing into the place where his thigh meets his groin and –

Connie loops her arm around his throat from behind, presses her mouth against his ear, her hand up against his jugular like a knife and she says, “They’re fucking with us, Wash.” The boldness of her instability frightens him, tightens him. Her mouth against his ear is intimate and forceful, she forces him to listen. “Are you letting them fuck with you? Good soldier?” And he grabs her arm and says –

Nothing but her name. Over and over. A name he doesn’t know but possesses him completely, is eating through him like molten lead through ice, her name sinks a burning canal of agony though his bones and he screams even when they hold him down, screams even when they shove the tongue guard between his teeth and the oxygen mask over his mouth, “Allison! Allison! Allison! Someone, please, god, please someone –!”

Someone says his name. Washington. Washington. Hey, Washington.

Someone talking. Voices speaking low.

Saying…

“No. Freakin’. Way.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Shhhh!”

“Why are you whispering, dipshit? It’s not like Sleeping fucking Beauty is gonna wake up. He’s been fucking out for a week.” A low mutter. “Lucky bastard.”

“Grif. Sleeping for week is not a good thing.”

“How dare you, Donut. How dare you.”

“Is he still outside?”

“Yeah, but Simmons and Sarge are throwing things at him.”

“Things?”

From outside there comes the sound of gunfire and distantly the sound of Sarge screaming, “Get off my lawn, ya dirty Blue!” A small explosion vibrates through the base. Somewhere, muffled by the walls, is the sound of high-pitched profanity and “Stop that! I said I just want to talk! Ow! You fuckers!” and then Simmons, “Suck it, Blue!” In In the hallway, Grif sniffs indifferently.

“Bullets, Donut. Thrown with high powers assault rifles. Also, you know, grenades.”

“Wait, which Church is it though?”

“I dunno. The one with the big scary body. That one.”

“Oh, so Asshole, not Bowling Ball.”

“Right. Asshole is outside and Sarge and Simmons are shooting at him. I’ll give him credit though: he’s fucking persistent.”

“Well, what exactly does he want to talk to Wash about?”

“I dunno. Stupid shit. I stopped listening.”

“Well,” says Donut primly. “Washington doesn’t want to talk to him. He needs space. You know, relaxation and quiet. Lots of good vibes and low stress.”

“Donut,” says Grif in a tone that is perfectly two-dimension. “This is not a fucking lovers’ quarrel. This is a grumpy AI with separation anxiety and insane power mods. Whenever he’s away from his crazy psycho Freelancer for longer than two minutes, he gets all whiny and threatens to blow our doors off… which is an actual thing seeing how he’s a killer death machine now. A killer death machine with separation anxiety that’s on the Blue Team.”

“Space,” insists Donut soothingly. “It’s very important. No talking until everyone isstable and clear-headed and ready to tackle the hard parts of smoothing out relationships. You’ll just have to tell Church to go think about what he’s done and come back later.”

“How about I just tell him Wash is in a fucking coma and can’t come to phone right now.”

“He’s not in a coma!” A beat. “Seriously. I checked.”

“Ugh, why don’t you go tell Asshole to fuck off then? I’ll stand guard until you get back or whatever.”

“Good idea!” Donut’s pleasure is brilliantly audible. “I think I’m a great neutral third-party and I love helping people talk out their problems. I’ll go get the talking stick. Be right back!”

Washington registers the rapid thump of armored boots gleefully jogging off and from the hall there originates a low, satisfied sigh. There’s a quiet for a moment, then the sound of the barrack door hissing open. Wash doesn’t bother moving, persists in lying as he is on the mattress – curled up on his side, arms tucked down around his middle, eyes closed. He is aware of Grif, of his spacial positioning, how far away the sim soldier is standing from the bed where he is lying with the curve of his spine to the room like an invitation. He doesn’t open his eyes when Grif grunts quietly, crosses the room and moves to the side of the bed.

There is quiet.

Then the small scrape of armor against armor. There’s a hiss, the low familiar sound of a helmet seal being released and the its owner pulling it from their head. A dull thunk, the weight of a heavy helmet being set down by a sandwich plate, then the slight grind of the plate being moved. He’s so close Wash can feel the air move slightly against the back of his neck when Grif takes a seat on the crate by Wash’s bed and, dimly, the Freelancer realizes he is eating the untouched sandwich Donut laid out for him.

Grif is a loud eater. Wash can hear his jaw popping and the crunch of the food between his teeth. He breathes through his nose while he chews, loud blasts of air over the wet smacking sound, fast and rhythmic, of his chomping. He’s obviously trying to devour the Freelancer’s food before Donut gets back and discovers him and Washington feels a stir, a swell, a strange growth of something inside himself. An arousal of some kind that feels alien inside the dull ocean of static that he’d allowed to hollow him out and live inside him for the past week.

He feels.

He feels… annoyed.

This fat motherfucker is literally stealing food from him and he’s doing it loudly, obnoxiously, shamelessly, less than three feet away from him and even as Washington’s small vibrato of annoyance settles there comes the snap-hiss of a soda can being opened and Grif downs the whole thing in one go. Washington listens, dully mesmerized, to the sound of Grif swallowing over and over, breathlessly, until the can is empty. Then the metal crumple of the can getting crushed and set down again.

Washington rolls onto his back and glares at the sim solider.

“Oh,” says Grif, disinterested. “You’re awake.”

Grif is neither ashamed nor alarmed by being caught in the act, nor by Washington’s evident annoyance. He scratches his jaw a little, where about a five days’ worth of stubble has darkened the soft line of the Red soldier’s jaw. Grif has a wide, squarish face, padded by an excess of flesh. He’s heavier and shorter than the other Reds, built like a linebacker, his armor slightly strained containing him. His hair is thick black, sticking up from his head like metal shavings under a magnet and he blinks slowly at Washington, openly looking him up and down like a man inspecting a growth under his sink that he’s not sure he wants to deal with right then.

Wash can’t recall anyone looking at him like that before.

Offended though he is, the Freelancer is momentarily arrested, however, by what appears to be a large skin graft that starts just below Grif’s left cheekbone and blooms out like a chemical spill the color of old wheat up into the thick black tangle of his bangs. The rest of Grif’s complexion is notably browner than the graft. His eyes are mismatched – the right one dark brown, the left one pale hazel. Like everything within the region of the graft was bleached, not just the skin. It’s hard not to stare, but Grif doesn’t seem to notice.

“Hey, your robot boyfriend is banging on the front door.”

“I don’t care.”

“You might care if he gets in here.”

“Let him.”

“I would, but then I’d have to listen to Church’s high-pitched anger-shrieking and that’s just, you know, the highlight of our week.” He points at a snack-cake wrapped in cellophane, sitting on the footlocker by the empty plate and crumpled soda can. “You’re not gonna eat that. Right?”

“Get. Out.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’.” He takes the snack cake and rips open the wrapper. The air smells immediately of processed chocolate and faintly of tobacco – Grif smells like cigarettes and chocolate. Washington wrinkles his nose and Grif eats a whole snack cake in one crumbly bite and gets chocolate bits in his stubble. “Hey,” he says, mouth full. “Question: Is there a money reward for turning you into the UNSC by any chance? Just in case we get sick of you lying around.”

“Get out.”

“Eh, fuck it. Your robot boyfriend would pulp us with missiles if we tried that anyway. Also, paperwork. Less effort just to let you rot in here I guess.”

Washington realizes Grif isn’t going to move unless he perceives sitting here as more trouble than it’s worth to get up and move. Which means Wash needs to get up the energy to threaten to beat the other solider into the floor or at least the energy to pretend that he’s going to do that but the notion seems such a staggering fucking feat he exhausts himself just thinking about it and settles, instead, for rolling his eyes, then rolling back onto his side.

“Why’s Robot McCrabby so obsessed with you anyway?”

Washington doesn’t answer. He just pulls his shoulders in tighter and closes his eyes until the darkness inside his skull blooms up with oily colors and the question slides away, sinking into him and out of sight, but still lays there inside him like wreckage in the water. He can feel it like a chunk of shrapnel caught under the muscle of his heart, scraping it slightly with every beat, tiny, tiny wounds. It’s maddening. Makes him want to tear his skin off or claw his scalp red, scream until his lungs hemorrhage air and blood into his mouth like vomit, but he just lies there, perfectly still, swallowing down the internal holocaust.

“Hey. Washington. Washington.”

“Go. Away. Grif.”

“You look like shit.”

Washington is having a feeling again. A different feeling. The feeling is hate. Not enough hate to get up and kick Grif in his fucking face, but it is technically an emotion rather than static so, having been devoid of emotions for a while, Washington’s brain seizes this fistful of rage, inhales it, and lets it completely fills him like a red nerve gas until he’s an immobile carcass of loathing on the bed.

“I’m giving you fair warning,” drawls Grif, unaware of Washington’s new murderous feelings for him, or that nothing but Washington’s complete and utter physical fucking exhaustion stands between him and being a smear of bone and blood on the floor. “Donut will literally hogtie you and hose you down if you get gross. Just one soldier to another. Fair warning.”

Washington tries not to care but through the crimson haze of his hatred a thought comes to him, drifting into the neurological devastation and bopping him in the head. “Wait.” He cracks an eye. “Did Donut hogtie you?”

“Uhhhh, that’s not what I said.”

“That sounds like what you –”

Grif is gone. Impressively fast, given Grif’s size. Helmet and all, leaving only the faint aroma of tobacco, snack cake, and shame in his wake. It’s a moment before the rest of Wash realizes there’s a smile on his mouth and rejects the foreign gesture as inoperable within the parameters of his fatigue. But for exactly three seconds, something was fucking funny and there was nothing strange about that. The Freelancer closes his eyes again and drifts to the sound of exploding grenades and gunfire, into a memory of the war before Project Freelancer, into a worse and better time.

Chapter 17 Chapter Text

Washington forgets where he is. Regularly. He wakes blearily from the murky caricature of half-sleep, his semi-conscious mind firing up scenarios both remembered and false, mixed together so he dreams in agonizing but wrong detail the day he tried to tear Epsilon out the back of his head… even though they’d already removed the AI implantation.

In this version of events his perfect memory goes off the rails and instead of blank-faced medical personnel in protective gear, it’s Connecticut and North holding him down. It’s Connie shoving the mouth guard between his teeth, her fingers in his mouth, nail cutting into the gum-line over his right incisor. It’s North who accidentally smashes his wrist into the side-rail of the bed, sends a burst of pins and needles ripping through his arm. It’s Carolina who holds him down by the shoulders, pinning him into the cot, her fist closes on his right shoulder, shakes him and she says –

“Uh, hey? Hey, are you okay? Washington, wake –”

Washington wakes up.

He jackknifes in bed, torques at the waist and grabs the figure standing over him, snatching their wrist and tackling them to the floor, body checking them so hard their head snaps against the floor with a metal-cement crack. The person underneath him screams – high and terrified – and the scream breaks open the chaos in the Freelancer’s head and he realizes he’s just tackled Simmons. He’s straddling the kid, one wrist pinned to the floor by his head, the other wrist pinned under his knee.

Washington has his Magnum in hand. He doesn’t remember taking it from Simmons but he must have. He’s got the muzzle jammed into the techie’s jaw, where the helmet converges into the semi un-armored material of his body-suit. Belatedly, he realizes this is the second time he’s held a gun to Simmons. The kid is babbling.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry! Holyshitdon’tkillme!”

Washington lets go of the Red soldier’s wrist, thumbs the clip release, stands and staggers back in one fluid, drunken motion. The back of his legs hits the edge of his bed and the full magazine hits the floor at his feet with the clatter, goes skidding and smacks up against Simmons’ boot. The Magnum follows.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Simmons sits up slowly, like you might when faced with an ambiguously rabid animal. “Hey, uh, no. It’s cool. You’re fine.” He speaks slowly, in falsely metered tones, holds up his hands. “Let’s all just… you know, be caaaalm.”

“I’m awake now. I won’t do that again. Don’t talk to me that way.”

He feels… like a scribble. Like his thoughts are colors scrabbled wildly outside the confining lines of his skull and skin. He has to physically resist the urge to reach up and press his palms into his temple as a calming token, just to somehow press everything back into his skull until he’s not such a fucking mess anymore, so he’ll stop being a scribbled writhing knot of fuckery and confusion and start looking like a person again. He doesn’t though. He forces himself to hold still and ends up at parade rest, his hands behind his back, on reflex.

“Don’t – touch me when you’re waking me up.”

“Yeah. Okay. No problem. No touching. Got it.”

Then, because he feels… bad, in particular about Simmons and pointing a gun at him. “I’m sorry, Simmons.”

The name-use seems to catch the sim-solder sideways because he kind of freezes, then awkwardly retrieves his stolen gun and magazine. He doesn’t reload the weapon in front of the Freelancer though. Just snaps the side-arm back to the mag-holster on his hip and tucks the magazine into one of the ammo-slots at his lower back. He stands up. Slowly. Rubs his jaw a bit, then thumbs the chin, hitting the seal-release and he tugs his helmet off. He rubs that back of his head, grimacing and Washington blinks, hard.

“Wait, you’re a cyborg?”

Simmons, who seems to have, himself, forgotten this fact, squints suspiciously at him and brings his helmet up against his chest, holding it between them somewhat defensively. Wash registers, far too late, that pointing it out like that might not have been the most diplomatic thing to do in a world just barely post-war – where shrapnel bursts rip eyeball to vitreous jelly and plasma swords shear limbs from trunks. So many legs blown off at the knee and vital organs perforated irreparably to bloody mulch. He should not call out another soldier’s war wounds.

That said, the obviousness of the sim-soldier’s cybernetics is almost… well…

Simmons is eerily plain. Taller than Donut and Grif, but without the filling of either of them. He has reddish-brown hair, cropped regulation short above his ears, grown out on the top long enough that his helmet’s given him hat hair and pressed his bangs flat against his forehead. He’s long a thin face, sharp cheekbones terminating down to a hard point at his chin. Clear complexion, the color of pale rye and Wash can’t quite guess his heritage – a mixed race colony kid for sure. Latino maybe? Freckles.

His eyes are a bit rounder than they usually are in all likelihood and speaking of his eyes – his right eye is a dull hazel color, like old tea. His left eye though… his left is bionic blue set in a black cybernetic resin. The upper left side of his face has been cybernetically grafted over, a thin silver sheet of sterile tension alloy having replaced the skin from the top of his left cheek bone all the way up to just below his hairline. (The same area, actually, that Grif had his skin transplant, come to think of it.)

Washington blinks harder.

“Uh, yeah,” says Simmons, still squinting suspiciously. “I guess. A little. Is that… bad? That’s bad. Sorry. Wait. No I mean… so what if I am?”

Washington blinks again, not sure which response to react to. Slowly, he says, “It’s notbad. I just didn’t know.”

“Oh, heh, right.”

Wash can’t tell if Simmons is nervous because Washington literally had a gun pointed at his head a moment ago or if he’s nervous because… he’s worried Washington doesn’t like the fact he’s a cyborg. The latter seems somehow more likely for Simmons which is ridiculous. Washington can’t stop staring at the graft though. Medical-grade tension alloy is cutting edge cyber-ware prosthetics, mostly experimental. Simmons has semi-articulation still in the brow and eye-socket around the false eye.

It’s too late to pretend he hasn’t noticed so, “’ve never seen one that high-end.”

“Huh?”

Washington points. “That graft.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s… Simmons, that looks like a bio-fix wound-detection patch. It’s extremely cutting edge medical technology. Last I heard about it, that kind of thing was still in testing in Tokyo and Kuniper. How did you… even…?” But even has the words are coming, Washington is having trouble remembering why he even started this conversation and, indeed, Simmons is staring at Washington like he’s an idiot. The Freelancer trails off, runs a hand over his face and sits back down on the bed. “Never mind.”

“So… you’re saying… this junk Sarge used to fix me is some kind of crazy untested stuff?”

Washington presses his fingers into his temples and rotates them. “You didn’t find it… odd, that your fucking sergeant performed a successful eye and skin transplant?”

“Well, he did a successful organ transplant too so…”

“Wait. What?”

“Well, Grif got crushed by a tank –”

“What?”

“—so Sarge figured we should fix him up with my organs, then replace mine with the new cyborg parts.”

“What?”

“Yeaaaah. In retrospect it would have make much more sense to just give Grif the cyborg parts but Sarge said he didn’t want to be putting expensive technology in ‘cannon fodder’ so the double transplant thing made the most sense.”

“No. Simmons. Nothing about that makes any fucking sense.”

“Oh.”

He’s too tired to figure out how these idiots managed an organ transplant and decides someone must just be lying or something. “Why did you wake me up again?”

“You were, uh, screaming.”

Washington supposes he should feel shame, or something, but all he feels is a dull kind of boredom and exhaustion. “Oh. Was I?”

“Well, that’s not why I came in here though. Donut sent me.” Simmons bends down and retrieves something from the floor. Wash missed it in the struggle, but Simmons picks it up, dusts if off, and holds it out. Washington slowly registers it’s a snap-trap can of soup – one of those bargain bin flash-meals. Pull the string and zap the food hot. “I’m supposed to make sure you eat,” explains Simmons.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Yeah.” Simmons continues to hold out the can. “It’s been two days since you ate anything, even after we stopped Grif from eating your stuff. So, Donut says if you don’t eat something soon he’s gonna have to get creative and you don’t want that to happen because it might involve spangly outfits somehow. Don’t ask me how. It just will.”

“Tell Donut, I’m fine.”

“Oh, no. Sure. I’m sure you are.” Simmons nods, lots of up and down, very agreeable. A natural ‘yes-man’, but then, “It’s just that you need to eat this.”

Washington exhales. Hard. Through his nose.

He doesn’t want to eat. He doesn’t want to do anything.

He vaguely understands that what he wants to do is stop. Not in any way specifically but just… discontinue his current course. The same way he might wish a constant migraine would just stop, or the sound of a car alarm going off down the block – he’d like it to stop. Simmons is staring at him with this kind of stupid hopeful look on his face and there is no tactful way to say the reason he sleeps so much is because being awake is boring. Not a regular kind of boring though; a dull butter knife in your spine kind of boring.

There’s a casulness to his deterioration that’s almost insulting. Intellectually, he knows he should be fighting and clawing against this — tooth and nail, bloody, screaming, bullets in his spine, mouth full of red fighting to not die. He’s survived a fucking war, disaster, bullets and the oblivion of genocide and alien holocaust, but he’d let his own inertia kill him right now if it were possible and that should scare him.

It doesn’t.

Simmons pulls the tab on the soup.

It flashes at the base, hisses and when the sim-soldier snaps the top like a soda can, steam and a warm brothy smell rises from the opening. He inspects the can as if to make sure it’s not defective or a gross flavor or something and, finding nothing offensive with it, holds the can out again to the Freelancer. After a minute, he swaps to the other hand because his arm is tired perhaps, keeps holding it out.

“Seriously. Eat something.”

Wash stares at the can. It’s four million miles away. A billboard with a Japanese stamp on the side and corporate food brand logo he doesn’t recognize. He recognizes the smell though – it’s bouillon cubes and sodium concentrate shot with vitamin supplements and immune-boosters. He smelled this in the halls of his apartment complexes and in the shared rooms of the housing projects he grew up in. It smells like comfort food. It smells like getting slammed up against a door-jam when he was seven. It smells like warm hands around his and kiss pressed into his hair. It makes him want to throw up and smile simultaneously.

“Wash?”

The Freelancer takes the can from Simmons’ hand and it’s warm in his palm, heating his fingers so the blood that pumps through his hand travels still warmed from his wrist back up his arm. Like an injection of sun, like the soup is in his veins. He stares at the label.

“It’s, um, chicken flavor I think. I can’t read it.”

Wash lifts the can to his mouth, doesn’t quite burn his mouth, lets the liquid heat slide across the back of his tongue. Once he’s started, he decides not to stop, holds his breathe and keeps swallowing, tilting his head back to a more obtuse angle until his lungs ache from not breathing, he swalloes until nothing runs out of the can. He sits normally again, gasping, the cold rush of air and his burning lungs expand and he feels awake. Caloric lights coming on in his body, slowly, like a wind-up generator struggling awake. Simmons takes the empty can from him and Wash wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling shaky all of a sudden.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You, uh, wanna get up and see the rest of the base?”

There’s a violence inside him. No. Yes. Fuck this. Stupid. Sure. Don’t. Do it. Pointless. Pointless. Just fucking lie the fuck down. Just lie down and die already you stupid fucking patch baby freak just die. Get up. Get up and go. Go. Go. Go. Seattle. Move. You need to go. Washington. Move. You can’t die. They all died. You can’t die too. You can’t. David. Move. No. Yes. Who will remember us if you go?

“Okay.” Wash stands up. "Show me around.”

Chapter 18 Chapter Text

“Hey. Where’s Washington?”

“Aint yur business, Blue!”

“Uhhhh, he’s getting something to eat.”

“Wash is on patrol.”

“He took a soul sabbatical.”

There is a beat of silence follows all four wildly different explanations.

“Guys, we can clearly see him under the Warthog. Why would you even try to lie about that?”

“Aint nobody lying about this shotgun to yur face! Get off my lawn or I’ll shoot ya both full’a holes an’ buckshot!”

Wash, who is indeed under the Warthog inspecting a busted axel, reaches down around his hips, grabs the edge of the chassis and pulls himself out from beneath the vehicle. He sits up, dragging one knee up to hook his elbow over, but does not stand up. He lays one hand on top of his helmet where he left it by the front wheel of the Warthog. Donut, Simmons, Grif, and Sarge are standing in a loose semi-circle facing out toward the verge of lawn and footpath where Agent Texas… and Agent Texas are standing. One with arms akimbo, the other one hand on her hip.

There is no difference between them save one, the one standing closest with her hand on her hip, has modded her shoulders guard and the center of her helmet, painted them the dark variant of sky blue. Her body language suggests she’s not going to rip someone’s dick off, so Washington supposes that blue-stripe Texas, in fact, Agent Texas. The Beta AI. The one who knew him from Freelancer. She looks at him.

“Wash.” She takes a step forward. “I need to talk to —”

All four Reds simultaneously draw weapons. Sarge, of course, already had his out, but suddenly all of the Red Team has weapons out – shotgun, battle-rifles, magnum – and Tex stop short. Behind her the other Tex, in all black still, her gold visor bright in the clear noon sun, throws her head back and barks with laughter.

“Really?” She unfolds her arms, lets them hang as fists at her hips. “You idiots think that’ll end well?”

“We’re not here to fight,” says Beta-Tex.

“I am,” says the other Tex.

“Guys.” Wash braces one hand on his knee, levers himself up. “It’s fine. I’ll talk to them.”

“I dunno.” Sarge speaks but doesn’t take his eye off of the Texes. “I don’t much hold with Blues walkin’ off with my soldiers when they’re supposed to be doin’ goddamn work ‘stead of jaw-waggin’ about… Blue stuff.” Simmons audibly sighs. Sarge ignores him, keeps his shotgun level with Tex’s chest. “You sure you don’t want us to shoot ‘em a little?”

He thinks about it. Thinks about how Sarge doesn’t grasp a single goddamn thing about Washington’s state of mind except that he was ‘bugfuck crazy once’ and that he has some reservations about his sanity even now. Not that his opinion of Washington’s sanity stops the man from busted into his rack and yelling “You’re worse than Grif! Get going! I’m not paying you to lie around!” Which is why he’s out here helping with the jeep. Sarge, at least, makes things easy. He just treats him like a soldier and following orders doesn’t require him to feel any particular way.

That said, he supposes Sarge shooting them ‘a little’ would likely get them all pummeled to death and he might feel… bad about that.

“We can totally shoot ‘em,” says Sarge.

“We’d rather not,” says Simmons quickly. “You know, because we’re conserving ammo.”

“And because the bitchy one kicked me in the balls fifteen times,” says Grif. “And literally blew us all up that one time.”

“Okay, yeah, but also the ammo thing.”

Donut, seemingly unaware of the Mexican stand-off, just adds, “If Washington doesn’t want to talk to you, then you’ll just have to tell Church that he should take this time to think about what he did wrong. Relationships take time. And sometimes, when you love someone, you just have to let them go. Because people deserve to be happy and –”

“It’s fine,” Washington says, cutting off Donut’s speech before it gets any weirder than extremely weird. He puts his helmet back on, the familiar weight of it as it locks around his jaw, sealing to the under around his neck. “I’ll talk to them. Be right back.”

The Red Team’s disapproval is less like four people disapproving so much as a singular entity zeroing its gestalt displeasure at the back of your head or, in this case, directly that the pair of black armored AI. Wash follows both of them a little distance, but not far enough away the Reds lose sight of them… or go outside Donut’s considerable grenade throwing range. They stand together facing him, identical in every way save the small silver scores and dents in Other Tex’s armor – the remnants of her battle with the Meta-Church/Tex binary. Original Tex looks… new. Shiny.

“You look good in red,” says Beta-Tex.

“You look like an idiot,” says Other Tex.

“Donut was pretty excited about doing the paintjob.” Wash shrugs. “Seemed rude not to wear it.”

His armor is a dark red, the original dark gray undercoat darkening the new paint so it’s verging on black. The yellow accents on his shoulders and helmet stand out neon against the new color. He’d put it on to stop Donut gushing about the paintjob, but that had only resulted in Donut gushing about how good he looked in red and that was an intensely uncomfortable conversation for everyone. That said… it does look pretty good.

Washington reaches out and taps Beta on the new blue on her shoulder. She watches him do this, a predatory mien to her body language, like a great animal making the conscious decision not to maul a person. It’s… strange thinking about Agent Texas… thinking about Beta in these new terms. Self-editing and re-contextualizing her in the narrative of his memories – the woman in black armor who outshown Carolina and brought down the Mother of Invention. Not Texas. Beta.

He taps one more on her armor, as though seeing if it’s hollow. “Where did you get this?”

Beta understands without extrapolation he means her new body. “Same place as Epsilon got his.” She inclines her head slightly at him. “I mean, the one you destroyed when you put a fucking capture shunt through his face.”

Washington looks for a trace of guilt, can’t find anything so he just shrugs one shoulder and says, “Whoops.”

The Texes exchange a look. Washington should care, but he doesn’t. He’s too busy reveling in his new invincibility. Feeling nothing is kind of exhilarating in a numb, brutal way. He’s never felt this way before with the exception of his time in sedation at Project Freelancer. There were a couple pills that could make you feel nothing and how he feels now is a little like that – things that he knows should make him feel things seem stupid or alien. He should have some fear in him, but he cannot access it through the gray wall of indifference that cuts him off from himself. It’s like part of him his been amputated, leaving only occasional phantom pains.

“Did Alpha send you?”

“Kind of,” says Beta-Tex.

“He’s a giant pain in the ass because your Red pals keep shooting at him. We figured we’d come make sure you haven’t blown your brains out and give him a sit-rep.”

Beta-Tex looks at Other Tex. Other Tex just looks at her counterpart, waiting, possibly anticipating the original Tex’s reaction. “You know,” says Beta, slowly, with a kind of controlled exasperation. “As a professional, I have to tell you, you’re kind of a bitch, Tex.”

“Thanks, Beta.” Are they calling each other ‘Beta’ and ‘Tex’ then? “I learned from the best.”

Beta heaves a sigh. “She’s not wrong though. We’re here to check on you.”

“I’m here to point and laugh. She’s here to check on you.”

Beta corrects herself. “I’m here to check on you and make sure my evil twin doesn’t light someone on fire.”

“That was an accident,” says Evil Twin Tex. “Caboose catches fire sometimes. You know this.”

“And Tucker?”

“Oh. I totally set that idiot on fire.”

Washington blinks. “So I guess having two of everyone is going well.”

“Swimmingly.”

“Like being cactus-fucked,” says Evil Tex.

Beta, unmoved, says, “Or like that, if you want to put it like that.”

He folds his arms. Waits for either of them to get to the actual point.

“Church wants to talk,” says Beta at last.

“She means Asshole, not Bowling Ball,” says Evil Tex. “Not that you want to talk to either of them, I’m sure, but I figure let’s be specific here about which idiot you don’t want to talk to.”

“Alpha and Epsilon can both fuck off,” says Washington.

Beta shrugs. “That’s fine.”

“Is it?” says Washington.

“Wash.” She says his nickname easily and, to his surprise, with something like gentleness. It’s Tex, so there’s that underlying layer of steel, but the familiarity feels… almost affectionate. “I’ll say it because Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Fuckwit probably won’t: Given what they both put you through, you’re pretty much paid up. They owe you, not the other way around.” He blinks and when he doesn’t respond Beta goes on. “The Director did this to us. To Alpha, me, Epsilon, Tex here.” Tex, for once, doesn’t correct her twin. “You too. What Alpha did… what we did I guess, after you took down Command, that was on us.”

“Yeah,” says Washington, feeling nothing again. “It really fucking was.”

“Yeah. So, I’m asking: What do you want us to do?”

“What?”

“What do you want us to do? We want to fix it.”

“There’s only three things,” says Wash, “that I want to do.”

“I can help you with one of those,” says Tex. “If you’re talking about the list Alpha mentioned. I can definitely help you with that last one.”

Beta turns her head, looks at her twin. “Don’t,” she says.

She doesn’t say anything else, but Tex tenses visibly and this time she doesn’t say anything. Beta continues to look at Tex for a good long moment, a dark and a density to her presence that was not there before – a weight of fucking intention so profound it’s physical, like she’s got dark matter crushing inward like a blackhole inside her and it will drag everything around her into itself to crush beyond oblivion. Tex flinches. She looks away and Beta turns back to Washington, the atmospheric pressure back to normal.

“How about the first item on the list?” she says, quietly. “Are you ready to kill the Meta?”

Oh. He wishes he could go back to feeling nothing again. That was nice compared to the sick jag that rips through him from throat to groin, settling in his guts like a knife. Beta does not apologize for her bluntness. What has she ever been but a blunt weapon? Like Maine was. The two of them pure force and fury. He remembers, vaguely, that Agent Texas – or rather, Beta – once mentioned in passing that she liked Maine. She says his name the same way she used Washington’s nickname: like she knows precisely who she’s talking about. History and horror all.

“That Freelancer facility had a lot of spare battle gynoids. We brought a couple to Valhalla but Alpha won’t jump into one until…” A sigh. “Well…”

“Until,” says Wash, “I tell him it’s okay for you lot to kill Maine.”

The silence is strange. The sun is still shining. Behind him Washington can hear Donut arguing with the rest of the team about something and over here, some twenty paces off, he’s deciding if he’s ready to pull the fucking plug on his best friend. The Texes don’t say anything. Silent as gravestones the two of them wait for him to say something while he tries to remember how to it felt to be a human being instead of a hollowed out shell with a knotted roping of muscle and gristle in its chest. He remembers to breathe.

“We have to burn the body,” says Washington at last. “I don’t care if you destroy the armor, but we burn the body.

“Okay,” says Beta.

“Why?” says Tex.

“Because,” says Washington, through his teeth, “there are motherfuckers who would dig him up just to get a look at his fucking bones. We burn him. Whatever’s left, we sink in the fucking river. This isn’t a negotiation. This is how we take care of Maine.”

“We do it your way, Washington.” Beta is steady on as the turn of the planet. “We’ll get what we need to get it done.”

“I want to be there. When he does it. It should be me.”

“Okay.”

“How… do I need to bring a weapon?”

“No.” Beta’s emphasis tell him she understands exactly why he asked the question. “You don’t do that. Church will just… shut a few things down. The armor is what’s been keeping Maine alive for the past year. Sigma… integrated a lot of systems. Church will…” She stops, as though thinking better of her phrasing, or making a decision about it. “He’ll just turn off the lights as he leaves.”

Turn off the lights as he leaves.

“Fine.”

“When do you want to do it?”

Washington says tomorrow.

“What was that?”

He tries again, louder this time, clearly. “Tomorrow. I want to do it tomorrow. In the morning, o’five-hundred.” He feels like he’s panicking. Like there’s pins and needles in his fingertips. Like he’s going to start hyper-ventilating and the seams of his skull are going to split open along their kinks and bends… and then the moment is passed and there’s nothing. Just the sun on his armor, bleeding heat through the undersuit. “Got it?”

“Got it. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

Washington nods, turns to go back to the Red Team.

Beta catches his shoulder. She doesn’t hold him, just catches his shoulder and lets go, enough to get his attention again. Her hand hangs for a split second in the air between them, like she’s thinking about putting it back on his shoulder but, ultimately, does not. She stands back with Tex who doesn’t say anything.

“You have my COM-freq if you change your mind.”

“Right.”

She nods.

“Tex. I mean… Beta.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

She just looks at him, her visor showing his own shadow back to him. “You don’t say ‘thank you’ for something like this, Wash.” When he doesn’t respond her tone changes and she says, gently, “but you’re welcome. And I’ll see you tomorrow.” A pause. “And… I’m sorry. About Maine.”

“Yeah.” Wash closes his eyes behind the visor. “Me too.”

Chapter 19 Chapter Text

He doesn’t sleep.

That’s a change of pace. Sleeping for a week has reminded Washington why sleeping is a bad idea for Freelancers with flash-drives for brains. He still needs to thank Epsilon for that, the eidetic nightmares I mean. The ones where he’s sitting in the MoI,drinking Pepsi out of a can while Connecticut makes faces at him, Connie’s scent carrying to him across the table of shampoo and something flora, the underscore of some Tribute based muscle cream called Icy-Hot. It helped with sore muscles. Maine is always sitting next to him… or around him. Washington is aware of him as a peripheral constant.

These are his nightmares. Worse than the memory salad fatigue and chems make of his head. The ones real enough to trick him.

Connie speaks around a cheek-full of banana. “How’d you two meet?”

“Eh.” Wash shrugs. “Our units crossed paths. I’m pretty sure I gave him candy and he decided I was his best friend.”

Maine reaches over, grabs the soda can in his hand, pops it from his fingers with a wrist twitch, then tosses it rudely into the trash bin at the end of the table. He does it with mathematical precision. That done, he settles back against and looks at Wash with an expression that says, Yes, keep telling your story, asshole. Connie laughs, her eyes scrunched tight, her smiles digging into her cheeks. Washington squints at Maine… then produces another can of soda from, literally, the ammo pack on the bench next to him, snaps the tab and resumes drinking like nothing happened. Maine eyeballs his rucksack like it hadn’t occurred to him that Washington might be the kind of motherfucker that buys and bring his own soda with him to his new black ops assignment in space

“What?” He swallow another mouthful. “I didn’t think they’d have any.”

Washington checks the time. It’s 4:45AM.

Washington lies there, armored to his neck, his helmet on the floor by his rack, and stares up into the ceiling. Donut painted smiley faces and rainbows up there while he was out one day. It was his attempt at getting good vibes at Red Team’s adopted Freelancer via excessive use of yellow paint and Crayola colors. Washington is pretty sure he could drink a gallon of yellow paint, three gallons and — were color a medication you could self-medicate with — that wouldn’t be enough yellow to wash out what’s lining his insides.

It’s 4:52AM.

Time to get up.

He leaves Red Base unarmed. (The Reds continue to insist he needs to earn ‘weapon privileges’ which are gold stars on a chart Donut keeps on the fridge. Grif is less polite. “We still think you might shoot Simmons.” A beat. “Or, you know, other things.”) He gets as far as the rise of foot-path leading back from the Red Base deeper in from the beach toward Blue Base and stops there, sighs.

“Sarge.”

“Colluding with the Blues!” A shotgun cocks in the twilight. “I knew it!”

“No.” Wash turns around to face the Red leader (who was sneakier than one might credit a crazy old Marine) and holds up empty hands. Sarge is standing behind him with his signature weapon leveled at the Freelancer’s chest and Washington would feel more threatened if that were a thing he was still capable of feeling these days. Mostly he feels vaguely annoyed. “I’m not colluding.”

“Scheming!”

“That’s… that’s what colluding means, Sarge.”

“Then you don’t deny it!”

“What? I just…” Wash struggles. “I just denied it two seconds ago. What are you —?”

“You denied colluding but not scheming. Gotcha. I know this game, son, don’t try to kid a kidder.”

Washington’s right eye twitches infinitesimally inside his helmet. “I don’t have time for this. I’m going to be late.”

“Late for your schemes!”

Exasperated, Washington just deadpans: “The Texes are expecting me. If I don’t show up they’re going to come over here looking for me and then you’ll have to explain tothem it was your fault I got held up. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s two of them now and one of them is pretty liberal with the ball-punching.” A shrug. “Or so Grif tells me.”

Sarge grumbles something under his breath and Washington watches the man physically struggle to lower the shotgun, fail, and resume pointing a loading weapon at the Freelancer. Washington lowers his hands and just stands there, resigned to either get shot or dismissed. Maybe both. It’s Sarge after all and just yesterday he shot Grif full of buck-shot for ‘lollygagging’ and couldn’t understand why Washington was moderately alarmed about that.

“Can I go?”

“Why’re you goin’ over there?” He gestures with the muzzle of his gun. “Thought the whole point was keepin’ away from the Blues and their freaky robot soap opera what-have-you.”

“I’m not going because I want to. There’s something I need to take care of.”

“Does it involve killing Blues?”

“No.” A beat. “Kind of.” Another beat. “It’s complicated.”

“Ain’t nothin’ complicated about killin’ Blues.”

“Church.”

“He doesn’t count. He’s a robot mcguffin-thingamajig.”

“A what?”

“He aint right and he don’t count!” Washington continues to wait patiently to be shot or not shot, whatever. He can feel the old-man squint even through the man’s helmet. “Ya know, it’s my experience that sometimes ya gotta let stuff go. It’s better fer yur health an’… other things.”

Washington’s mouth runs before he thinks better of it: “That why you’re still trying to kill the Blues even though it’s painfully obvious the whole sim-soldier conflict was put together purely for a mad-man’s military-research?”

Sarge is unfazed. “Force of habit.” There’s a beat wherein the red-armored sim-soldier continues to study the Freelancer, the unreadable exterior of his helmet giving nothing away. After a moment, Sarge lowers the shotgun. “Warthog’s still busted.” Washington blinks. It occurs to him that he still does not know what Sarge looks like under the armor. The Red leader grunts. “Expect you back here to help Donut with repairs. Make sure he don’t lose any more fingers.”

“Fine.”

“Fine, what?”

Washington doesn’t sigh this time. “Fine, sir.”

“That’s more like it. Get goin’! I don’t want the angry one coming over here. Or… theangrier one. Either of ‘em.” The Red soldier swings his shotgun over his shoulder – flagging Washington blatantly as he does – and holsters it on his back. “Mostly I just can’t tell ‘em apart an’ it’s hard to know which one I should be pointing my shotgun at.” Sarge sets off down the footpath back toward Red Base, the edge of sunlight starting to bleed over the lake. “Dirty rotten Blues…”

Washington stands for a moment. Checks his HUD. It’s 5:01 AM.

Beta is waiting for him.

She’s leaned up against the wall by the front entry way, arms crossed, looking less like a person so much as a part of the structure behind her, the blue accents on her shoulders black in the half-light, her armor eats the light until she looks up at him and the gold of her visor winks a band of yellow back at him. She pushes off the wall, an easy gesture that carries an incredible amount of weight behind it. Her motions make his eyes track her. She jerks her chin toward the side of the building.

“Church is waiting out back.”

Washington looks in the direction she indicated. After a moment of him just looking,Tex folds her arms.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Washington doesn’t move. Beta tilts her head very slightly, but neither comments nor moves. Agent Texas waits for her old teammate to make up his mind like this like its old hat for her, her thumb tapping out a rhythm against her armored bicep, watching him postpone the walk. She glances over her shoulder briefly, after a minute, like she’s expecting someone. Or checking for an audience, then stops tapping and he sees her almost lift a hand from where she’s crossed her arms, like she’s going to touch him… then thinks better of it and remains as she is.

“You don’t have to do this. We can take care of it.”

“No.” He looks at her. Tex is his height. That always throws him just a little. Like she should be bigger, like he remembered her bigger. “It should be me.”

“I agree. But… just letting you know your options, Wash.”

“Thanks, Tex.”

She tilts her head. “Beta, actually.”

Wash starts to walk, gets about five stops, then stops. “Hey.” He turns half a step to face her. “Why’d you give your name to her?”

Beta thinks about it, or at least she thinks about whether it’s any of his business, then: “I’ve have a couple names, kid. She’s only ever had the one.” A shrug. “Didn’t seem fair.” If Washington is going to make a comment on that, on what that says about Beta, about the shadow of a dead Marine that he never knew, she doesn’t give him a chance. She turns strides back to the wall, resuming her post leaned up against it, black and sentinel like. “Take care of it, Wash. I’ll be right here.”

There’s no telling why she felt the need to tell him that, but as he turns his back on her and leaves Beta standing by the front door, Washington is aware of her like a nav point on his HUD. Whatever happens, Beta will be standing there, waiting, and he doesn’t know how to feel about the fact that her standing by for him is any kind of comfort. But it is. Like knowing Tex is on the roster for a mission. She’s gonna be there. Fixed point.

Church… the Meta, is waiting.

He’s still fully armored, the dirty white power armor still scarred and burned by combat and years of use, the paint worn down to silver at the hard angles, black patches scorched into the spine and thigh guards. In the half-light the pale paintjob seems ghostly, glowing against the dark of the terrain behind him and he glances in Washington’s direction, moving slightly to indicate he’s heard the Freelancer coming. The flighty head jerk, briefly looking at him then away is enough to break the illusion.

Maine didn’t move like that.

Washington comes to stand next to him, directs his questions at the ground just in front of the Meta. “You got the stuff I mentioned?” A nod. Church gestures toward an ammo crate about ten meters off. Washington can make out the bright orange warning labels of explosive contents. “Fine. How do we do this?”

“Uh, I’ll just… go. I’ve already shut down most of the systems in here.”

“So what. You go and his heart stops?”

“Yeah, Wash.”

“It’ll be fast?”

“Yeah. But I still dumped the suit’s full dose of pain medication. So… either way. No one’s going to be feeling anything.”

“Do it.”

“I… you ready?”

Washington moves one step forward and turns to face Maine’s body directly. Maine looks… Church looks at him, looking down at him, the bright dome of the EVA helmet staring impassably at him, the chin dropped slightly and Washington can feel his own pulse in his head, his breath inside his helmet against his own lips, his jaw cupped by the duraplex foam lining the interior of his armor. He’s aware of his fingertips gloved in Kevlar-titanium composite, the body-suit netting his whole body and the weight of his power armor – gray and yellow shelled in a thin red primer and outer coat. All that is left of Project Freelancer.

“Just do it, Alpha.”

And he does it.

There’s no perceptible change at first. Maine’s head drops his chin against his chest, slowly, like a man nodding off inside their armor and the light in his holo-projection slots flicker, blink, then dim. Washington is weirdly aware of his own eyes in his skull, of his eyelid as be blinks. For a moment, nothing happens. The Meta remains where he is and, after five seconds, Washington thinks the armor has gone into lockdown. That knot in his gut, the one he’s had since yesterday, twists in on itself, dragging at the moorings of his belly until he works up the nerve to reach out a hand and…

Maine moves. There’s a hiss, almost inaudible, of motor relays unlocking and with a kind of machine smoothness, the Meta takes one step forward and Washington freezes, hand flinching for a gun he doesn’t have but before he can do anything but that, Maine’s armor shifts again and with no preamble gradually drops to one knee. Like a SPARTAN activating a blast shield, the armor falls into what Washington registers is a pre-set lock position kneeling, head bowed, one fist against the ground. Then all the lights go out and Maine doesn’t move again.

It’s very… quiet.

Church jumped away, but there’s no spare body nearby. It’s just him and his old squadmate. He doesn’t remember doing it, but he followed Maine to the ground as his armor took him into, what he can only guess, was the execution of a final motor sub-routine Church left in the armor. To keep the body from just falling, Washington supposes. So… they’re kneeling across from one another, Washington staring at the top of Maine’s helmet and counting the beats of his own heart as it thrums irresistibly on inside his chest.

He feels like he’s supposed to say something.

He feels like he’s supposed to rip his own eyes out of his head.

So, logically, he does neither.

He does take off his helmet though. And… when he finally convinces himself it’s the right thing, he reaches carefully over, tucks his hands under the jaw of Maine’s helmet and releases the seal. Then, moving with the carefulness he would if he were taking armor off a wounded soldier, he slides the helmet off and sets the heavy piece of armor down in the grass between their knees. Washington can’t feel through his gloves, but he suspects as he places one hand at the back of Maine’s neck, where the under-suit fits up to the back of his head and the base of his jaw, that the other Freelancer is still warm to the touch.

Like he’s dropped to sleep.

Wash leans forward, a space of less than a foot, and tips his forehead against Maine’s, his thumb shifting slightly across the other man’s jaw in a comforting gesture. He hears his own shaky breath, then: “See ya later, buddy.” Washington presses his mouth to his friend’s forehead, once, one last time, then picks up his own helmet and stands up again. He steps back and puts his helmet on, then crosses the space to the ammo crate and pulls out three pack of small nitro-gel explosives. Thermite shells. Already weaponized and ready with neat efficiency that tells him Tex was involved. He makes short work of fully arming them.

He sets one charge on Maine’s knee, mag clamping to the armor, then one on his chest over his heart. The last one he sets into back of the armor between the shoulder blades, over the main power core in the armor. As he’s arming it, the Freelancer stops very briefly because there is a tattoo. He never saw that before. A tattoo up the back of his friend’s head from the base of his skull to the top of his scalp. It’s a series of interlocking Greek symbols, numbers. He knows, without looking too closely, what those symbols are.

Wash doesn’t think about it. He checks the detonator sequence for simultaneous single trigger detonation. He has to blink a few times to see the numbers clearly. He head is pounding.

Three minutes later, standing 100 meters back, Washington can just make out Maine’s silhouette against the dark. He thinks that one day there are going to be statues erected, of SPARTAN soldiers in armor just like that, kneeling on cast iron battle grounds, their heads turned up and set upon some distance iconic objective, battle rifles in hand. Post-war year one, the heroes of Earth are going to look like Maine. And that’s going to have to be memorial enough.

The detonator is in his hand, the switch under his thumb.

He pictures a battlefield on a planet called Circumstance. A soldier in SPARTAN greens, looking over his shoulder, as the Pelican drop ships beat the long grass flat against the earth around him. The bodies dark shapes in the saw-grass. The soldier shrugging at him and making a gesture, one thumb and pinky finger across the mouth of his helmet. A sign to him: I’m smiling.

Wash pulls the trigger.

Chapter 20 Chapter Text

Washington remembers this: standing at the edge of a derelict park in the heart of an Inner Colony city. Name: Kuniper. Population: three point two million. He remembers this because his Battalion was assigned to the protection and defense of this city and its still un-evacuated civilian population whom the Battalion resented, generally, for still being in the city when – through some trick of logic – they should have been elsewhere, away from the fighting, as though there was somewhere ‘away from the fighting’. As though the War hadn’t laid down roots in the outer rim, hadn’t burned Harvest and worked its kinked way through human space, snaking its way like cancer toward the fucking heart.

Toward Earth.

Washington was born on Earth. It hadn’t done much for him, but he gets its military import.

He remembers watching a group of Marines feeding a stray dog. In the playground behind them there are children playing on the jungle gym and he was, really, watching her, not the Marines. She catches his attention only because of her dress – pink, pink to match her pink sneakers, her arms spread as she walks across the top of the monkey bars. He remembers the weight of his MA5 on his shoulder, standing there, blinking behind his helmet, the VISR tech in his HUD’s interface marking out the girl in neutral tracking markers.

The combat suite is not active. The technology does not know what to make of her.

He watches her wobble on top of the bars, her skinny body tweaking to the right suddenly like she’s going to fall, but she rights herself and Washington recollects the fine net of affection that he felt – not necessarily for the girl, her pink sneakers, her persistence in play while the skies on the horizon boiled with artillery fire. Sure as the weight of the armor against his chest, the dura-foam padding against his ribs, the cradle of his helmet against his jaw, he thinks he would like to have an excuse to gather a girl up just under the arms and boost her up to the monkey bars.

He does not translate this thought, directly, to a want for a daughter.

He never does because that’s when one of the Marines swings their own MA5 from their shoulder and shoots the dog.

The first spray of bullets blows chunks of meat from the stray’s ribs and the dog howls once, horribly, before the bullets puree its lungs in a splatter of red and Washington jolts. The Marine with the rifle keeps shooting, bullet pummeling the corpse open while their compatriots shout or stare. The gunfire startles him. His pulse jumps and the VISR tech, detecting the sudden surge in his bio-metrics, kicks the combat suite on and his HUD pin points the Marines in ‘friendly’ green.

It picks out the girl in red.

The technology is not at fault. It operates of motion detection; it picks on friendlies based on the presence of a standard issue neural interface and pegs them green. This prevents friendly fire even in the darkness, even in chaos. The girl does not have a military issue neural jack.

Washington yanks his helmet off, but he can still see little girl is standing on the monkey bars, her skirt twitching in the breeze, a glowing red triangle affixed over her heart and…

“Wash.”

Washington opens his eyes.

Tex is standing over him. Beta-Tex – the blue on her shoulders identifies her. His HUD’s target detection system is busted. Has been for a while so when he looks at her through the feed in his helmet, it’s just her standing there black and solid, unmoving, neither hostile nor friendly. Her stillness is inhuman. It momentarily throws him, but she cocks her head and kneels down next to him and in motion she is human – smoothly coming down in a crouch, her elbows braced against her knees.

“C’mon,” she says. She cocks one arm out over him, hand open. “Let’s go, kid.”

“You can’t call me ‘kid’,” he says.

“Sure, kid.”

He grabs her hand, like grabbing hold of flattened rebar, and she pulls him up until they’re standing face to face, her hand fit around his and gripping tight and pulling him closer than she needs to. Her visor is reflecting the fires that are still burning behind him – the smoldering crater that he fucking blew in the earth because overkill was better than not fully destroying the body in the first go. He knows a thing or two about how to dispose of Freelancer armor. He’s had practice.

“Focus,” she says. Her hand is still in his. “You need to talk to Church.”

“No,” he says, matching her tone. “I don’t.”

“Look, I understand if you want to be alone…”

“I don’t think you do…”

“Washington, will you trust me? It’s about Maine.”

Frustrated, he speaks before he can think better of it. “If I’m trusting you, then why can’t you tell me?”

Beta-Tex stares at him, wordlessly, seemingly startled by his entreaty for her to tell him… as though it will soften the blow coming from her. She seems to become aware of her grip on his hand and lets go. Washington’s blood is pounding behind his eyes, anger a taste in the back of his throat. She glances back toward the base, turning her head away, then back to him.

“Washington,” she says. “I was part of Alpha, okay? I am, but you should hear this from him.”

“Why? If it’s about Maine, then you were with him longer, weren’t you? As the Meta?” Beta stiffens, goes still as an object. Washington doesn’t have any pity in him presently so he says, “He doesn’t need to be the one to tell me. You can tell me.”

“No. I partitioned. Sigma and the others fully integrated and Alpha synced to them. He’s got…” She pauses. “He’s got the full picture, Wash.” And when he doesn’t respond, just stands there, she says, “I encrypted myself, okay? When the Meta came for me I… changed myself to hurt them.” Wash suspects she is dumbing down what she means when she says ‘changed’. She is still unmoving, that machine stillness. “I can tell you, but it will be second hand.”

“Then tell me.”

Beta hisses suddenly, moving in her frustration, human suddenly in her motion.

“I don’t want to tell you, Washington. Okay? I hurt them. I didn’t fucking jump in and pull them all into me and let them inside like nothing…” She stops and glances at her fist, which, during the course of her talking, has risen, clenched at her side. She lowers it and steps back, putting just another stride of space between her and the other Freelancer and Washington recognizes the move not as defensive but… protective. She puts him out of her own reach. “I didn’t do what Church did.” Her tone is flat again. “Will you just trust me?”

Washington stares at her.

“He’s got ten minutes.”

“It might take longer than that.”

“He’s got five minutes.”

***

“I can’t believe he didn’t punch you in the tit,” says Tex.

Washington, who had not seen Beta’s sister program standing in the corner of the room, ignores the AI’s declaration. Epsilon is standing near Tex. He’s back to an identical sky-blue as Church, but Washington can tell it’s him because his helmet is still Lopez’s outdated model. Church himself is leaning against the kitchen island in the galley and he pushes himself straight when Washington looks at him, tensing and Washington thinks he looks… nervous, he supposes, might be the word.

“Hey, Washington.” Tex again. “Now that you nuked Maine, you feel any better?”

And, just to annoy her, Wash says, “Sure. I’m peachy.”

Beta snorts. Tex, however, doesn’t seem to think it was very funny. She pushes off the wall where she was leaning and comes toward him, rolling her shoulders with intent that tightens his whole body with instinctive adrenaline. But Beta-Tex is already moving to intercept her, seemingly to literally fight the other AI.

And that’s when a voice pipes up, loudly.

“Oh no. Fuck no. No fucking way.”

Washington is not 100% sure where the blue-green guy came from. He seems to have sprinted out of a side-corridor near the galley area. Washington recollects that his name is Tucker, he was in the desert. He called Epsilon Bowling Ball and that’s the sum total that Wash knows about him. He’s easily the shortest in the room, maybe the skinniest too. His helmet is off, his armor partially affixed (his chest plate and pelvic guard is missing) but he puts himself between the Texes like that isn’t suicide and they stop up short.

That, their unwillingness touch him, says something.

Tucker points a finger at Evil-Tex.

“You robo-bitches are not having another fucking throw down. It’s six in the fucking morning and Explosions McGee over here –” He points at Washington. “— just set off a fucking bomb in the backyard and Asshole –“ He points at Church. “—let him do it and Bowling Ball—” He points at Epsilon. “—hasn’t stopped bitching since I’ve been conscious. It’s a fuckin’ miracle Caboose didn’t wake up. Do you know how long it takes to put him down?” He points at Beta. “Don’t you fucking start. It’s too early in the fucking morning for this bullshit.”

“Calm down, Tucker,” says Church, exasperated.

“Yeah, this has nothing to do with you,” says Epsilon, somewhat coldly.

The Blue guy, Tucker looks at both of them. He’s youngish without his helmet. Younger than Wash anyway, black, angry. He’s got bed-head dreads, kinked and messy, half bound up at the base of his skull. His face is an angular mask of incredulity.

“Fuck you, Asshole.” He enunciates it. “And fuck you in particular, Bowling Ball. I put up with your horseshit on the daily. The least you cocksuckers could do is keep it to civil fucking hours not, you know, the literal asscrack of dawn.”

“It’ll just take five minutes,” says Washington, holding up two hands.

“Jesus, go back to bed, idiot,” says Tucker and for a minute Wash thinks he’s talking to him. Then, “Caboose, it’s nothing. Just go to sleep, man.”

“I heard party sounds.”

Everyone in the room turns slightly. There’s a solider, Cabose obviously, in blue sweats and a T-shirt standing barefoot on the tile by the galley, having come up the darkened hall at his back to see what the commotion is. Even outside his armor, Caboose is still taller and broader than Tucker, black hair sticking up from his head like he slept on it funny. Wash can’t see his face but he can see Caboose has the corner of a pillow in his hand, dangling from his fingers. He seems confused.

“It’s not a party, Caboose.” Tucker sounds strained.

“Yeah, buddy.” Epsilon this time, gently. “Trust me, this is nothing you wanna be conscious for.”

“Are you sure it is not a party?” Caboose sounds sleepily suspicious. “Because if people were having parties without inviting other people to parties, other people might be sad about that.”

“It’s not a party,” says Tex. She has abandoned her attempt to come have a word with Washington and grabbed Epsilon by the arm. She steers him, rather unwillingly, toward the door where Caboose is rubbing his eyes. “C’mon. You too, Tucker.” She looks over her shoulder directly at the Alpha AI who is not looking at her, is very pointedly looking away. “Let the obsessed assholes talk with their favorite.”

“Fuck you, Tex,” says Church with a particular fluency. He leans against the bar again, arms folded. He sounds pretty fucking angry with her.

And Tex, with an uncomfortable kind of familiarity, responds, “I’ll fuck you whenever you want, Church.”

Beta sighs, but with that parting shot, Tex and the others are gone. Washington is, you know, fucking perturbed for too many reasons to possibly fucking cover in a timely fashion. He’s not sure if clearing his throat awkwardly in the ensuing silence is still the appropriate reaction when the domestic involves a Smart AI and his ancillary fragments telling him to go fuck himself because he’s a massive asshole. Church has the face of his helmet in one hand.

“I guessing that’s the usual atmosphere around here?” says Washington.

“No.” Church lifts his face from his hand. “Usually it ends in actual violence. Luckily Tucker was awake.”

Wash is skeptical. “Tex wouldn’t hit Tucker?”

“No, she would totally fuckin’ hit Tucker, but it makes Epsilon mad so…”

“Your five minutes started, by the way.”

“What?” Church yelps. “Oh, c’mon, Washington—”

“Four minutes.”

“Wait. What clock are you using it’s been like fifteen seconds…?”

Washington pops up his shoulders, lazily. “You wanna argue with me for four minutes, be my guest, asshole.”

“I’m gonna wait outside,” says Beta-Tex. Washington looks sharply at her. “I’ll be outside,” she repeats, more gently, but firmly. When Wash continues to exude low-grade betrayal she sighs, a kind of heavy long-suffering and leans in close. She whispers, “Remember… Church doesn’t have any of the armor mods set up in that new body, so you can beat the shit out of him if he starts to piss you off.”

She gives him a thumbs up. Then leaves.

Church, tiredly: “Did she just tell you to beat the shit out of me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s… awesome.”

“You have like three and a half minutes.” Washington squares up. “What the fuck is so important that you think I need to goddamn hear it from you because if this is just a ploy…”

“Jesus, Wash. I’m not jerking you around, okay?”

“What is it then?”

“I thought you might want to know what actually fucking happened to Maine.”

Washington’s hands at his sides curl tight. “I know what happened to Maine.”

“Sure. But do you know everything? Because, I don’t know, he just ‘went crazy’ doesn’t seem like a very satisfying fucking explanation for what Project Freelancer did to him. But if you don’t care, then never mind I guess.”

“You know,” says Wash, “I might just beat the shit out of you, Church.”

“Ugh, sorry. Sorry. I’m not doing this right.”

“Two minutes.”

“Washington…”

“Why the fuck does Beta think you have anything to say to me that I would want to fucking hear?” Washington doesn’t raise his voice. Just stands there, tired. “I just burned Maine’s body. I did that less than an hour ago, but you have something you think that I need to fucking hear. Right now? Now? Because it sounds like AI bullshit to me—”

“On Circumstance,” snaps Church, pushing off the counter finally, “in Kuniper, after you carried that dead girl off the steps of the court house, you carried her for him. He wanted you to know that was the moment, okay, that he decided you were important. And in the end, when Sigma and others were boiling in his fucking head and he wasn’t even Maine anymore, he still couldn’t pull the trigger on you. The last thing he did as himself was refuse to kill you. That’s what Tex can’t tell you. The thing Maine wanted you to know. Okay?”

The silence roars. Washington can’t speak because Church could not have more thoroughly silenced him short of cutting his tongue from his fucking skull.

“I re-integrated them.” Church says it the way you describe swallowing arsenic. “All of them – Delta, Theta, Eta, Iota, Sigma. When I jumped into the Meta I – I fucking just took them all back. And it was hard and they were all broken and they didn’t fuckingfit, but I did it anyway and I’ve got all these pieces of all of them. The fragments and the Freelancers all here in my fucking head and Maine was part of it and I just thought you should know that he didn’t—” He holds up his hands, like there’s something between them, indescribable and invisible that he’s trying to hold down and define. “They killed Connecticut and then they put Epsilon in your head and Maine just… thought it would be easier that way. I don’t fucking know. It was so fucked up. Everything the Director did to us we couldn’t –”

“Stop.”

Church stares, resolutely, at the floor between Wash’s boots. “Right. Sorry. Look, can you not beat the shit out of me though? I just got this body and it’s the only one that actually looks right and I –”

“Thank you.”

Church looks up.

“You’re still an asshole, but… thanks.”

And he still means it, completely, with all his fucking heart, soul, guts, and bones down to his molecular composition that Church is still a fucking asshole. He also means the ‘thank you’ part though. So…

“Uh. Yeah.” Church doesn’t seem to know what to do with Washington’s words. So he shrugs. “No problem.”

“Two minutes.”

“What?”

“You still have about two minutes.”

“Oh, uh, you don’t have to…”

Washington can’t help himself though. “He did it because of Connie?”

Church stares, frozen momentarily by the name of a dead woman. Then, “Yeah. I mean it wasn’t just Connie it wasn’t… It was a lot of things with Maine. It was everything he was and what was going to happen and what they did to him even before Project Freelancer. What they said they would do if he washout of the Freelancers. And then it was Connie dying like that and when they said you were never going to recover…”

Wash swallows. “They told him I was never going to recover?”

“Yeah. They said you were going to be insane for the rest of your life if the complications didn’t kill you. They…” Church stops. He keeps doing that – stopping and starting. Washington thought, at first, it was just because he was uneasy with Washington but he’s seeing, now, the AI’s hands are curling and uncurling at his sides, his shoulders pulled tight. He talks in a low whisper. “It was like they wanted Maine to break too, you know? Like they didn’t want him to have anyone. They wanted us all to fragment, the team, you see? He wanted to fucking rip them apart like he ripped us apart – I mean me. Like he… like he used to tell me Tex had died and you had died. God, he liked to tell us you were dead…”

“Church, you don’t have to…”

But Church doesn’t seem to hear. “He treated Maine like he treated me, like military fucking hardware, like a fucking machine and he didn’t care and he didn’t see it coming when we turned on him. He didn’t see it coming and the look on his face. The look on his fucking face when I…” Church stops, presses a hand suddenly against his head. “Sorry. Fuck. I’m good. I’m good.”

“You’re not.”

“I’ll be okay.”

Washington shakes his head, slowly. “How many people are you now?”

Church gets snappy at this. “That question doesn’t make sense for me.” He drops his hand back to his side. “That’s like asking how many apples I am. Don’t ask me stupid questions.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“Aren’t the two minutes up?”

“You have all the memories of all the Freelancers who had an AI?”

“Not all the memories just… Maine mostly. His sync with Sigma was the deepest. His neural lattice was different. He was the prototype. Did – did you know that? He was the test, actually. That’s what…” He shakes his head. “I’m not them. If that’s what you’re getting at. It’s just data and pieces and it’s not mine. I know what was mine. I was a UNSC light frigate, I was the AI running Project Freelancer, I was…” He stops again, lowers his voice talking to himself. “I have to keep reminding myself that I didn’t kill you guys. It was him. It wasn’t me.”

“I think Beta should come back in here.”

Church bitterly says, “You think I’m crazy.”

On reflex, Washington replies, calmly, “I think you’re still operating within acceptable deviations.”

Church stares. Wash stares back. Then Church bursts out laughing. He laughs so hard he doubles over, then falls back against the counter behind him, bracing his elbows against it and shaking. He wheezes, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and after a while, again, still laughing, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Wash doesn’t laugh, because it’s not funny. It’s not.

He realizes he’s smiling behind his helmet. He takes that as he cue to go get Beta and tell her to come back inside and deal with Church who is still, Washington sees, fragmented along a dozen fault lines barely stuck together. He’s pieces and there are still pieces of him walking around, separate and free to hate him. It’s not funny. He stifles a laugh in the hallway. Not a… good laugh really. It’s got all the qualities of a laugh but it’s not funny. It’s really not funny at all.

Chapter 21 Chapter Text

“Oh shit.”

“What?”

“We got a Blue.”

“Which one?”

“Uhhh, looks like Tucker?”

Washington does not get up. Grif, likewise, does not get up. They’re technically on patrol, but ‘patrol’ with Dexter Grif is, in actuality, getting in the Warthog and driving to the shady spot behind Red Base and just camping there facing the Blue Base. Grif seems to sense that he has a compatriot in not taking these war games seriously and is literally eating a bag of potato chips while Washington taps the zoom on his helmet. That function, at least, still works.

Sure enough, the guy in blue-green armor is stomping his way toward Red Base. His rifle is on his back and, while his pace and stride is aggressive, he’s not otherwise armed. Washington reduces the zoom and glances at Grif who continues to eat chips, the bag crinkling loudly, crumbs flaking off the sim soldier’s gloves, the mechanical shoveling from bag to mouth proceeding unhindered by the potential threat of an enemy combatant.

Wash, for his part, says, “Should we… be concerned?”

“About Tucker? Fuck no. He’s probably just coming over to vent.”

“Vent?”

“Oh right, you were in a coma.” This is Grif’s standard response for any time Wash asks a question. “He comes over here sometimes and just bitches about the robot soap opera. Also, he trades me beef jerky for Pop-Tarts. Tucker’s alright.”

The sum total of what Washington knows of Tucker is in the two times he’s encountered the man – the one time in the desert when he was delirious and not paying attention and one week ago when he buried Maine (so to speak) and encountered Blue Team in its entirety at 2AM in their kitchenette. All other things he knows about Tucker are things that Red Team says about him, and therefore not reliable. He knows this much: Tucker is the only sane man on Blue Team. That is knowledge enough to pity the poor fuck.

“Grif,” shouts Tucker, once he’s about fifteen feet out, bee-lining for the parked Warthog, “Explain this shit to me.”

“Here we go,” says Grif.

“So I get that Church was a robot the whole goddamn time, I mean that was pretty obvious back in Blood Gulch –”

“Only to you,” says Grif.

“—but,” continues Tucker, climbing up to sit on the hood of the Warthog, “what I don’t fucking get is how I leave just, like, a year and a half, come back, and suddenly he thinks he’s the fuckin’ robot king of the universe. I mean, I don’t care if he has a fancy robot body and can bench press a couch, I need someone to stop Caboose setting the kitchen on fire. Old Church could do that. Asshole Church is an asshole. How can someone go from being a normal kind of asshole, to super asshole so quickly? Is that a robot thing?”

“I thought Church was always an asshole.”

“Yeah, but he’s not the same asshole.”

“So you want your asshole?”

“Right. I want old robot asshole. New robot asshole is the wrong kind of asshole. It sucks.” Then, this conversation having happened, Tucker seems to notice Washington sitting in the driver’s seat at last. “Oh shit, you’re not Simmons.”

“No,” says Washington, still not moving from where he’s kicked back in the driver’s seat. “I’m not Simmons.”

“Dude,” says Grif, “we’ve been fighting each other for years. How can you not know what Simmons looks like at this point?”

“It’s not my fault all three of you the exact same shade of red.”

“Sarge is red, Simmons is maroon, Wash is like super dark burgundy. Also – accents, dude. Pay attention.”

“That’s fucking bullshit. You’re all the same fucking color.”

“Dude, my sister was fucking yellow and on Blue Team. Tex is black. You fuckers don’t get to say shit about our color schemes.”

“Fuck you, Red.”

“Eat me, Blue.”

And that’s when Tucker extracts a small MRE-sized bag from a cache in his armor, tossing it at Grif who chucks what must be a cellophane wrapped Pop-Tart over the windshield into the other sim-soldier’s lap. Grif wordlessly begins to tear into the strips of jerky, chewing loudly, breathing through his nose. It might say something that Washington links the sound of Grif snorting food to down time. It’s about two minutes of companionable chewing before Tucker turns his attention back to Washington.

“You,” he says, pointing the Pop-Tart at him. “What the fuck?”

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” says Washington somewhat tersely.

“No, like, who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Washington.”

“No, I mean who are you?”

“The newest member of Red Team and therefore not above shooting you.”

“Right. I can see why the robot foursome is so fucking obsessed. You must be some kind of supreme asshole and they’re all aspiring to be like you. Seriously, dude, do you have any goddamn clue what is going on over there?”

Wash looks at Grif. “Can I run him over?”

“Sure,” says Grif, through a mouthful.

Wash starts to put the Warthog in gear.

“Hey!” Tucker grabs the windshield. “Jesus, calm down. I’m trying to warn you.”

“Warn me about what?” says Wash, the engine already rumbling.

“They’ve got, like, some kind of plan and they want you to help.”

Wash glares. It has been one week since he buried Maine. He gauges, briefly, with what little mercy he retains, if that has been an acceptable span of time to anyone on Blue Team, innocent bystander or not, to broach conversation with him. Ultimately: No. No, it hasn’t. Wash hits the gas, sending the vehicle rocketing forward for ten yards before slamming on the brake, very nearly sending the screaming Blue soldier flying. Grif already has his foot braced against the dashboard and continues eating jerky unaffected. Tucker, a two-handed death-grip on the top of the windshield, immediately starts yelling.

“WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?!”

“Did they send you over here?” Wash bellows over the screaming and the engine.

Tucker, distracted somewhat, shrieks, “What!?

“Did they send you over here to talk to me?”

“No, you paranoid fuck!”

Washington hits the gas again and yanks the steering wheel sideways, promptly sending the Warthog into a series of high-speed donuts while Tucker clings screaming and swearing to the windshield. Grif, for his part, remains undisturbed consuming jerky, using one hand to hold onto the frame of the spinning vehicle. Briefly, in the back of his head, while the sun shines down on the 5000 ton military vehicle whipping around in circles, Washington thinks that maybe he’s over-reacting. But then the other parts of his head remind him he’s on Red Team and this kind of behavior is acceptable and, he admits, this is kind of satisfying.

Eventually, he brakes again, the whole Warthog rocking on its wheels, and Tucker bails off the hood. He kind of fucks the dismount on account of being disoriented from all the spinning and promptly falls over. Gets back up. Falls the other direction. It’s like watching a kitten walk on a corkboard boat.

“You are fucking crazy!”

Wash gets out of the vehicle.

“Aw, shit,” says Grif.

“I am not,” says Wash.

“Oh fuck,” says Grif.

“Crazy.”

Tucker screams.

“So,” says Donut, later that evening, “I hear there was a little incident this morning. Aaaaand, you beat up Tucker?”

Wash shrugs. “Grif told me to.”

“No,” Grif says, looking up from where he’s field stripping his rifle to Washington’s left. “I said run him over. You got out and starting punching him all on your own. But, honestly, how could you not get out and literally beat the snot out of him? He used the C-word, after all.”

“Oh no. Not the C-word,” says Donut, legitimately appalled.

Wash puts down the sandwich. “Stop calling it ‘the C-word’. It’s weird. You’re making it weird.”

“Okay,” Grif snorts. “Whatever you say, psycho.”

His cavalier attitude holds for precisely the two seconds it takes for Washington to direct a look at him and Grif kind of sinks in his seat and resumes rifle cleanliness with uncharacteristic diligence. Wash admits that he likes being called ‘crazy’ about as much as he likes being shanghaied into sim-solider war games or kidnapped by unstable AI fragments, but he also thinks Donut likes to lay it on a bit thick and doesn’t need any encouragement from the team slob.

“Excellent!” Sarge thumps Wash on the back on his way from the kitchen to the couch. “I like my rookies with initiative! Keep it up, son!”

“I think,” says Donut, unperturbed, directly to Washington’s right, “that maybe you’re projecting a little.”

“Really?”

“You seem upset.”

“That’s not the word I’d use.”

“Yeah, Donut.” Grif reaches for another fistful of chips, sprinkling crumbs into the parts of the dissembled rifle. “You’re confusing terminally angry with upset. Upset is a normal people feeling, whereas Washington only has rage feelings on a scale from face-punching to murder.” There is a beat and he points at Wash. “See? See that face. That’s the lower end of the face-punching scale.

“Why did you beat up, Tucker?” says Simmons. He’s sitting across the table from Wash, a data tablet in one hand, a soda can in the other. He’s got his helmet off on the table next to him so Wash can see the furrow in his brow, directly on the seam where his skin meets the bio-mesh alloy. Simmons is a plain person with an expressive face, so Wash reads the undercurrent of genuine unease in the question. “Tucker is the one member of Blue Team that isn’t Caboose or, you know, a scary robot AI with a god complex. Why take it out on him?”

“He was annoying.”

“Wash,” says Simmons. “Grif is annoying. Donut is annoying. Lopez playing Spanish soap operas at six AM is annoying. You don’t beat up any of them for being annoying.”

“They’re on my team,” says Wash and before anyone can respond: “Also, Lopez is a head. I just put him in a bucket.”

And, muffled from somewhere in the hall: “Vete a la mierda.”

“Aww,” says Donut.

Simmons puts his soda down. “Do not ‘aww’ Washington running someone over with a Warthog, Donut. You’ll just encourage him.”

“I think,” says Donut, with unbearable brightness, “that it’s healthier to get those feelings out in the open. Just let it all hang out.”

“Okay, first of all: it’s only ‘healthy’ for the people Wash isn’t running over. Secondly: Stop talking.”

“I didn’t run him over.” Everyone at the table looks at Wash. He shrugs, takes a bit of his sandwich. “Grif told me to run him over, but I just beat him up a little.”

“A lot,” chimes Grif.

“A little,” corrects Washington. “You haven’t seen me beat up anyone ‘a lot’.”

“Christ, do you hear yourself when you talk or do you just go through life not knowing how scary-unhinged you sound?”

Washington doesn’t answer in favor of eating his sandwich. He’s not really sure why the Red Team has this habit of sit-down chow at the end of the day, but he’s been here long enough to know that trying to skip out on it just gets him harassed by Donut. From the corner of the room, he can here the indistinct sound of Sarge watching his ‘stories’. Donut is still giving him that look that means he’s concerned, which is a look not dissimilar from watching a puppy with three legs run around the yard chewing on things. Wash is kind of sick of that look.

“What?”

“You sure there isn’t anything you want to share?” Donut props his chin in his hands. “About, I dunno, a certain secret rendezvous last week.”

“Well, that explains the explosions,” says Simmons under his breath.

Wash deadpans. “I’m not telling you about what I was doing at Blue Base. It was my business and I cleared it with Sarge.”

“Your business included explosions?” says Grif.

“Were you meeting with someone?” says Donut, on an entirely different wavelength than his teammates, who are regularly on the exact same wavelength. “Someone you shouldn’t be meeting with because, frankly, I don’t trust that guy and think you should both keep your distance. I mean, I know the type, Wash. Guys like that will sayanything to try and get you to talk to them and you shouldn’t until you feel ready.”

“Donut,” says Grif, “I’m legitimately curious: You do get that Church is a crazy AI and not a fucking ex-boyfriend right?”

“I’m just saying,” Donut continues primly, “that there’s clearly still a lot of anger there. I mean, you beat up Tucker. Like I said…” He singsongs, “projectinnnnng.”

“Why are you all so hung up on me beating up this Tucker guy?”

“Tucker’s alright,” says Simmons.

“Grif told me to run him over.”

“Yeah, but that’s different,” says Grif.

“How?”

“Look,” says Donut, “just because you have trouble with acceptable social cues –”

“What?”

“—doesn’t mean that the rest of us are gonna stand for you embarrassing us, Washington. You’ve gotta get a grip, man.”

Wash gives up on the sandwich. “I have a grip. I’m fine.”

“Explosions,” says Simmons.

“Tucker,” says Grif.

“Church,” says Donut.

“Christ,” says Washington. “All of you, stop. I am handling this and if I need help I’ll let you know, but for now just drop it.” And, when in the wake of this pronouncement he receives three mirrored looks of extreme skepticism, Washington scowls. “What? I am. I’m handling it.” And when that persists in getting him these increasingly skeptical looks, he pushes back from the table. “Okay. If this is all we’re going to talk about then I’m done. I’ll be working on the Warthog.”

“I have a question,” says Simmons.

“What?”

“Your code name is Washington, so is that where you’re from?” Wash blinks. Simmons blinks back. Grif and Donut blink too and Simmons says, after a moment, defensive, “What?”

“You are such a nerd,” says Grif.

“What? I’m curious.”

“You think they recruited Freelancers specifically from each state of one country on one planet? Wow, Simmons, tell me more.”

“Grif, when I asked you to name a state for your fake Freelancer name, you said ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Europe’ followed by ‘Pacific Ocean’. You’re from fucking Honolulu.”

Wash speaks up.

“I am actually.” Red Team stops talking and blinks at him, simultaneously. Wash does not scoot his chair back to the table. “Washington State,” he says, “not Washington DC. The call-sign was open at the time and I happened to get it.” Grif and Simmons glance at each other. Donut has a look on his face that Wash isn’t sure how to read beyond a neutral but focused interest and Wash didn’t intend to go on, but before his brain can relay that to his mouth, he says, “None of the other Freelancers were named that way. Pretty sure I was the only American on the team. Maybe. The others didn’t talk about where they were from much.

“What about Tex?” says Donut.

Texas pulling him up off the grass. Her hand viced around his. A flash of teeth, biting down and his whole body jolting from the point of contact until—

“Yeah.” He rubs his face. “I guess Texas too. But they reserved that name. I don’t think the Director gave a shit what call-sign I got.”

“This Director,” says Simmons. “He’s the bad guy right?”

Washington looks up, his fingertips still dragging against his lips. There’s a silence again, three faces staring and, after a moment, “Yeah, Simmons. He’s the bad guy.”

“What did he do to you?” says Grif, not looking up from reassembling his rifle. “Cuz you still seem pretty pissed off.”

“See?” Donut supplies, almost hopefully. “Projecting. It’s not about Tucker.”

What did he do to you?

Washington thinks, briefly, the best answer would be to take the butter knife Donut is using on his crumpet, to jam that up into his gut just above his cock, then split his belly open from his hips to his sternum, lets everything rotten inside him come pouring out steaming and black on the dinner table… but that thought goes like all the other thoughts like it and he just blinks, slowly, at Donut who peers back at him, doe-eyed and blond, with his ruined ear and shrapnel scars.

Wash sits forward. “Do you know what I was doing for Project Freelancer when I defected and tried to take down Command?”

Donut shakes his head.

“I was a Recovery Agent. You don’t know what that is so I’ll tell you.” Donut doesn’t look nervous but Simmons and Grif exchange another one of their looks. Wash ignores them. “A Recovery Agent is the person the Director sends to dispose of other dead Freelancers or, in some cases, to take down rogue Freelancers. Now, just so we’re clear, that means it was my job to recover and/or burn the bodies and equipment of men and women I served with.”

Donut’s eyes are wider than they were before, just a little, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“So, the Director is the reason that, last week, when I went over to the Blue Base, I knew exactly how much C-4 it takes to completely dispose of Maine’s power armor. That was me, disposing of my squad mate’s body because there is no other way to safely dispose of the Freelancer technology that Maine took when he went Meta.” Wash leans forward, taps two fingers on the table to emphasis the point. “I know how to eradicate people from the face of the earth. That’s a skill I have now. That’s a skill the Director gave me. The fact I couldn’t even bury Maine like normal person, because of all the shit Project Freelancer did to him… also on him.”

Donut bites his lip.

“You know what no one tells you about surviving?”

Donut glances at his other teammates who, wisely, don’t say anything. “No. What don’t they tell you?”

“That holding out is a force of habit.”

Donut looks at the other two, somewhat anxiously now, but Simmons is looking at Grif and Grif’s frowning into the middle of the table. Eventually Donut looks back at him and Wash notices that despite all the scarring, the chunks missing, keloid knots terminating from his temple back, it has no effect whatsoever on his ability to look like the farm-boy from Iowa. Wash wishes he could explain that mix of jealousy and exhaustion that gives him.

Donut swallows a little. “So… you’re in the habit?”

“It’s a hard one to break once you’ve been at it for a few decades.”

If Donut has a comment on trying to break one’s habit of survival, he doesn’t make it. What he says is, “You know, Wash, all of us are pretty good at surviving too.” A beat and, for a second he reaches up as if to run his hand over the scars across the side of his face, stops, puts his hand down. “I mean, I think you’ve been at it longer, probably, but, uh, we know what you mean and, uh, I know its kind boring and awful sometimes just… to keep on going and stuff, but…”

He glances at Simmons for some reason.

“But we think you’re pretty tough, Wash. And sometimes, it’s okay to autopilot and just… be in the habit, cuz that’s what you need to do to not think about every awful thing. You know? Because thinking about every awful thing that ever happened would be pretty bad and no one should do that. Uh…” He scratches his chin and Wash thinks he looks nervous again, before he smiles and says somewhat bravely, “It’s okay to be mad. Just sayin’ being mad is really exhausting and you deserve a break.” An anxious smile. “You know?”

And, for a second, Washington smiles, tiredly.

“So you don’t think I’m mad at Tucker or Church?”

“Oh no,” says Donut, “You’re definitely angry at Church. Church is an asshole. He kidnapped you basically!”

Washington laughs.

And it’s about then that Sarge pipes up from across the room: “Don’t let being mad about this Director guy drive you any farther off yur rocker.” Sarge has not looked up from where he’s seated, back to the lot of them, powering his way through his own meal. He grunts. “Rotten bastards get good people killed for lousy reasons: Let’s file that under ‘shit we already know’. How about it?”

As it happens, Wash doesn’t leave to repair the Warthog.

Chapter 22 Chapter Text

Washington is looking at himself.

Which is weird.

He’s watching himself like a movie, cutting from one angle to another, to another, to another as he sails down an empty hallway on the deck of a skateboard. He is aware of himself in detail – of the weight distribution of his boots against the grain, the easy swing of his foot against the ground propelling the board forward, the growl of the wheels against the metal floor. He’s got a candy bar between his teeth and he’s rocking back on his heels, easing into a long turn around the corner and down the next hall and he sees himself from behind, then coming down the new hall from the front.

He’s got one hand in the pocket of his sweatshirt, the hood up. He remembers this hoodie because he cut the sleeves out of it a few weeks into his arrival on the Mother of Invention. He’d spilled bleach on the right elbow and so the lights of the passing over heads run over his bare shoulders and arms. He’s looking around. He’s not seen this part of the ship before, rolling down the hall on waning momentum until, at last, he drops a foot to the ground and kicks the board into his hands. Easy as a breath. A thousand times done.

Washington suffers, momentarily, from the disorientation of seeing himself as he’s used to seeing others – like a stranger, casually judging that his boots are scuffed and his bed-head is fucking astonishing. His hair is black, jet dark and fake. His eyebrows are too pale for the color. He’s watching himself finish eating the candy bar in what is clearly a too-large bite, looking briefly like an over-zealous chipmunk before swallowing. His been told he eats like someone is going to take food from him and, in his history, he’s never disagreed. He observes himself from one angle, then another, peering into an empty observation room, then leaning out again.

He remembers being on the board. He remembers the weight of his body against the deck, his weight shifting on the ball of his foot, the moving air on his shoulders. He remembers the hall rolling past from a first-person perspective. He also remembers this – watching himself from five angles simultaneously and focusing, very closely, on his thumb tapping a rhythm against the edge of the board and he remembers looking over his shoulder (sees himself look over his shoulder) because he thought he felt someone watching him. The light of an overhead erasing the blonde of his eyebrows and putting shadows in the hollow of his eyes.

The hall is empty.

The hall is not empty.

Far away someone asks: “What do you think of the new recruit, Alpha?”

“Eh, seems like a dork.”

He wakes up.

He blinks, figures out what’s wrong. Donut has thrown a towel at him and it smacked him in the face, waking him. This is his solution to Washington being a heavy sleeper (capable of sleeping through artillery if needed) but prone to punching people who touch him while he’s unconscious. Wash tosses the towel back at Donut, who catches it and folds it, humming to himself as he does. It’s weird watching someone in pink power armor neatly arrange a floral-printed towel and place it back on a shelf.

“Morning!”

“Hi, Donut.”

“We have patrol.” He always sounds like this is the fucking high-light of the year.

Washington scrubs a hand over his face. “Alright.”

“Better gear up. Sarge says we need to be out there ‘yesterday or he’ll have our asses’.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“You,” says Donut, beaming, “are wearing the spare clothes I gave you.”

Washington sighs. He is, indeed, wearing the fatigues and T-shirt (a standard issue black, not the Party Time shirt) that Donut gave him and before Donut can ask, “No, I’m not wearing the boxers.”

“But they’re not used!”

“No.”

“You can’t go commando forever.”

“Watch me.” Then, after a minute, “I meant that… rhetorically. Not actually… never mind.”

He gets dressed. Donut waits in the hall and Washington gets his armor on and while he’s alone, putting on the parts, he registers like an after-thought the notion that he doesn’t want to do this. The temptation to roll over and go back to sleep is there in the pit of his belly like a chemical dreg, a shot of sedative to the blood stream. He could collapse back into oblivion and let it fill his fucking body until there there’s no room for anything else. He can’t imagine, presently, a better pleasure and again, like every day, like every hour of every day since the desert where he chose to lie down and give up, he has to make a different choice.

“You seem better,” says Donut.

Washington, standing in the hallway ten minutes later, pauses momentarily and blinks.

“Do I?” he asks, pulling his helmet on.

“Yeah.” A shrug. “You do.”

“Oh, heeeey, looks like one of the Texes is coming over.

“What? Which one?”

“I dunno, it’s kinda hard to tell at this distance, Wash.”

“Donut, blue accents or no accents?”

“No accents,” says Donut, suddenly possessing 20/20 color-differentiating vision. “Kind of shame, all the black is just kind of, I dunno, drab. Don’t you think?”

“Donut, give me your rifle.

“Uhm, I dunno, Wash. You’re still at least three gold stars away from –”

“Give. Me. The. Fucking. Rifle.”

Washington climbs out of the jeep, the stock of Donut’s M5 tucked up into his armpit, the safety off. Behind him, Donut scrambles out of the vehicle and jogs to catch up, making a slightly anxious noise. Wash walks away from the jeep to meet her halfway, his grip on the gun tightening – the first time he’s held a weapon months and it’s like it’s only been days. The Tex coming down the nearside of the hill does not, indeed, have blue accents. She’s got that rolling stride, head slightly down, shoulders swinging and it makes every muscle in Wash’s body slide tight with adrenaline. His pulse faster in his veins.

Eventually, she stops, standing out just ten meters from him, one hand on her hip.

“What are you gonna do, Wash? Shoot me?”

“Ask Alpha how South died, then say that again.”

She barks laugher.

“Beta and the others know you’re out here?” Wash maintains his calm. “Or they forget to lock the backdoor?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you on my own, babylancer. Just the two of us.”

“Last time we talked, just the two of us, you tried to shoot me in the head.”

“You didn’t seem too adverse to that.” A shrug. “At the time anyway.”

“I think,” says Donut, peering over Washington’s shoulder, “that maybe we should all just… calm down. Take a breath. Relax. See? Like this. In.” Donut takes a large audible breath. “Out.”

Tex looks at Donut. “You. You’re the one who keeps weirding Alpha out.”

“If Church can’t be an adult about giving Washington his space, then I don’t think he can be an adult about talking out their issues.” Washington’s finger twitches on the trigger guard. Tensely, he watches Donut shake a pedantic finger at the AI who tried to kill him. “It’s like I told him: They both need to be a in a safe, stable mind-set before they can talk.”

Tex looks at Washington. “Safe and stable.” She tilts her head at him. “How about it Wash? Are you stable yet? You feeling safe?”

“What do you want?”

“Epsilon’s got a line on the Director.” When Washington does not react (or rather, forces himself not to react) she shrugs, lazily, a flex of machine smoothness that send a surge of violence through him like a sudden arousal and bites down until the ridges of his molars grind. “The others are fighting about whether you should come along but I’m sick and tired of them fighting about it and, more to the point, it makes no fucking difference if you want to keep playing house with the idiot brigade.” Donut is sticking his tongue out at Tex. Washington doesn’t know how he knows because Donut is wearing his helmet but he knows. Tex cracks her knuckles for effect. “So yeah, make a decision so we can leave you behind already.”

“That’s not very nice,” says Donut, moving as if to step between him and Tex, but Wash quickly roadblocks Donut with his elbow, keeping his squadmate behind him. He cannot read her face but the slight inclination of Tex’s helmet in Donut’s direction tells him she didn’t miss the small exchange. Donut, for his part, grumbles, “You are rude,” as though that were the blackest curse he could lie on the black-armored ancillary.

Wash jerks his head. “I thought Epsilon didn’t remember.”

“He’s starting to. Took a while. Took some doing. He’s not real happy about it.” She cocks her head at him. “I’m not really happy about it either, point of fact, and I’m sick to death of Asshole and the Beta-Bitch coddling this fucking subject because you’re their favorite.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

Tex stops a second, then, “What?”

“Epsilon said that. Back in the desert.” He feels hyper-aware of the weight of the rifle in his hands, heavy and familiar and he thinks, maybe, he missed the weight. He hasn’t felt right for months. The gun feels good in his arms. He says, “Being the only Freelancer with a fucking pulse doesn’t make me their favorite, it makes me the only Freelancer with a pulse. That’s it.”

Tex snorts. “Yeah, don’t get too many fuzzies. Beta only likes you for your pulse. You weren’t her favorite.” Then, like it means anything to him, she says, “You’re all wrong. She skews toward variables and irrational nodal data. You’re boring. Alpha likes boring. That’s why I’m here asking you what the fuck you want to do before he talks Beta into talking you into coming along.”

“What?”

“Look, idiot. I’m trying to be helpful. Church has this lousy habit of thinking he knows what’s good for people so in the spirit of spoiling his plans, I’m cutting to chase before he can send Beta to swing it. Are you in or out?”

“What makes you think Beta can talk me into anything?”

“The fact that she can? You liked Texas. Still do.”

“You don’t know what I thought about Texas.”

“Yes.” She speaks with incredible coldness. “I do fucking know.”

“You’re not her,” says Wash. “She gave you her name, but Beta is the real Texas. Not you.”

Tex has him in the dirt before he sees her move. He doesn’t remember shooting but the gun she jams up against his throat has four less shots than it did three seconds ago. There’s a blown hole in the material at her shoulder, sparks crackling in the gap, something red and too thick to be blood running down her inner arm. (So he didn’t miss.) She weighs more than him, at least twice what he does, straddling him in the dirt and methodically crushing his trachea with the stock of his rifle.

“You know.” She presses down when he tries to lever the weapon off his neck, jerks it up into his chin, forcing his head back into the ground. Wash, gripping the stock, is exerting all his strength to keep the weight from kinking his windpipe shut and Tex says, calmly, over the sound of his gasping, “I wonder how much Alpha would freak out if I busted your jaw.”

Which is the moment, of course, Donut attempts to tackle Tex.

It doesn’t really work very well. He throws his shoulder against her, kind of bumping her slightly and at first she just kind of grunts and keeps at choking Washington, but left unchallenged Donut begins to power her back off of Washington’s throat. She sits up, tossing the rifle and with two hands she lunges to her feet and grabs Donut by the neck, boosting him up into the air like a rag doll. He flails, clutching at her wrists, emitting high pitched whimper-choke noises. His boots are swinging a whole half-foot off the ground.

“Really?” she says.

Tex readjusts her grip so she has Donut by the collar of his armor, holding him at arm’s length while he pin-wheels uselessly at her. She’s looking at Washington, something mean and disgusted in her body language.

“You’re a war criminal and a fuck-up, Wash.”

He rolls onto his stomach, lunges right and grabs the rifle, comes up on one knee with the stock against his shoulder, but before he can get a line, Tex yanks Donut in, hooks an arm around his throat from behind, then jams his arm up into the middle of his back. She does this so hard Donut immediately squeals “Owowow!” and Wash freezes in his tracks. Tex is peering at him over Donut’s shoulder, the jaw of her helmet dug in against his neck. For a split second, this distance, practically point blank, he thinks: I can make the shot.

But Donut makes a high, whimpering sound and he doesn’t.

Tex is talking.

“One dead squad isn’t enough for you? Almost killed Alpha to get revenge on the Director, were gonna turn in Epsilon to save yourself, dragged these idiots into it and now, what? You’re gonna use them as body shields while Beta and I clean up this fucking mess?” Wash doesn’t move from where he’s crouched on the ground, every fucking nerve buzzing tense. “You can act like you’re the victim here, but we all fucking are so suck it up, Washington. You buried Maine. You still up for finishing what you started or you giving up now?”

“Let go of him, Tex.”

“Don’t get dramatic.”

“He’s appropriately dramatic!” wheezes Donut.

Tex eases her angle on Donut’s arm, but doesn’t let go. She jerks her chin at Washington.

“Drop the rifle, kid.”

For a moment, he does not. Then he puts the rifle down and shows her both open hands. Tex seems to think that’s an acceptable surrender, uncurling her arm from its collar around Donut’s windpipe. She, instead, clamps a hand at the back of Donut’s neck and uses that hand hold to keep him still. Her fingers on Donut’s neck shift a little, relaxing. Washington shifts his weight.

“Didn’t you used to be smart, Wash?” Tex drops one hand to her hip, shakes her head. “I remember you being smart, but hey, maybe my data is all fucked up, you know, since –”

Washington interrupts by tackling her at the waist.

It’s like quarterback sacking a fucking tree, but unlike a tree, she’s not rooted and he hits Tex below at her center of gravity, buckles her at the waist and Wash takes to the ground. Wash lands on top of her. Tex rolls him instantly putting him back on his back in the dirt. She does this just in time to catch his wrist against hers, stopping the 12-inch ka-bar in his fist just short of her visor. For a split of a second she stares at the knife tip, registers what he just tried to do… then she grabs Wash’s helmet andsmashes his head back into the ground. His HUD shorts out and bands in static and it takes him a moment to realize the black is his own eyes not the helmet.

“Sneaky, fuck.” Tex grabs the shoulder straps of his chest harness, dragging him up so they’re face-to-face. “You seriously just try to knife me? What is this? Basic?”

Wash grabs her wrists. “You attacked my teammate. Fuck you.”

She grabs him by the throat, not hard, just enough to hold him. “Your teammate?”

And that’s when a bullet slams through the side of her helmet. Tex’s head snaps left, her visor exploding Duraplex into his face, the blast shielding ricocheting off his own visor. Wash doesn’t remember if he screamed, but his tongue retains the shape of the word ‘fuck!’ so he’s pretty sure, yeah. Tex topples left, falling off of him. Her body hitting the ground is dead machine weight, like dropping an engine block. For a stunned second, Washington just lies there in the dirt with his weight back on his elbows, trying to process what the fuck just –

“Oh my god someone is shooting at us!” screams Donut.

Washington rolls onto his stomach, comes face-to-face with Tex’s obliterated visor, the right side of helmet cratered in slightly at the point of penetration. He stares. The sunshine through the visor shunts bands of bright yellow into the interior of the helmet and his guts coil inside him, syncing his whole body tight because a pair of blank blue eyes are staring out at him from inside the fucking helmet, which is not empty at all, as he’d assumed.

“Tex.” She shoves her shoulder, her helmet wobbling against the dirt. “Goddammit… Tex?”

Donut is still screaming. “Someone is stealing our jeep!”

Washington goes for Donut’s rifle. He grabs it off the ground running, sprints up with the butt against his shoulder and opens comm to the Red Team. “Sarge, if you’re there, there’s some shit going on!” He can hear the Warthog roaring closer behind him and Donut shouting that, of course, the driver is coming after him. “Might want to get out here!”

“Blues?!” bellows Sarge into the COMfreq.

“I don’t know. Someone shot Tex.”

“I think yur confusing good news, with bad news there, son.”

“Someone shot Tex and it wasn’t me.”

“Oh. Did Donut kill her again?”

“No, he didn’t – wait? What?”

Washington doesn’t have time to process that because the Warthog cuts right suddenly, swinging around him to flank him and he finally stops moving, rifle to his shoulder and he squared the headshot instantly, puts the driver’s helmet in his crosshairs and he – “That bit with the purple plane? That was just showing off.” – almost pulls the the trigger and destroys himself again. The horror, the potential energy of it, paralyzes him but his trigger finger slides off its curl and he –

“Washington! Get in the jeep!”

He doesn’t move, just stands there with his rifle pointing at the ground, staring.

“What the fuck are you just standing there for? Get in!”

He starts to say, screws it up, tries again and gets it out in a stutter. “Carolina?”

“Jesus!” His old squad leader – his dead squad leader – half rises from her seat, bracing one hand against the roll-bar behind her. She seems smaller than he remembers her – wiry in her battered turquoise armor and, for a moment, he wildly tries to remember how he got here. If he can recollect. If he’s lost time again and this is just another waking memory. She jerks her thumb over her shoulder. “Get in the goddamn jeep. I will explain in a second, but move. Your. Ass.”

It’s mostly reflex that gets him going. Donut’s rifle snaps to his spine and Wash is swinging up into the passenger-side seat while the woman next to him shifts gears and guns the vehicle, swinging it around toward Blue Base and swinging a wide berth to aim for the out-let in the back of the canyon, the one that will take them out into the mountain roads that he and Alpha took two months ago. Carolina is driving very aggressively. He grabs the sides of the vehicle to keep from rocking in his seat when she swing a hard right, cutting past a cropping of rock.

She shifts gears again, doesn’t look at him. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay.”

“Washington, are you hurt?”

“No.” He speaks more clearly this time. “I’m fine. Texas didn’t…”

“What the fuck was that bitch trying to do to you? Is she back with Command?”

“No, no.” Adrenaline keeps him on track. “We were arguing. You shot her.”

“Yes I fucking shot her. She was slamming your head into the ground when I first got here, you think I was gonna let her go for round two?”

“You shot her in the head.”

Carolina glances at him, briefly, once. “So?”

Wash doesn’t know how to respond to that. “Carolina, stop the car.”

“Are you insane?”

“No. Carolina you need to stop the car right now. We need to go back. She might still be alive.”

“She was trying to kill you.”

“No! She was trying to help me! I pissed her off, but you shot her. Stop the goddamn car, Carolina!”

There must be something in the raggedness of how he says that because she looks at him again for a much longer moment. The scratched mirror of her visor shows his own reflection back – red armored and crouched across from her. She slows the vehicle to a stop. It idles at the mouth a narrow tunnel that feeds out of the canyon into the roads beyond. She doesn’t put it in park. She keeps her foot on the brake.

“What is going on? Why are you out here with her?”

“I’m out here with all of them. We’re regrouping after we took down Command. Carolina, turn around…”

“There was nothing,” she interrupts, “on the Command feeds about Texas. It was all about you and Maine. That was it. You and Maine on the run so I came looking for you, Washington, for both of you. Where is Maine?”

Wash presses a hand against the side of his helmet. “Jesus…”

“Washington, answer me.”

“He’s dead.”

“Damn,” says Carolina. It’s almost toneless, almost. “And I was really hoping.” She puts the car in gear and starts the Warthog into the tunnel. “I’m not heading back there until I know what’s going on. Tell me as we drive. If Maine is gone, then it’s just us.”

“Carolina, Tex wasn’t trying to kill me. She’s an ally.” He grabs the dashboard and roll bar so he can face her. “You don’t understand. That was fucking friendly fire. We have to go back right now. Dammit. Boss, listen to me!”

“She was trying to kill you!”

“No, she wasn’t!” Washington combats the urge to grab the wheel and the conflicting urge to touch Carolina just to make sure she’s fucking there and he’s not sitting in a Warthog yelling at a ghost. “Carolina, Tex isn’t the only one in the canyon. We need to –”

And, of course, that’s when Beta lands on the hood of the car.

Chapter 23 Chapter Text

For exactly two seconds, Beta and Carolina just stare at each other.

Beta, braced like an armored animal on the front of the Warthog, her boots hooked in the front tow tusks, one palm down on the hood, just looking at Carolina. They don’t move. The vehicle, still in gear, keeps rolling forward. Carolina’s hand is on the pistol at her hip. She’s half out of her seat. Washington recollects his own voice from years ago: “Are you kidding? I’m hoping one of us doesn’t get killed just by watching!”

Then Beta steps up on to the hood and Carolina pulls her pistol.

Wash hears himself say, “Wait! Don’t!”

But – as always, like nothing, not even her own death has changed her – Carolina is already moving. She lunges up from her seat and she unloads half a clip directly at Beta’s torso, blowing out part of the windshield. Beta moves with machine speed. Beta ducks. Beta jukes, jerking down, then kicking up. Beta launches off the hood with such force the metal craters beneath her boot, throwing her up, eight feet, and she comes down hard on top of Carolina. One boot slams into her shoulder, the other into the seat behind her. Beta grabs Carolina at the wrist and at the collarbone, fisting the shoulder-band of her armor and driving her back into the seat, smashes the pistol from her hand.

In response, Carolina pulls a knife from her back and slams it home in the crook of Beta’s right knee.

Beta screams, not exactly in pain but she screams, dives right out the side of the Warthog and yanks Carolina with her. They disappear over the frame of the car, which is still in gear, rolling lazily forward on its own momentum. Wash scrambles across the driver’s seat, yanks up on the parking brake, and jumps out. Hits the ground running, races back fast and stops up short because, he remembers, getting killed here is a very real possibility.

Carolina and Beta are fighting.

This was what he missed all those years ago:

Carolina is using her speed mod. Wash can’t remember that she ever used it like this before, in vicious bursts that turn her body into a helter-skelter blur. She ducks, spins under flurry of short jabs, blocks a bone-shattering knee-strike with the armored part of her thigh, swings with her fist – She disappears. Beta’s head snaps to the right, then the left, then she doubles up, staggers back from a blow Washington can barely follow. Carolina is a living smear of motion and after-image. She is impact and force. Texas staggers, her arms up, her body jarring and jerking. She doesn’t, it is notable, try to hit Carolina back. Carolina jolts into real-time, suspended for a heart-stopping split second in mid-air, then whips the full force of a spinning back-kick straight into Beta’s ribcage.

The sound is like two cars colliding.

Wash feels the impact shake through the air.

Beta hits the ground skidding, the impact ripping up the grass as she rolls, shoulder jarring an uneven point in the ground, knocking her like a rag-doll end over end, until she lashes out with one arm. Grabs the earth and uses the handhold to anchor her, ripping up five finger-runnels in the dirt until she comes to a stop….

Carolina is already on her.

She doesn’t stop for even a split second, snapping across that distance between them, she seizes Beta’s helmet and smashes it jaw-first into the upward driving piston of her knee-strike. She hits Beta so hard it knocks her to the ground on her back, her visor spider-webbed with fractures. Beta rolls back into a handspring, turns the handspring into a backflip, lands in a crouch and launches with such force the ground behind her shreds up. She comes back at Carolina.

Carolina dives right. Texas clothes-lines her at the middle, grabs her up by the stomach and in a single bear-hug motion suplexes Lina into the fucking ground. Wash is rooted where he stands and feels the impact through the soles of his boots, Carolina’s scream of pain is like his own shoulder dislocating. It also doesn’t stop her. She rolls out from the impact, pulls another blade from her back and whips it with a crack into the armor at Beta’s shoulder, punching through the alloy and Beta stutter-steps back, glances at the knife sticking out of her chest plate. It’s in deep enough that it must be hitting mass beneath the armor.

“Carolina.” She pulls the blade out, tosses it. “I don’t want to fight you.”

Carolina answers her by activating her speed mod again and rocketing a fist into Beta’s face. She blocks with her forearms, but the force is such it still knocks the AI back. Carolina transitions instantly from the first blow into a flurry of head and body shots. Beta absorbs the blows. Grunting. A human being would be a jellied crush of rib and blood inside their armor but Texas powers on. Still, bits of her visor are starting to fall out of her helmet. Carolina blurs again.

“Carolina!”

Carolina flickers. Slams a straight kick into Beta’s chest, knocking her skidding back ten meters.

“Stop using the mod!”

Another blow, harder. It’s like watching CT use her shadow-play – Carolina is in two places at once. Carolina is moving too fast. Carolina is a kinetic wash out, a streak of color and ozone. Wash can hear the power core in her suit whining like a live wire. She is running with no AI.

“Carolina, stop!” Washington cannot remember that he’s ever heard that tone from Texas, from any of her iterations – words verging from command to fear. Beta throws up both hands palms out. “Carolina!”

Carolina flickers. She vanishes. Washington hears her scream – then she’s in the air, fist on the down-swing. Beta braces. Beta doesn’t block. And Carolina hits her. The freight-train force of her fist smashes the full momentum of her speed into the mouth of her helmet. The blow plows her to the ground like a rag doll, her helmet ripping off and rocketing 100 meters back, bouncing off the rocky outcropping. Carolina hits the ground in crouch, landing boots down, hands in the dirt, on top of Beta. The helmet rolls, ruined, into the grass

Beta-Texas doesn’t get up.

From where he stands, Washington can only see the dull gleam of the AI’s armor, one knee bent up, one arm limp, fingers curled loose. The sun shines pale on a blond coil of hair in the grass and Carolina – crouched, vibrating, a wash of heat bleeding from her power armor – just stares. A violent whining sound emits from the suit’s main power core. She falls slightly forward onto her knees, Beta’s torso between her thighs and pulls her own helmet off. The heat mirage makes an oil-painting of her face, her hair red as a head wound, her helmet rolling into the dirt.

Washington reaches her side just in time to hear her say, “What the fuck is this?”

That stops him. Carolina’s head is bent down over Beta’s, close enough that the long rope of her pony-tail hangs almost to her bare cheek and at this close distance, face-to-face, Washington can see it, what’s arresting her: Beta’s face isn’t the same one from Project Freelancer, it’s – “Leonard, come on. Stop it, put that thing down. You’re gonna make me late.” – a different face entirely.

It’s been so long since Epsilon. That’s the truth – it’s been so long and still there is the part of him, like a fresh stitch coming undone. It’s the same knot in his head that pulls apart every time he wakes up thinking he’s on the Mother of Invention, or dreams himself pressed flat onto a floor and someone’s tongue against his, hands pinned until the knuckles bruise. Looking at her is someone grabbing every thread frayed loose inside him and pulling…

He pulls his helmet off. The air against his face reminds him: this is the real moment, Carolina, her battle-battered armor, the smell of crushed grass. He shoulders it away – the memory wrapping itself around him. Stay here. Stay here. He steps forward, reaches out.

“Carolina…”

“Why does she look like that?” Wash drops his hand inches short of her shoulder. “What the hell is going on?” Wash can hear Carolina slowly building toward something – not hysteria, never that, but action and that is bad. Carolina in motion is bad. She looks up at him. “Who the fuck did I shoot back there? You said I shot Texas, but thisis Texas, I’ve fought her. I know it’s her, so why does her face look like this?”

“I don’t… I didn’t know she looked like that. She picked up a new body a few months ago. I just assumed…”

“She what?”

The silence between them is like a gun leveled at his skull.

“Fuck it. She’s an AI, Carolina – wait, listen. Texas was always an AI.” And before she can call him insane, “Think about it. It makes a kind of sense, right? How hard she could go. What she was capable of. Why she never interacted with us except on the mission. I don’t know why she looks like that. I don’t know. It’s a new model or something.”

Carolina, very reasonably, growls, “What?”

“I can’t explain this right now.”

Her expression is unfathomable.

“Boss…”

“I know – I know her. The face model or whatever. I know her.”

“Wait. What?” Wash blinks. “You know who Allison is? I thought…”

Carolina shakes her head. “You know who Allison is?”

“She…” And suddenly Wash isn’t so sure. “She was someone the Director knew. I don’t… that’s all Epsilon remembered about her. He was the memory and I got what he knew.”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who was she based off? All AI are based off a person so what person was Texas based off?”

“I don’t… the Director.” He’s not sure why that is important right this instant. “The Alpha was based off the Director and Beta was part of the Alpha AI – our ship’s AI. The one we never saw. The Director used him to make all the fragments. He was the source.”

A line of muscle jumps in her jaw. Now she looks closer to hysterical.

“Carolina… we can talk about this but not right now. I will explain everything, but you need to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

Whatever she knows, Carolina seems to get hold of it and push it down.

“Check her,” she says, “Right.”

She swings one leg back and kneels next to Beta so Wash can bend over her and gather the AI’s head with both hands. He does not, in fact, know what he’s doing but he knows that he didn’t like Carolina edgy and battle-amped kneeling on top of Beta. He readjusts his hold, the flats of his thumbs set against the place where Beta’s ears meet her jaw, pulls her face up a bit.

He acknowledges the sick lurch inside him, the formaldehyde slide of nausea looking at Beta’s new face – “Don’t worry, you’ll see me again.” – but he and Carolina can’t bothfreak out, so he pushes that part of him that is still his AI down and down until Beta’s face is just a face. Focus. Breathe. Her skin is warm, gives against his gloves like real skin, but dry, not sweaty from combat. Her complexion is pale, not reddened by exertion. There’s no breath on her lips. The blonde of her lashes laid against the high plane of her cheekbones. She just some blond woman in power armor. Focus.

“Beta,” he says, trying for something gentle. “C’mon. Beta, wake up.”

Carolina shifts, stands up and backs away, looping her hands behind her neck and pacing. Her breathing is heavy, ragged and uneven and when he looks, he catches her wiping blood as it runs from her nose, a red smear across her cheek. He can smell sweat and hot metal from her. She braces her hands against her hips, bends at the waist and grimaces so he looks away. Tries to focus on Beta. One ghost at a time.

“Texas. It’s Washington. Can you hear me?”

“Why?” Carolina pants. “Why didn’t she block me?”

“I don’t know,” says Wash, “but she didn’t and now she’s busted, so give me a minute.” He gently smacks Beta on the cheek, waits to have his larynx torn out. Doesn’t happen, so he says loudly, “C’mon, Tex. Wake up. Texas! Jesus… Beta Program? Respond. Acknowledge last directive. Lights on. Activate.”

“Are you kidding?” Carolina says.

“No, Carolina. Clap your hands and see if that does it.”

“Are you insane?”

“No. Still in standard deviations.”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Never mind.”

Carolina is circling, pacing behind him. Wash ineffectively swipes blond bangs off Beta’s forehead, checks her skull for damage. After a minute Carolina breaks her silence again. “What is she?”

“I don’t know. A… a combat gynoid I guess.”

Carolina swerves away from him, muttering.

“Jesus, you’re really not kidding.” She runs her hands through her hair, breathes in, breathes out. “What do you know about Allison?” Her tone catches his attention because it’s kinked in the middle, strained all the way through. Carolina is staring down at Texas and all the blood that rushed to her face from the fight is gone now – the smear on her face gone neon in contrast. “Just that she was someone the Director knew?”

“Yeah. It’s not exact or anything just… images. Mostly.” He feels his face getting hot inside his helmet. “I think they were close. You knew her?” Then, when Carolina doesn’t say anything else and the look on her face becomes unreadable as the surface of the fucking sun, he opens a COM-frequency to Red Team. “Hey, Sarge, it’s Washington.”

“What in the name of General Custer is goin’ on?” Wash grimaces at the volume Sarge employs. “One minute yur yellin’ about the enemy! The next minute yur gettin’ yur crazy ass in the car with the enemy! I know you got yur brain scrambled, son, but that aint scrambled that’s eggs benedict!”

“Look, I can explain that, but can you check on Tex and see if… I don’t know, she can be repaired? I guess? You should probably call Blue Team to come and look at her. They’ll be able to help her.” He’s making a lot of declarative statements in the hopes that it’ll sound like he knows what he’s doing when, in actuality, he’s not sure that a headshot to an android frame isn’t fatal in some fashion to the AI riding it. He decides not to think about that. “Can you take care of it, Sarge?”

“Are you kiddin’? Bowling Ball is already out here lookin’ at her. Got all dramatic about it too. Sayin’ we shot her and stuff. Tch. Big baby…”

“Oh my god!” Wash jerks his head, turning the volume down on his internal radio. “Are you okay, Wash?”

“Hi, Donut. Can we not with the COM-chatter?”

“Okay! But I just want you to know I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Thanks, Donut.”

“Who the hell’s goin’ around shooting at Texes?” Sarge’s voice glows with something Wash has never heard: a kind of glowing admiration that sounds entirely wrong given, you know, Sarge. “I’d like to meet the man who can take down one of her.”

Wash glances at Carolina. “No, you wouldn’t. Look, can you tell Church we’re out back by the northeast tunnel behind Blue Base? I need some help with Beta.”

“Fine, fine, but who’s shootin’?”

“Uh, old friend. Thought Tex was attacking me.”

Donut chimes in again. “Uuuuuh, she was attacking you? You know… and me.”

“Right. So you can see how there was a misunderstanding.”

“Uh-huh,” says Sarge. “Eggs benedict, son.”

The COM clicks off. “Okay, so help’s coming for Texas. Don’t, you know, give them any reason to be nervous and we should – what?”

Carolina is looking at him funny. In the window of his memory, which is eidetic and unforgiving, Carolina has never looked at him that way – with a combination of confusion and non-recognition. As though she tapped his shoulder in a subway tunnel and when he turned around he wasn’t who she thought he was. The look makes… he’s not sure, makes something roll over inside his chest, a turn of his anatomy that he wasn’t altogether prepared for because it’s then that he remembers lying in a hospital bed and how, in the fractured non-linearity of his head at the time, it made no sense what the Counselor was saying – that Maine had ripped Carolina apart for her fragments.

But they convinced him of it.

“Boss?”

“How long have you been out here with these guys?”

Wash thinks about it. “Little over two months now. They’re sim troopers. They helped me take down Command five months back and I… regrouped with them so… yeah about two months now out here.” He lets that hang for a minute. “I thought you were dead.”

Carolina folds her arms.

“It was better that I stay dead.” Then, hearing that aloud, she adds, “at the time.”

“No,” says Wash, “No, it wasn’t.”

Carolina blinks. “What did they tell you?”

“Everything. They had your HUD footage.”

“They showed you my HUD footage? Why would they do that?”

Wash laughs, realizes that he probably shouldn’t have because Carolina stares at him. “They… didn’t really have my health in mind at the time. They showed it to me a couple times – look.” He picks up her helmet from the grass, stands up, and holds it out to her. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one coming back from the dead.” He waits until she, after a moment, lifts her helmet from his hands. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Carolina wipes it with the back of her hand, wet shining on the Kelvar. “I’m fine.”

“You ran the mod too long.”

“I said I’m fine.” She wipes at her nose again, licking blood from her upper lip. “Shit.”

“When did you learn to do that? You couldn’t do that back in the program. Not like that.”

“I had to learn. No AI to help me.”

“Had to? What for?”

She stares at him. “There was a war on, Washington.”

And so there is a whole war, the one Carolina fought, in six words.

He points. “You’re still bleeding.”

“Shit,” she says again. She pinches the bridge of her nose and tips her head back. Maintaining this position she blinks hard at the sky. “Why do you call her Beta?”

“Because she asked me to call her Beta. It was her name before the Director… did whatever he did.”

“Right.” Carolina closes her eyes and she breathes in through her nose. “What did hedo?” It’s not a question for answering. She swallows, the muscles in her throat moving behind the high collar of her suit and when she inhales and it’s a ragged sound. Then it’s ragged words, her shoulders arching back, her hand pinching her nose sliding over her mouth. Muffled: “What the fuck did he do?”

Washington’s realization comes slow.

Carolina turns away from him and he thinks about Beta, Agent goddamn Texas, standing there with her arms down. What he thinks: the fastest way to end the fight, to stop Carolina using the speed mod, was to take the fucking blow. The air smells like hot metal, like sweat and ozone. Carolina bends at the waist, her eyes wound shut, her other hand against her belly. Her fingers curl against her stomach until he can see her fist shake, pressure there as if to a wound.

Epsilon poured electricity into him, static, like a gunshot to his head. A massive hole the size of Epsilon killing himself – pieces of the AI still jolting in his head, the parts survived independently of each other, bleeding things into the neural lightshow of his head. Epsilon purged into him like a machine, unfathomable torrents of memory. He remembers and he remembers and he can’t stop remembering – for himself, for Epsilon, for the Director, forever. He tore down Command because of what he remembers, what he fucking knows.

This time, when Washington reaches for Carolina, his hand finds her shoulder and stays.

He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

Chapter 24 Chapter Text

“You could have told me.”

It’s 2AM on the Mother of Invention and Washington’s only awake because he woke up violent. His dreams dug him waist-deep in a ditch back on Circumstance, sunk to his utility belt in a soup of mud and bodies. It was raining. The earth kept giving way when he tried to claw out of the crater, the weight of his equipment, his soggy armor, his panic, dragging him backwards into the grave. After that, he finds himself rolling down the hall on the battered deck of his skateboard, clipping along very, very slowly. Slow enough that when he hears the voices coming quiet down the hall, they clearly don’t pick up on the low grumble of the wheels.

Wash dismounts and picks up the board, padding quietly toward the pool of light laid like a carpet from the mouth of the observation deck doorway. Laughter, throaty, on the verge of a snort – Wash recognizes Carolina’s voice like that.

He peers around the corner into the room.

Carolina’s got her shoulder against one of the viewing panels and there are seven bottles of soda open on the desk to her left. The light glows amber off her bare shoulder, her arms folded, a half-empty bottle in one hand. Her face is turned out toward the training floor far below, the blue light of the leaderboard painting cool bands down her forearms, coloring the plane of her cheekbone. Her hair’s down.

She snorts again, whispers, “You really don’t even like beer?”

Maine, the skyline of his shoulders silhouetted against the window, blue light curving along the deep line of jaw, he answers, “No.”

The single syllable holds the grate of scar tissue and amusement. He hands her an empty bottle and she looks at it, wrinkles her nose at him, then takes it and hands him the one in her hand. He drinks it. Washington doesn’t move, standing at the door with his skateboard under his elbow, waiting to see if they notice him there – part of him hoping they don’t and the rest of him attracted, vaguely, to the lazy warmth in the room. To the way Carolina reaches up and rubs the back of her neck, rotating her head and sighing. The way Maine finishes off Carolina’s soda – and it is soda, not beer – and never looked crossways at it for having been on her mouth.

He never cares about that kind of thing.

“It’s been nearly a year,” says Carolina.

Maine nods.

“That’s a long time to not tell me you don’t like beer, Maine.”

A shrug. Carolina scrunches her nose disapprovingly.

The story: Agent Carolina and Agent Maine have a post-mission ritual. Provided the combat was extreme enough, that they were required to put themselves in an amount of danger exceeding the usual high standards of suicidally mad for Project Freelander, Carolina brings a six-pack of beer and they finish it together. Carolina began this ritual after a mission in the Epsilon-Eridani System, wherein she got two bullets to the gut and Maine lost part of his right ear and a chunk of his thigh.

The joke: Washington knows, because he served with Maine before PFL, that Maine has a childish (literally stick your tongue out and grimace) dislike of alcohol and a bad habit of drinking whatever people put in front of him. Maine is, contrary to his temperament in battle, disinclined to voice complaint about anything whatsoever short of setting his shoes on fire while he’s wearing them.

The punchline: Wash told Carolina this yesterday and she gaped at him like he’d slapped her.

“So much wasted beer,” says Carolina stoically.

Maine grunts.

A silence.

Carolina bursts out laughing. She slaps a hand against the viewing panel and leans against it, kinking at the waist to laugh into the floor with such force her whole body rocks with the violence of it. Maine, for his part, probably just rolls his eyes. Carolina keeps laughing and laughing, wipes her eyes with the back of one hand, presses her palm to her stomach and straightens up.

“Oh god…”

Maine sighs.

“Oh god, York is never gonna shut up about it.”

Maine sighs louder.

“Oh god, Washington is never gonna shut up about it.”

Maine sighs loudest of all and Carolina slumps a shoulder against the wall, dropping her head against the glass, coils of her hair clinging slightly against the angle of the glass. Laughing so hard seems to have worn her out. Maine looks at her and she grins up at him, a laconic smirk, eyes a bit heavy at the lid.

“And here I thought I was being a good teammate.”

Maine, because he is Maine, doesn’t answer. He does, however, reach over and pull a shank of hair into her face. Carolina, resigned to this, just nods, her hair draped like a scrap of red cloth over her eyes.

“Thanks, Agent Maine. You know just what to say to make a girl feel better.”

Then, as Wash is about to step away, she turns her head and sees him standing in the door and –

“Washington.”

He blinks.

“Wash, I need you to focus.”

Carolina is standing directly in front of him and her hand is on his shoulder. People are yelling. There is, actually an unfathomable amount of yelling going on. (He supposed that might be why he skipped out.) Epsilon is screaming at Alpha and Alpha is yelling at him. Tucker is yelling at both of them. Caboose is yelling because he’s confused and Beta-Tex is kinda heavy and he’s not sure where to put her. The Reds are also yelling because why should all the Blues have the fun?

“She shot Tex!” Epsilon is screaming. “I don’t want her in here! Get her out!

“Epsilon!” Alpha is on his knees on the floor, cupping Epsilon-Tex’s head, bare of helmet, between his hands. There is a significant portion of the right side of her skull missing, a gap there full of shadow and wiring, strands of blonde hair tangled into the wreckage. Wash’s insides knot up when he looks at it – an aborted feeling of responsibility and dread. Alpha’s got his hand on her forehead, is shouting, “Shut the fuck up and quite messing me up! I can’t get her out of it would you just –?”

“Not until she leaves!”

“Christ, Bowling Ball, could you be quiet!?” Tucker’s got his arms hooked under Beta’s armpits and is in the process of lifting her up onto the kitchen island. Or rather, Caboose is doing most of the heavy lifting and Tucker is awkwardly trying to do something. “I know you love being fucking crazy, but can you can it for five seconds?”

“I’m not the one pretending the gunman isn’t in the room!”

“Can it, Sir Roundalot!” Sarge has joined the chorus of shouting. “Your girlfriend tried to break Washington’s neck and then she got shot by Agent Fussybritches. So, in accordance with the laws of fair play – she started it. So shut up.”

“Oh god – CAROLINA WOULD HAVE KILLED ANY ONE OF YOU. SHES NOT EVEN ON YOUR SIDE. SHE’S A FUCKING FREELANCER. And stop telling me to shut up!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Alpha shouts immediately. “Jesus, I’m trying to do this, will you just let me concentrate!?”

“Wash, should I just —?” Carolina glances toward the door.

“No.” He says it as a reflex. “Stay.”

Epsilon, hearing this, jerks his head toward him. “Oh, that’s fucking typical, Washington. Last time you put a fucking hole in my head to save your skin. Now your crazy bitch team leader does it to Tex and we all just pretend it didn’t happen. That’s fucking great. Fuck you, Washington.”

Epsilon talking is like static in his head.

Carolina turns, an animal jerk of the shoulders toward Epsilon and Washington’s hand snaps out, catches her inner elbow before she can cross the room. She swings around to look at him, startled by his intervention. He can tell just by the line of virulent violence that rushes into her spine, that she recollects what she was told about Epsilon once upon a time in the recovery ward. (That, really, in the game of holes to the head, Epsilon had one up on Washington a long time ago.)

Wash just shakes his head. His grip on her arm – white-knuckled tight beneath the Kevlar.

“Epsilon,” he says. And it’s the first he’s spoken to his AI since the desert. “Calm down.”

Epsilon throws his hands up, dropping them into fists. “Stop talking to me like I’m crazy!”

“I’m not.” Wash is not yelling but, somehow, his voice carries. “You know I’m not.”

Carolina is looking at him. Epsilon says nothing.

Alpha, into the stunned silence, of course, snarls, “Great, now if you’re all done bitch fitting can you please fucking help me get her out of this? Epsilon, she’s ignoring me. If you don’t do something right now she’s gonna –” He growls, frustrated, his hand on Tex’s forehead tensing. “Just help me! You made her! You talk to her!”

The shouting dies with Epsilon. He kneels down with Alpha, bends down over Tex and cups her jaw with two hand and goes inhumanly still. The holo-lights in his armor dim, then pulse slow. For a moment the only sound is Tucker swearing softly, a mantra of ‘stupid fucking cockbite motherfucker Jesus Christ such bullshit stupid Churches fuck’and for a moment Wash feels a strong, random pull of sympathy for the flustered Blue soldier that he doesn’t know. He’s standing, shoulders hunched, gripping the edge of the kitchen island, helmet on the floor, his dreads getting away from him.

“What are they doing?” Carolina breaks the silence of course.

“They’re trying to get her to possess a different body.” Tucker is snappish with his answer. “Duh. Also: who the fuck are you?”

“Agent Carolina.”

“Great. More Freelancers.” He says it like ‘venereal diseases’. “Like Agent Melodramatic over there wasn’t enough. Now we have two. Thanks for jacking up literally all the AI in the canyon, lady. Because they aren’t motherfucking crazy enough without you punching their heads in.”

Carolina diplomatically circumvents that. “How is… uh, Beta?”

“Fucked up,” announces Tucker. “Church says she’s just in stand-by or something though. It’s Bitch-Pants Two Point Oh, he’s worried about. Texas will sort her shit out, but Bitch-Pants had, like, a billion fucking screws loose before you shot her in the head and now she’s not jumping or whatever. I dunno. Church explains it better. Do I look like fucking tech support to you?”

“Church is the only one who can set up the DVD-player,” says Caboose solemnly.

“No one has used DVDs since the 21^st century! I keep telling you this, Caboose!”

“And the toaster,” Caboose adds.

“Fuck me.” Tucker slams his hands on the table by Beta’s boots and leaves the room. “I’m going to check and make sure the backups are still hooked to the what-ever-it-is. Caboose, make sure the Reds don’t steal any shit.”

“You don’t have shit worth stealing,” Grif shouts.

“Caboose, shoot Grif first if anyone steals anything.”

“Hey!”

“Okay, Tucker.” Caboose, who still has his helmet on, proceeds to watch the Reds very closely. Said Reds are all standing at flanking positions at Washington’s right on account of Carolina being on his left. He is, indeed, aiming his weapon at Grif which means everyone else on the Red Team is actually at risk here. “You can’t have our DVD player.”

“Jesus,” says Grif. “Is anyone following this?”

“The two Churches are trying to fix the angry Tex. The not so angry Tex is okay. Tucker is a bitch. Caboose is stupid. The new girl ruined everything in five minutes.” Simmons looks around as if waiting for someone to contradict him or for Carolina to kick his balls into this throat. When neither of those things happen he adds, “That pretty much sum it up?”

“Yup. Everything ‘cept why Miss. Fussy Britches is in the canyon callin’ open season on Texes.” Carolina shoots Sarge as look and Washington grips her arm again just in case. “Mind you,” Sarge goes on, “I admire that gusto, but seems like poking a hornet’s nest. A hornet’s nest full’a silver-back gorillas! So, mind fillin’ us in there?”

Carolina’s got her helmet on, so it’s hard to tell if she’s legitimately trying to think of how to phrase this, or if she’s telling Sarge to fuck off and die with her eyes behind the visor. After a moment, however, she manages a terse response.

“I came back for Washington. I thought they were attacking us. It was a misunderstanding.”

“Isn’t kinda late to come back for him?”

Carolina’s still got her helmet on, but the look she shoots Simmons is unmistakably violent. Simmons whines and ducks behind Grif, who mutters something like ‘fuck’s sake’. Washington watches Carolina stare Simmons down until she seems to become aware of him staring at her, like that breaks her concentration. She stops trying to kill him with her eyes and faces forward again, watching Alpha and Epsilon do… whatever they are doing sitting like statues over Tex.

“I got… held up.”

“By what? A fucking coma?” Grif, of course, capitalizes on Simmons’ poor start.

Carolina’s fingers coil into a fist. She says, tensely, “No. Stop talking to me.”

“You gonna let her talk like that to us, Wash?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” says Washington. He lowers his voice while Grif says something like ‘bros before hoes, dude’ and Washington prays Carolina doesn’t actually kill the Reds before the hour is out. “Carolina, if this goes badly I don’t know what Epsilon is going to do.”

“Of course you don’t. Epsilon is insane.”

“He’s not insane.”

“He was made to be insane, Wash. We know that now. He killed himself in your head. Why are you defending him?”

“It wasn’t his fault.” He has no idea why he’s defending him. “Don’t… call him crazy.”

Carolina doesn’t say anything. “I need to talk to Texas when she… I mean Beta. When she wakes up I need to talk to her and I need to talk to Alpha.” She’s keeping this on-task. “I’m sorry that I misunderstood the situation here, but it’s important. I… have questions.”

“I know the feeling.”

Carolina glances at him, then back at Alpha and Epsilon, both with their hands on Tex’s head. Wash knows they’re doing something wirelessly, an intervention in frequency and ether, two machines transmitting to another. But sitting like that it’s almost like they’re praying, kneeling there like they’re calling down God to do something about the goddamn hole in Tex’s head. Wash feels Carolina struggle to say something, also sees her glance back at the Red’s and clearly decide whatever she wants to say, it can’t be said in front of them and she breathes out through her nose, a bullish sound, then…

“Washington –”

And then Beta sits up.

“What the fuck?” she says loudly.

“You’re awake!” says Caboose. “We thought you were dead… again.”

“Oh. Right. Hi, Caboose.”

“Hullo.”

“Where’s –?” She looks to her left, sees Alpha and Epsilon and Tex and the assembled Reds, Wash, and Carolina. “Oh. Right.” She swings her boots off the edge of the kitchen-island and lands heavily. She rotates her shoulder, then moves to kneel down between Epsilon and Alpha, peering back and forth between them. Without her helmet, her lips curl back at the corner, brow knitting with annoyance as she inspects the hole in Tex’s head. “Guess this was you, huh, Carolina?”

She looks up, finally.

When Carolina says nothing immediately, she stands up, reaches back and tucker the band from her hair, finger-combing the fibers back and pulling it through the elastic again, not in a ponytail but a military-tight bun, yanking her hair flat to her skull. She lifts her chin, one hand falling on her hip and Washington has to avert his eyes because every gesture and arch of brow sends shocks and nausea through him. She’s looking at Carolina though, not him.

“Well, kid. You know how to make an entrance. Wish you’d get your intel straight, but you always were in a fucking hurry.”

“What are you?”

“Wash didn’t explain it?”

“You explain it. What are you?”

Tex rolls her eyes and Wash actually closes his. “I’m a fucking AI, Carolina. You had a few of them, if you recall.”

“Not like you. What are you? Why do you look like that?”

“Because this was the only model in the warehouse, kid. If you want to know why thatis, then you’ll have to ask the Director and if you want to do that, you’ll have to get in line behind me, Tex, Alpha, Epsilon, Washington, and I dunno, I think Caboose wanted to ask the guy if it’s his birthday or something.”

“I heard there was cake,” says Caboose from somewhere.

“There’s no cake, idiot.”

“Yes, but Church said…”

“Whatever. Look, Carolina, you kinda jumped into this at the end here so I’m gonna keep this simple: The Director ripped us to pieces and we’re gonna find him and get answers. Wash here already burned the fucker down as it were, so the rest is personal. We get to him before the authorities, we get to ask all the questions the Chairman and his lot don’t give a fuck about.”

“You’re… going after the Director.”

“Yeah.”

“When you find him,” says Carolina, “are you going to kill him after?”

Tex doesn’t answer immediately. When she does, it’s a metered tone. “You want to kill him, Carolina?”

“I’m asking what your plan is.”

“I dunno. We’re working that out. You still game?”

“You have any idea,” says Carolina, “what going after the Director… actually means for me?”

“I do, kid.” Tex doesn’t even hesitate. “I know exactly. So again: you game?” There’s a quiet, then. “If you’re not, that’s fine but I gave you one free shot back there cause I owed it to someone but I’m not gonna do it again so if you’re planning on getting in my way…”

“No.” Wash opens his eyes in time to see Carolina duck her chin, how her shoulders square to answer. “No, if you’re going after the Director, then I’m going with you. It should be me. He’s – it was my team and my AI so it should be me.”

“Good. That’s sorted then. Caboose, where’s my helmet?”

“I’ll get it!”

“Thanks, kid.” Wash feels her glance at him. He’s keeping his gaze at about her collarbone, but he can feel her looking at him. “Figure I’ll stop weirding you fuckers out. Don’t get it crossed, Carolina, this isn’t my face. Not for a second. Not ever. That clear?”

There’s something dangerous in how Carolina says, quietly, “Crystal.”

Caboose hands Tex her helmet. “Thanks, Caboose.” She puts it on. “All of you should get out of here. It could be days before these three come out of it and when they do, it might not be so pretty. I’m not sure if Tex is gonna pull through.”

“I did too much damage,” says Carolina.

“No, actually, it’s just a frame. If she wanted to get out, then she would get out and transfer to one of the back up or we could hardline her to transfer. The problem is she’s not letting that happen.” When no one says anything she sighs. “Wash, you know how she keeps asking you about item three on that list you used to have?”

He’s not sure why she’s so confident it’s an old list but, “Yeah?”

“Let’s just say she’s got a similar list and she’s not so choosy about the order. Okay?”

“I… didn’t know that.”

“She didn’t want to come back, Wash. You get that, right?”

He hesitates, thinks about Alpha forcing York’s healing unit to his spine, about waking up in that warehouse, about being pinned in the mud, Alpha pinning him in the mud with the knife under his throat and the raw surge of relief that just won’t come and –“Does anything about my behavior suggest that I expect to survive this?” – he nods.

“Good,” says Tex. “Now get out. All of you. Carolina, you come with me. We need to talk.”

“I’ll stay.”

Tex and Carolina stare at him, but it’s Donut who breaks the quiet. “Are you sure, Washington?”

He pulls the rifle off his back and hands it back to Donut who, hesitating, takes it back from him. “I’ll stay with them until they wake up.” A shrug. “It should be me, right?”

“They’ll mind you least,” Beta agrees, warily. “But I don’t know what they’ll be like when they wake up, Wash.” She shakes her head slowly. “If they don’t come back with Tex…”

“Then I’ll deal with that.” He leaves the Reds and takes a seat on the kitchen island, bracing his elbows against his knees. Across from him: The Red Team, Carolina, and Beta-Texas all looking back at him with a question. He thinks about his response, whether he means it or if he’s lying and he’s not sure… both in equal parts, shifting like a shell-game inside him. Despite this, he says, calmly, “I’ll be fine, guys.”

He think he means it.

He waits.

Chapter 25 Chapter Text

Washington is thinking about medical insurance.

This is a really boring thing to think about while waiting for three AI fragments to come out of a three-way seemingly psychic system lock, but it’s been a few hours now and he’s got a headache.

Between the dull aching pulses, it crosses his mind he might – at a future time, not now, no time soon – need actual medical attention, not Aloe Vera neck rubs and orange juice. (He wasn’t aware that was even a thing?) But the possibility of regular healthcare seems so fucking alien at this point that thinking about it is rather like projecting himself into a theoretical fishbowl populated by pill bottles, wrists blistered, and torn IV leads. He’s sitting on the kitchen island, his helmet on the counter next to him, waiting.

He waits for Alpha and Epsilon and Tex to wake up.

There’s a knot in his stomach. It’s been there for hours. When he thinks about it, about the knot and why it’s there, the pressure builds under his gut and rises until his breathing is through clenched teeth and he – he’s tugging the refrigerator door open. As he rifles through the contents of the freezer, elbow deep, prying up an ice-cream carton from the bottom of the ice box, Washington becomes aware of himself as though from a distance. Some busted up motherfucker in wrecked power armor extracting Ben&Jerry’s from someone else’s fridge.

This is it, he thinks, watching himself bang around in the drawers for a spoon, then give up and use a fork of suspicious cleanliness, this is where I am now. Prying up a chunk of slightly freezer-burnt ice cream from the corner of cement-hard Cherry Garcia. The fork is so cold the tines cleave to his tongue for a split second before the heat of his mouth on the metal gives way to the dull sugary burn of melting ice cream. He closes his eyes. Swallows. The headache is gone.

“Are you fucking stealing Tucker’s ice cream?”

Without looking, Washington knows its Alpha talking, not Epsilon.

He’s got the fork in his mouth when he looks over his shoulder. Alpha is standing, Tex and Epsilon still immobile behind him. For a moment, just staring at Washington, he’s the stupid sim solider fuck failing to shoot Caboose from the top of a ruined barricade wall. It’s a weird nostalgia to have for someone he ultimately didn’t fucking know. Wash pulls the fork from his mouth, licks the back of it (mostly to really get it across he’s getting around to answering the question), and swallows.

“Yeah, I am.” He starts carving out another bite. “Why are you out? How’s Tex?”

“She’s got a goddamn hole in her head, Wash.” Alpha enunciates the words as though Wash may be slow on the uptake. “How the fuck do you think she is?” While he exudes annoyance, Washington takes another bite of ice cream. Church almost manages to keep it together but, “Are you seriously going to stand there and eat while Tex is – goddammit, stop eating.”

“I’ve been sitting here for hours. Yeah, I’m going to eat.”

“Get your own ice cream, jackass. That’s Blue Team property. What’s with you and stealing junk food?”

Wash laughs, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, Kevlar on his thumb scraping his lower lip. “Kay, so any luck with Tex? Tucker says she won’t come out of it.”

“Why,” says Church, clearly hung up, “are you even here?”

“I volunteered to keep watch.”

“You volunteered?” Alpha shakes his head, hands up, and circles toward the opposite side of the kitchen island. “No, no, no. You joined the fucking Red Team to keep away from me and Epsilon. You hate us. Why would you volunteer to keep watch?”

“Because I like Beta,” says Wash, aware that Tex, in the moments before the bullet found her, called it. “And Tex has a hole in her head. Carolina and Texas needed to talk, so I volunteered. Who else was gonna babysit you?”

“Tucker could have –”

“He’s keeping Caboose away. Also, he was gonna draw dicks on your visors because he’s, and I’m quoting, ‘Sick of your robot soap opera bullshit.’ So…”

“Cockbites,” mutters Alpha.

“Why,” repeats Wash, “are you awake?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I don’t care.”

“Okay, okay. Uh – do y’know what recursion, is?

“Yeah. It’s when computer tries different iterations to solve a problem. When it gets to the end, it returns all those solutions back up the line to the first iteration, and then it has its solution. What does that have to do with you and Epsilon –” Wash abandons that thought, cut off internally by a different more pressing one: “What problem are you trying to solve?”

“The Tex problem.”

“The… Tex problem.”

“Yeah, the problem where she won’t let us help her.” Alpha tosses his hands up. “We’ve talked to her, like, a billion times but she just fucking blows us off every fucking time.”

“You’re talking to her? Over and over?”

“Yeah, we go in, find her, talk to her, and she blows us off. So we try again, different, and she blows us off again. It’s complicated. And her memory is like full of dangerous shit so sometimes we just get stuck and have to start again? I was making it worse, I think, so I left, but Epsilon’s still in there. I should have dragged him out too but he’s… you know… me. So –” He gestures, as though that will fully articulate the psychology that would lead him to respect Epsilon’s self-inflicted rampancy. “No talking to him either.”

“So you two have been… following Tex through her memories and trying to get her to agree to come back with you? How many times?”

“It’s pretty compressed time in there so… a lot?”

“Just… a lot?

“Yeah.”

“You two haven’t learned a fucking thing have you?”

Alpha’s head kind of jerks back. “Huh?”

“You can’t make Tex do something she doesn’t want to do.”

“She is trying to kill herself.”

“Epsilon,” says Wash, “shouldn’t have brought her back in the first place.”

“Are you seriously telling me we should just let her die?”

“I’m telling you about two minutes before Tex got shot, she was telling me that you have a habit of making calls for people based on what you think is best for them. Tex needs to make this call.”

“Hey, you know what, buddy?” Alpha points a finger at him. “This is about me and you back at Command isn’t it? Because I didn’t, what, let you martyr yourself? Like… okay the coma thing… I might have fucked that up, but you were alive at the end of it. I’m kind of sick of you ragging on me for saving your life. Like excuse me for thinking you guys might prefer being alive to being dead, you know, just throwing that out there.”

Wash laughs. “You know what? Fuck you, Alpha.”

“Church.”

Wash leans forward slightly. “Fuck you, Church.” He shakes his head and goes back to, somewhat angrily, stabbing at the ice cream just so he doesn’t have to look at the AI. “You follow a dead woman through a memory, and every time she escapes you, you either follow her down to the next set of memories or, what – resurrect her in some way? Like the Director brought Allison back? You drag me across the damn planet because you have some idea that being stuck with you is what’s best for me? Fuck you. Tex was right about you.”

“Tex is crazy –”

Wash doesn’t look up from the ice cream or raise his voice. “Don’t call her crazy.”

“Tex and you are not the same, Washington. Or… or are you really saying you’d rather I have let you die and that I should do the same with Tex right now? I should let her die?”

Wash ignores Church a moment when the stem of his fork bends slightly, hitting a particularly stubborn bit of freezer burn. He extracts the fork, sets the carton down and goes to the sink, turning on the water hot and running it under the stream. His gloves don’t have the sensitivity to pick up the heat so very experimentally he tests the temperature of the metal against his lower lip. Briefly – a memory, burning his tongue against the back of a spoon in college. Washington didn’t go to college. The metal burns his mouth but he doesn’t really notice.

Church comes around to Washington’s side of the counter. “Stop eating ice cream.”

Washington laughs at him.

He sees Church start to reach for his shoulder. Wash moves first. The fork hits the tile about the same second that Church’s chest slams down hard against the counter top, the full strength of Washington’s force-mods pinning him there – one hand clamped at the base of his skull, his other hand viced around one wrist. He’s jamming the AI’s arm so far up the middle of his back that, were he human, the bone would have given way. As it is, Church just kind of yelps. Then starts yelp-swearing. As the pitch of Church’s voice skyrockets, Washington thinks, vaguely, how a Smart AI can control cities, can pilot war-machines across the cosmos, lay waste to alien civilization from orbit.

And this one just kind of sputtering at him because he’s stuck in an arm-bar.

“Let go, asshole!”

“Don’t fucking touch me, unless I tell you to.”

“You know, if I had my mods still –”

Wash’s lip curls back from his teeth. “You’d what?”

There is a pause. The ice cream is melting on the counter by Church’s head, the carton dented at the corner where he dropped it. There’s something strange about the feel of the neck in Washington’s hands – the density of the musculature against his fingers feels wrong, but the tension is leaving slowly, diffusing against his palm as Church kind of… settles. The silence persists.

“I’m not sorry I didn’t let you die,” says Church. He twist his neck a little to glare over his shoulder at Wash. “Even if you’re a jackass and you hate me or whatever, I’m not sorry.”

“Great, you’re a fucking –”

“I’m not done.” Wash stops talking. Alpha kind of grunts, a low annoyed sound, almost a sigh. “I’m not gonna talk about Beta because it’s none of your goddamn business, Washington, but you’re – you’re not completely fucking wrong about Tex.” Wash unclenches his teeth. He hadn’t noticed he was gritting them before. “She didn’t ask to be brought back. You think I don’t know that? I do. So, fuck you. She’s here now so I’m gonna try to help her.”

Wash breathes in. Out. His hands, he realizes, are gripping pretty tight. He lets Church go. The AI glares at him a moment before he straightens up and rubs his neck, as though the pressure has put a kink in the alignment. Washington paces away from Church, folds his arms, paces back, then forth.

“Why do you think Epsilon can talk her out of it?” Wash jerks his chin toward him and Tex. “He’s the one who brought her back in the first place. Why would she trust him?”

Alpha hesitates. “Well… he’s me but, like, me from back then? So he’s in love with her.”

“So?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“So fucking what? Epsilon is in love with Tex? She doesn’t want to exist. Someone loving you isn’t enough when you want to stop going.”

“Well, you –” Alpha stops.

“I what?”

“You…” He folds his arms and looks down briefly, before seemingly making eye contact again; it’s hard to tell with the helmet. “You seem okay. Now.”

“You saved my life at Command, Church, but then you put a gun in my hand and told me to choose.” Wash shakes his head, slowly. “So I chose to keep going. Me. Not you.”

“I’m not putting a gun in Tex’s hand.”

“It’s already there. She’s dying. Only she can choose to survive now. I don’t… you and Epsilon can’t do anything. It’s down to her.”

“We can’t do nothing.”

“Yes, you can. People have to all the time. You’ve already literally brought her back.Twice. And now Epsilon is running her down? You aren’t in control of people. You two need to let go.” Wash lowers his voice, not sure when he raised it. “Maybe, maybe, she’ll come back if you do that.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“If she doesn’t then she was never coming back, Church.”

He doesn’t know when he got so close to Alpha but he is, his hand fists at his sides, his throat hot like he’s swallowed that hot spoon from his memory. He’s close enough that he can see his face in Alpha’s visor, a blurry gold reflection in the Dura-plex. Alpha is a little taller than him. He’s standing chin down, silent, and he doesn’t say anything for a long, long time. But Wash doesn’t move – some kinetic instinct holding him in place, glaring into his own eyes in the visor because if Alpha doesn’t do something –

He reaches up and pulls his helmet off.

Wash backs up. Alpha follows him, shoves his helmet into Wash’s hands and Wash opens his mouth but doesn’t know what he means to say. Alpha doesn’t quite look like the Director. He’s too young for one, and there’s something mixed about his features that the Director never was. The mid-twenty-something staring down at him is a stranger – generic almost, pale, helmet hair like metal shavings sticking straight up. And looking back at him is bad Deja vu – like he almost remembers the way his brow knits, the angle of his mouth, the way his jaw is set and he almost – Wash doesn’t know the face. The eyes break it. Green, bio-light shining back from inside the retina. Segmentation in the iris. The eyes are mechanical and then, Wash remembers, all of it is mechanical.

“Hold this.”

The helmet is heavy in his hands. “What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna go tell Epsilon to let go.” Alpha is already rounding the opposite end of the kitchen island. He runs his hand furiously through his hair and marches over to crouch next to Epsilon. “You better not walk off.” He reaches down and grabs Epsilon’s wrists. “I think I’m about to do my fucking worst right now.”

He closes his eyes. Washington has less than two seconds to react.

Suddenly, Epsilon is jerking, violently. He makes a noise like he’s been hit and Washington feels that scream like an echo jarring through his head. Alpha, already gripping Epsilon’s arms, pulls them away from Tex’s face and powers up to his feet, driving Epsilon backward off of the gynoid frame.

“Oh god, what did we do?”

“Calm down.”

“Let go of me!”

“Just wait.”

“Let go of me, Alpha you fucking –!”

“We agreed!”

“What if we’re wrong!?”

“We’re not wrong.”

“That’s easy for you to say! You have Beta!”

“This isn’t about me!”

“Let go of me!”

Alpha lets go, holding up his hands and backing up. “Fine. Got it. Just don’t –” Epsilon sucker punches him in the stomach. Wash, too far away to interfere, stares. Alpha staggers clutching his middle. “hit… me,” he wheezes. “Fucking… asshole.”

“Why is your helmet off?” Epsilon notices Wash. “Why the fuck is he here?”

“Forget him.”

“I can’t forget him that’s kind of the fucking point!”

And before Washington can begin to fathom what that means a sleepy voice says, “Hullo.”

The AI stop yelling and stare. Wash turns around. Caboose is standing in corridor entry near the end of the galley, still in full armor, head tilted. For a moment he says nothing and Washington, somewhat hesitantly, says, “Hi, Caboose. Uh, what –?”

“Yeah, hi. Tucker says Mean Tex is awake now in the other room and to come get you because she is kicking him.” There is a stunned silence. Caboose tilts his head the other way. “Yeah, she is kicking him a lot?”

“No, I’m done.”

Caboose looks over his shoulder. Epsilon-Tex loops an arm around his neck, hooks it around into a kind of rough one-armed hold and Caboose squawks and paws at her arm and for a moment something in Wash lurches, like it lurched when it was Donut with Tex’s arm around his neck and he – stops because Tex is knocking on the top of Caboose’s helmet. Caboose, seemingly familiar with this rough-housing, squirms and wiggles.

“Noooo,” he says, but in a tone that’s not very unwilling.

“Sup, kid? It’s been a long time.”

“It has?”

“For me. I didn’t remember you very well.”

“Well, that makes me sad. Remembering is important.”

“Well.” She lets go, kind of taps him on the chin of his helmet. “I promise to remember a bit better this time.” She looks toward Washington, the gold in her helmet striping molten in the lights before she straightens. He notices, before she pulls the helmet off completely, that someone has drawn a smiley face on her visor and supposes that is why Tucker was getting kicked. “What are you doing here?”

“Going,” Wash says, putting Church’s helmet down. “Just going.”

She laughs. Allison laughs. Washington shivers in his armor. “No you’re not. Stay there.”

“Tex?” It’s Epsilon this time. “Are you… I didn’t see you jump to the new frame.”

“Oh, shut up, wuss. It’s been literally two seconds for you.”

She puts her helmet down on the end of the counter next to Church’s helmet and moves in front of Washington. When she keeps walking toward him, Wash backs up. Her smile is dangerous and he knows it. It’s like Fall in Austin, Texas. It’s cut grass and the smell of home and he backs away, a rising panic in his gut because while he may have just argued for her continued existence… she’s still exactly who she was before Carolina shot her down.

“So you know what we look like now.”

“Tex,” says Alpha.

“Look like you’re gonna freak out, Wash. You freaking out?”

“Fuck off, Tex.”

She laughs and Wash bites his tongue because Allison laughs. “What do you think of the new model?” She makes a two-armed ta-da presenting gesture. “The Director knows how to pick ‘em, huh? We look good.”

“Tex, knock it off.” Epsilon this time.

“You know the two of them look the same too, right?” She points at Alpha and Epsilon. “Epsilon keeps messing with his. Trying to make it look different. Didn’t work so well. He shown you? Beta doesn’t mess with her model. Neither do I. Not point in getting attached if Freelancers are gonna keep showing up to pop us in the head. Right?”

“Get out of my way, Tex.” Wash is running out of room to back up.

“Think we look good, Wash?”

Washington’s back hits the refrigerator. Epsi-Tex plants a hand against the freezer door by his head. Her face is inches from his and she’s smiling. He can’t move and she leans forward and – she holds him against the wall, palms fit tight around his throat, thumbs hooked up against the place where his jaw meets his ear and she kisses him and it’s hot, her mouth hot against his and he’s already hot, the muggy heat, skin tacky with humidity and the pressure of her thigh between his and her teeth catch his lip and – Washington jerks his head sideways and down. Her kiss catches him on the temple, her fingers hooking adroitly up under his chin, holding him still for the split second of contact.

She jumps back just as Alpha’s hand finds her shoulder. He pushes, but she’s already moving back, hands up, that jackal grin still in place, pieces of her bangs sliding free from her ponytail, hanging in pale threads around her face.

“Glad I’m back?” she says.

But when Washington says, “Yes,” without a trace of mockery, the smile goes.

Wash takes that as his cue. He ducks past Epsilon, shouldering past his old AI and it’s so strange. He moves past him and Epsilon turns, one hand twitching up instinctively as if to steady… then stopping. Wash ignores it. He strides away from the galley for the main foyer. He’s aware he’s probably red in the face. He’s aware of the heat sitting low in his gut, pushing pressure through skin as he steps over the threshold into the hall. He’s breathing fast. Can’t tell if it’s panic or residual. He can hear Alpha calling his name down the hall, but he keeps walking, resisting the urge to start running.

“Washington!”

“Back off, Church.”

“I didn’t know she would do that.”

“I said back off.”

“You forgot your helmet.”

“Keep it.”

“Slow down a second. I have it.”

Wash wants to tear his hair out. He turns on his heel. Church is, indeed, jogging around the corner with Wash’s helmet in hand though he slows down significantly when he catches the look on Wash’s face. Alpha’s still not wearing his helmet so when he realizes Washington got a murderous look about him, his annoying expression gives away very convincingly to an ‘oh-this-guy-can-kick-me-into-a-wall’ kind of configuration. He stops short, the dark red armor hanging from one hand at his hip.

“Uh, sorry about that.”

“Whatever. It’s Tex.”

“Right, uh…” He holds out the helmet. “Here.”

Washington steps forward. He ignores the helmet.

“Uh, Wash, what are – oh.”

Alpha’s mouth doesn’t taste bitter. It should. If he were human, the kiss would be cut with the flavor of another person’s tongue. But when he shoves Alpha up against the wall, hooks his fingers up into his hair and kisses him, it’s clean. Church isn’t breathing. Wash can feel it, the lack of breath when Church’s mouth open’s against his, how he makes a noise in his throat but there’s not vibrato under his thumb, one hand having slid down around the AI’s neck. He kisses Alpha again, harder, sloppy. Tongue and teeth and residual. It’s residual.

Feels a hand against his lower back. The metal scrape of armor on armor. Washington pulls Church down by the neck, drags him down to meet his mouth, things blurring, he drags his mouth down Alpha’s jaw, where his neck meets his hairline, where his pulse would be but it’s not. Bites down, teeth against skin and his skin doesn’t smell like anything, doesn’t carry the smell of soap or sweat of anything and –

Wash hooks his fingers into the lip of his helmet and tugs it from Church’s hand.

Then he’s gone, pulling the helmet on and walking fast out the door into the evening dusk. He doesn’t look back. No one calls after him. He get about ten meters out of Blue Base walking… then he breaks into a sprint, running across the valley as fast as his body will carry him, his tongue tasting like nothing at all.

Chapter 26 Chapter Text

Here’s the trick to staying sane: Keep moving.

Funnily enough, Washington didn’t learn that bit from PFL. He learned that at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. A night-terrorized bed-wetter, he pried nails out of windowsills to run for miles to nowhere in the dead of winter, summer, whenever. The farthest he ever ran was four states out. Five foster homes. Then the war. The war was more his pace, honestly. Made sense. Move or die.

So Wash keeps moving.

Mostly he keeps moving to avoid thinking too hard about things he did in the Blue Base. He keeps moving because otherwise he’s going to think too hard about how his mouth aches, his lower lip holding onto residual pressure and – He keeps his helmet on in the Red Base kitchen while Sarge complains that Beta-Texas and Carolina are camped out by the lake. They know this because they’ve been really nervously listening to them argue down on the opposite end of the beach from their front door. Now they’re just huddled in the kitchen anxiously eating nachos. Wash can’t explain how the nacho-eating is, somehow, comforting.

“Okay,” says Washington, “but when you say ‘argue’…?”

“There was one little fist fight,” says Donut soothingly. He’s digging a chip into a bowl of salsa as he talks. “Just the one. I think Nice Texas said something that made your aqua friend mad. Otherwise they’re just standing there talking. Your old boss still seems mad though.”

Grif, around a mouthful of nacho, says, “Everyone Washington knows is mad. I think there’s a direct correlation.”

“Carolina,” says Wash. “Her name is Carolina.”

“Hey, did Bitch Pants Mccrabby get herself fixed up or what?”

“Tex is fine. Everyone is fine.” Oh shit. Donut is tilting his head at him. Washington clears his throat. “Are you guys okay?”

“Us?” says Simmons, somewhat falsetto. “Yeah, I guess, but that’s because the new girl’s been beating up Blues. She gonna come after us next?”

“I don’t think it’s on her immediate To Do List. Just don’t do anything…” He glances furtively toward Sarge, who is listening while somewhat meaningfully polishing the barrel of his ever-ready shotgun. “…aggressive,” he finishes slowly. “Don’t do anythingaggressive at her.”

“Heeeey,” says Donut, in a tone that’s absolutely anxiety inducing. “You sure everything was okay at Blue Base? You seem kinda –”

“Everything was fine.” Shit. He probably said that too fast. Wash clears his throat. “Nothing’s on fire. All the AI are still bent on Director-targeted seek and destroy vengeance. No one is dead which, considering how many people got shot today, I find shocking.” Donut tilts his head. “What? What are you looking at me like that for?”

“I dunno.”

“Okay, then stop looking at me. I’m gonna go talk to Carolina and get an itemized copy of her immediate To Do List. I get the feeling seek and destroy might be right up her alley.”

“And, uh, how about you?”

Wash blinks at Simmons who’s twiddling his thumbs.

“Uh, just, know you know. After everything that’s happened are you gonna… go with them or…?” Simmon’s fidgeting increases. “Just curious.”

“I don’t know, Simmons. I might. If Carolina asks me to.”

“For the record,” chimes in Grif, “we’re not coming with you on crazy Blue adventures if you go with them. Just putting it out there. That’s not happening.”

Sarge makes a low, “hmmmm,” sound and Grif looks worried.

“So, Wash,” says Simmons slowly, “if Carolina says lets go after the Director, you’ll do it, but not for Texas or Church?”

“Why are you repeating things I just said?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” He waves his hands in a consoling, calming manner. “Just making sure we’re aaaall on the same page.”

Grif, through a wad of nacho, says, “He wants to know if you and your boss were ever doing it, but he can’t get it out.”

“That’s not what I was getting at, Grif! Shuttup!”

Washington is marginally less comforted now. “I’m gonna go.”

“So that’s a yes or a no?”

“That’s a ‘fuck you, Private Grif.’”

“Nah, see, Washington is too much of a tool to date his squad leader. And it’s Church who likes scary chicks who can beat him up.” Grif raises his voice. “But I’m pretty sure that Carolina chick can totally beat you up, just saying, she nuked a Tex. That’s like… twelve of you in Freelancer math.”

But Washington was out the door at “Church likes chicks” so he doesn’t hear that last bit.

“The Director is my father.”

Washington stares.

Carolina isn’t looking at him.

Beta is gone and the sun is rising over the lake, lying mirror smooth, burns a clean streak of molten gold across the water to Carolina’s feet were the water ripples against her boots. She is standing there, alone, like a sentinel looking out over the water, her arms folded, her helmet on. Wash can see she’s got something in her right hand, a small stone she must have picked up from the edge of the water because it’s slightly wet in her gloved grip. She’s rubbing the stone idly with her thumb.

Almost casually, she says, “You know the face Tex and Beta are using now?”

“The blonde woman?”

“Yeah. Their face-model looks like my late mother.”

Washington blinks, hard. Carolina continues not to look at him, but now she sounds almost amused in that kind of borderline not-okay way, like something could give way under the façade of calm she’s projecting. Washington is familiar, intimately so, with that feeling. So he says nothing, because he suspects she doesn’t want him to have an opinion just yet.

“So,” says Carolina, “if I understand what Texas told me, the Director mapped Alpha off his own neural patterns. Then, at some point during the early outset of the program, the Beta AI manifested as a binary intelligence to the Alpha ship’s AI. She presented a similar personality presentation as my mother and then the Director ripped Alpha apart starting with Beta and then piece by piece the other fragments.” A one shoulder shrug. “Then, after Maine went rogue, I guess he went truly insane. And that’s what he is now – on the run and still working on his little project.”

She skips the stone across the water when Washington doesn’t answer and it skims half a dozen jumps across the burning lake before sinking. Carolina laughs.

It’s not a good sound.

Washington clears his throat. “I don’t know what to say to that boss.”

“I didn’t expect you to.” She turns slightly, away from him so she’s looking farther afield. The light breaks over her shoulder in beams, prisming out from the edge of her armor. “Just thought I’d put the cards down before I say what I’m saying next.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m going after the Director with Beta and Alpha. I’m planning to kill him when I find him.” She inhales slightly, exhales slow. “We’re leaving soon. I wanted to know if you’re coming with us or not.”

“Everyone keeps asking me that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Tex was trying to get me to make that decision when you shot her.” When Carolina doesn’t respond to that Wash clenches his right hand tight, uncurls it. “Simmons asked me too before I walked down here. Everybody’s asking.”

“Simmons is the… burgundy one.”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That I might do it if you asked me to.”

Carolina turns to face him finally, hesitates, then reaches up and unseals her helmet, pulling it off. She briefly finger-combs her bangs from her forehead, tugs her ponytail loose then sets her helmet in the sand by her feet. She’s almost smiling, but Wash wouldn’t call it smiling, not really. It’s just the same shape. She says nothing while she fixes her hair, then looks up at him. He’s standing at the verge where the grass gives way to the sand of the narrow beach, unarmed.

“Back at Blue Base… you gave your rifle to the pink one.”

“His name is Donut.”

“I cannot call him by his stupid nickname.”

“No. That’s literally his last name.”

“Wow. Okay. Wash, why did you give Private Donut your rifle at Blue Base?”

“Because it was his rifle. I borrowed it.”

“Where’s your rifle?”

“I don’t have one right now.”

“Why?”

He almost evades her, the say she looks at him, but what he actually says is, “Because I don’t have enough gold stars,” which gets him the long silent blank stare he thought it would. He shrugs. “They figured it would be safer not to give me a weapon until everyone felt comfortable with the idea of my having one again.”

Carolina purses her lips. “And you’re okay with them having that say over you?”

“Right now? Sure.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m one of the people not comfortable with the idea of having a gun.”

He can’t read the way she’s looking at him. He’s got not touchstone to compare it to from back in the Program. She never looked at him like she’s looking at him now.

“Can you take off the helmet, Wash?”

“Why?”

“Because I haven’t talked to you in years and I want to see your face.”

He curls and uncurls his right hand. Carolina doesn’t say anything, she just continues to look at him with an expression he can’t read. There are new lines on her face. Not as many lines as he’s got, but new lines and that reminds him that she’s real, that she’s afflicted by time, that she’s not a memory because if she were a memory he would remember her exactly that way she was before.

Washington takes off his helmet.

He doesn’t move from where he is and Carolina doesn’t move either. She just tilts her head and looks him up and down, once. He wonders if she’s doing the same thing he is: making sure he’s real after all. He wonders, suddenly, at the enigma that she is because the last time he really saw her she was comatose in the medical ward with two AI fritzing a cascading system failure into the interior structures of her neural lattice. The woman standing on the beach is not really the one he knew back then. She, like him, has had so much time to change.

She kinda smiles. This smile is better than the other one.

“Hey, Wash.”

He wasn’t expecting the gentleness there so he says, “Hey, boss.”

“Did I already tell you I’m glad you’re not dead?”

“No, I think we had to skip that on account of your shooting Tex in the head.”

“Sorry about that.”

“No, I was giving it some thought myself as you showed up.” He shrugs. “The AI are kinda hard not to shoot.”

Carolina shakes her head. “Interesting company you are keeping these days, Agent Washington. AI and sim soldiers. They’ve got gold stars and your gun and they gave you a fuckin paint job and shit.” There’s a ghost in her voice, like ‘It doesn’t hurt if you don’t let them hit you.’ She’s grinning a little. “You look… kind of ridiculous.”

“You’re turquoise.”

“You always hated our armor color –”

“Shut. Up.”

“– and look at you now.”

“I don’t care if you were dead for two years, I’m gonna punch you.”

She laughs. It’s a rough sound, like a car engine starting up after too many years in a garage and she clears her throat after.

“How did you find me?” says Washington.

Carolina thinks a moment.

“Well it took me five months to do it, so not easily.” She rolls her helmet from one palm to the next, a slow agitated motion. “After you took down Command there was an inter-galactic Level One BOLO put out for you, Maine, and the Director. The Oversight Committee is restricting this to ONI-bands only, but it’s starting to leak. Everyone knows you destroyed Command, but it’s the why no one is clear on.” She tilts her head. “Me included, actually. You basically destroyed the evidence, Wash…”

“Not all of it. I kept the, uh, back up.”

“Epsilon. You, what? Were going to turn him in to damn the Director?”

“That didn’t go like I thought.”

“And how did you think an assault on Command would go?”

“I dunno. Sounded Freelancer tactical to me.”

“Doesn’t sound like you were thinking about exit options to me.”

Washington runs his fingers through his hair, curls it into a fist at the back of his head and sighs. “No one will let that go.”

Carolina gauges that response warily before rejoining. “Beta told me what happened with Maine. Him and Sigma. She says you took care him in the end.”

Wash’s right hand curls and uncurls again. “Yeah, I did.”

“I’m sorry, Wash. I know Maine was –”

“I didn’t know who Allison was.” Carolina allows the violence of the subject change show on her face. Wash just keeps going. “I knew Alpha was based off the Director’s memories. I know because Epsilon put that in my head. Epsilon was Alpha’s memory of everything. He purged Epsilon and Epsilon purged into me. So I knew that Beta was a memory of someone called Allison but even Epsilon didn’t know what or who she was exactly; he was too fucked up. She was just a word in the middle of everything Alpha was. Driving him crazy.”

Carolina, after a moment’s silence, follows his example and diverts the conversation from the topic of dead loved ones.

“After you got Epsilon, the Director put you in iso for three weeks, Wash. You remember that?”

“No. I don’t remember shit about that time except what Epsilon remembered.” Wash taps an index finger against the side of his helmet. “Which is what fucked me up by the way.”

“I know, Wash. I saw you when they let me, you know, before they pulled Epsilon.”

Washington hesitates. “I’m – they didn’t pull Epsilon right away?”

“No.” Her tone is blank. “They didn’t.”

“Huh.” Wash looks out over the water. “I mean… I’m not surprised. I just didn’t know that.”

“He fucked us over, Wash.” Carolina takes a step toward him, the first since he got here. She grips her helmet in one hand, punctuates her words with the other. “The Director fucked us over and everyone we know is dead because of it. If the UNSC gets to him first they will just… he’ll just be another fucking war criminal getting hung up on their post-war wall of necessary fucking evils and we won’t get a shot at him. The AI won’t get to ask him the questions they need to ask. We won’t get to close this out the way we want to.”

“Who says I want to close this out by killing him?”

Carolina stops. He looks at her but her face is carefully blank.

“How do you want to close this out?”

“I don’t want to close this out. I tried to close it out back at Command and it backfired, Carolina. It backfired and it backfired again and again and I’m pretty goddamn tired. I’m really tired of things backfiring on me when I try to do the right fucking thing. It backfired when I joined Freelancer. It backfired when I tried to protect South. It backfired when I tried to take down the Director. It just keeps… going wrong and I don’t think you need me. You can do this without me.”

“Yes.” Carolina doesn’t even hesitate. “I can, but I don’t want to, Wash. I want you to come with me.” He stares at her. “What?”

“Nothing just… never heard you say something like that.”

She closes her eyes and rubs her neck. “I’ve had a long go of fighting alone since Sidewider, Wash. I’m tired too. I don’t want to do this on my own if I don’t have to. I told you what this is to me. I think we should stick together. I think our odds are better if we do. I think you should be there when we close this out. I think it’s the right thing to do and I promise I won’t let this backfire on you, Wash. I promise you, I’ll take that bullet if it comes. Alright?”

He stares.

“You gotta use your words, Wash. I don’t speak long blank stares.”

“And here I thought you and Maine were friends.”

“Ha!” Carolina looks startled at her own laughter, like she might not let it continue. Then she grins. “No, see, I’m fluent in long, judgmental, Agent Maine style hate-glaring. That’s not what you’re doing right now, Bambi.”

“Go fuck yourself, boss.”

“If you were Maine you could have told me to do that with your helmet on and radio off.”

Wash sighs and runs a hand over his face.

“Christ. I’ll come with you, Carolina. But it’s not because I need to kill this son of a bitch. It’s because we were a team before, for what that’s worth.” He takes a few steps onto the beach and extends a hand to her. “Deal?”

She takes his hand in hers. “Deal.”

Chapter 27 Chapter Text

“So are we clear on the plan?”

“This is bullshit,” says Tucker, again, for the dozenth time.

“Noted. Does anyone have any questions?”

“Yeah, why the fuck do I have to come along on this stupid adventure?”

“Does anyone besides Tucker have any questions?”

Washington lifts a hand to get Carolina’s attention. “Yeah.” He points at Tucker. “Why the fuck does he have to come along on this stupid adventure?”

Tucker stares at him like he’s grown a second head and Carolina stares at him like there’s been several years of absence between them and he’s not like she remembers. He’s fine with both assessments. Washington folds his arms and remains where he is, leaning back against one of the parked Warthogs. The entirety of Blue Team, the AI, and Carolina have gathered in a very wide but hostile circle near the parked vehicles and managed to keep things civil and conversationally on point for the last ten minutes of recap. This is mostly because Epsilon-Tex has been unnaturally quiet. She remarks on nothing, sitting cross-legged on the hood of the opposite Warthog. Wash makes a conscious effort to ignore her.

“He’s coming,” says Beta, “because we need to check out the desert temple. That sword unlocks the door.” She glances at Tucker. “The Great Prophecy might have been bullshit Wyoming cooked up to mess with the aliens, but I guess the sword being a key is for real. Go figure.”

Caboose says, gravely, “It unlocks peoples’ death… and sometimes doors.”

“Why is dipshit coming?” says Tucker, pointing at Caboose.

“Because he’ll burn down Blue Base if we leave him alone.”

Tucker mutters.

Washington still hasn’t processed that Wyoming died fighting Tucker who, apparently, stabbed him with a Sangheili plasma blade in an effort to stop the Freelancer from kidnapping, quote, “Tucker’s gross alien baby.” Beta tried to explain but, after about five minutes of failure, admitted she honestly had no real idea what Wyoming was doing or who sent him only that his plan involved exploitation of a Sangheili religious prophecy and the sim soldiers took fatal exception with that. Wash doesn’t possess the spare mental energy to feel any way but hapless about this knowledge and admits to himself he knew nothing absolutely fucking nothing about Agent Wyoming. Then he dismisses it as irrelevant to the mission now.

“Just to be clear,” says Washington, “we’re going back to the desert because Epsilon says…” He clenches his teeth, feels Epsilon shift uncomfortably. “Epsilon says he killed someone there who was calling themselves CT. I didn’t see the body myself when I was there –”

“Because,” interrupts Tucker, “Grif buried the bodies. We’re not monsters dude.”

“—but I’ll take his word that he’s remembering things right.”

Tucker throws up his hands. “My word too, asshole. Or Red Team. Ask them if you want, but it was me that motherfucker tried to kill for months out there. His name was CT, he killed everyone at the dig site, almost killed me and Donut. Bowling Ball shot a fucking hole in his chest.”

“How do you know it was a man?” says Wash flatly.

“How? Because he was a dude.” Something about the way Tucker says that is hard, flinty with disgust. “It was a dude in the armor. I saw his face. Trust me, I’d fucking know if it was a chick. He wasn’t a chick. Why does that matter?”

Wash glares at Tucker. “Agent Connecticut, the real Connecticut, was a woman.”

Epsilon speaks up. “It was her armor. I remember the armor, Wash. Okay? So –”

“And you’re all sure,” says Carolina, loudly, “that the power plant is a bust?”

Wash grimaces.

Alpha glances at Beta. Beta is looking at Carolina. She waits a moment before saying, quietly, “Yeah, Carolina, we’re sure. I was… with the Meta when we went there. We did a power transfer to run the armor mods and recover from our –” She pauses, an audible discomfort coming into her voice. “Our loss.”

“You mean Maine.” Carolina speaks cooly, but there’s nothing calm about her words. “Right?”

This time, Alpha answers. “It nearly killed them.” He doesn’t raise his voice, speaking so quietly everyone stills. He continues. “Us. The Meta. Whatever. Losing him nearly killed us.”

Washington’s grip on his own bicep tightens until it hurts, his fingers digging into the muscle through the Kevlar. The reaction rises in two parts. The part of him that craves every fucking detail, every moment, every horror in molecular precision of how Maine’s final conscious fragment unraveled in the maelstrom of the gestalt – torn apart or maybe not. Maybe blinked away, instantly, painlessly. Or, as he envisions, in the eternity of a split second the SPARTAN ripped into them – suicidal and unstoppable, the indomitable war boy born of the Great extinction level event – until they could no longer hold him alive inside them. The Meta gutting itself to survive Maine’s refusal, a digital knife carving out their human core. The AI screaming, agony, as they do it. Good. Fuck them.

The rest of him covers his ears and screams the military phonetic alphabet until the AI stop talking about Maine dying to stop them from putting a bullet into his skull.

“Right.” Carolina’s serenity is chilled nitroglycerin, layered thin across her words. “Fine. We’ll skip it.” She turns on her heel and walks away. She doesn’t look back. “We move out in an hour. Wash, get your equipment and meet us back here then. If your idiots are coming with you, then radio ahead otherwise I assume they aren’t coming. Got it?”

She’s gone before he can tell her that’s not a possibility.

“So you’re going.”

“I said I would if she asked me.”

“You said ‘might’.”

Washington sighs. “Where did you hide it, Donut?”

“You,” says Donut, “don’t have enough stars.”

And for a moment there is a standoff in the kitchen. The smell of pizza, gun oil, and lavender candles permeates the air. The other Reds are out working on the Warthog. Lopez’s head is on the counter, glaring somehow. Donut glares too, wrinkling his nose with the effort which makes him look about twelve and makes Washington feel his age and then some. This would be easier if Donut didn’t have a massive bruise purpling his neck where Tex viced his helmet up into his jaw. It would be easier if the sim soldier’s face wasn’t torn up on one side, a network of pale scar tissue cutting lines into the blonde buzz of his side cut. Basically if there were no evidence of Project Freelancer’s myriad martial costs staring directly at him.

“You honestly think that the Blue Team won’t give me a weapon the minute I join them? Quit being weird about this and give me my rifle.”

“¿Por qué?” drones Lopez. “¿Vas a tirar a ti o todos los idiotas?”

“Exactly right, Lopez. He needs at least two more stars.”

“Este hijo de puta necesita terapia. Idiota.”

“Sorry, Wash.” Donut crosses his arms and sticks his nose in the air. “You can’t make me.”

“I really can,” says Washington, but more like he’s just pointing it out, not that he has the energy, will power, or desire to do so. He sighs. “Look, Donut, I’m going no matter what. You want me using some stranger’s weapon or my own?”

“Well…” He purses his lips. “I guess it would be bad to leave you handling another man’s gun.”

“Why… do you phrase things like you…?” Wash scrubs a hand over his face. “So you’ll give it back?”

“Only if you promise to be reaaally careful.”

It would be erroneous to say that Donut’s small stipulation does anything like truly relieve the crush of isolation from the Freelancer’s fucked up insides, but when he drags hard on the vowel in ‘really’ Wash feels some measure of warmth bleed briefly inward. He shakes his head.

“I’ll be careful, Donut.”

“Promise.”

“Este hijo de puta no necesita el arma. Es justo aquí a la mirada triste.”

“I promise. Now give me my goddamn rifle.”

Turns out it was wedged between the mattress and bedframe of Donut’s bunk. It’s empty, the magazine stored in Simmons’ carefully organized ammunition closet. It’s been months now since he held it. It’s not really ‘his’ rifle, particularly. Issued to him by Project Freelancer’s Recovery division, he’s got no emotional attachment whatsoever. None. And yet, when Donut puts the gun in his hands, his palms instantly sweat and a cold slides sudden into his gut. He snaps it into the mag-slot on his back.

“Thanks, Donut.”

“The others are talking about coming with you.”

“Grif seemed pretty set against it.”

“Grif’s set against bathing too but that doesn’t stop me from hitting him with pressure washer every Wednesday!”

Wash pauses to review his time at Valhalla and determines, yes, there has indeed been semi-regular Wednesday screaming from Grif. He shakes his head. “None of you should come. It’s not your fight and we have the AI with us so it’s not like we lack for man power. If you just stay here, the UNSC will get around to sending everyone home. All of you deserve to get back.”

Donut blinks. “So do you.”

Wash opens his mouth, stops, tries again. “No, yeah. I know. I’m just not done yet. You guys are.” Donut seems to buy that so he goes on. “I’m not gonna drag anyone into this again. Don’t let Sarge follow Blue Team into another cluster fuck, okay?”

“I think you have funny ideas about Sarge and ‘letting Sarge’ do things, Wash.”

“Donut, I’m serious. I’m a dangerous criminal wanted by the UNSC. No one even knows you or the Reds have been hiding me here. If I go and get caught now you’re all in the clear. Just pretend you never saw me again after I got myself blown up at Command. Easy. Just do that.” When Donut just keeps looking worried he says, exasperated, “It’s a Blue Team problem. Just leave it alone this time.”

“But you’re on our team.”

“I – what?”

“I didn’t painstakingly repaint that armor because fashion sense compelled me, bucko.” A beat. “Well, okay, maybe it did, but those are team colors!”

Washington has no idea why that fills him with panic.

“Donut, just tell Sarge not to follow me. I’m not your guys’ problem. Look, I need to go. Carolina and the Blues are loading up. We’re gonna head out soon.”

“So,” says Donut, a wobble in his voice. “This is… goodbye?”

“What? I don’t… maybe? I don’t exactly plan on – oof!”

Note: It’s hard to hug someone in power armor. It’s harder still to hug someone in power armor while wearing armor yourself. Donut manages it anyway. He’s not… well, no, he’s definitely crying but at least is a kind of dry sobbing and Washington would run away but the sheer terror of being hugged by a sobbing sim solider is so intense he remains perfectly still, blinking, breathing the smell of lilacs and hair gel because Donut’s crying into the collar of his under armor. He’s saying words, muffled, something about a beautiful soul. Washington can’t make it out.

“Please stop,” Wash says eventually, weakly.

The sobs torque off instantly, like a faucet twisted shut. Donut straightens out and puts his helmet on. “Sorry. Just needed to get that out. Want me to walk you back to Blue Base?”

“Uh… no thanks. It’s fine. And, uh, Donut? Don’t… ever do that again.”

“Okay! Take care then!”

“Yeah. Uh, you too.”

“We need to talk.”

“Get the fuck away from me, Alpha.”

“Jeez. Hostile much? That’s a big change of pace from before.”

“I will literally shoot you. I have my gun back and I will shoot you right in the fucking chest.”

“Uh, ha. No. I don’t think so. You wouldn’t shoot me after last – OH MY GOD! FUCK! PUT IT DOWN! I BELIEVE YOU!” Wash lowers his rifle. Alpha has now backed up, putting a good ten meters of distance between himself and Washington. Wash, for his part, would have liked another five meters but he’s already gone from ‘hello’ to flagging the AI with a fully loaded weapon so he doesn’t push for it. Alpha huffs. “Christ, you are a jumpy son of bitch you know that?”

“Sarge says I have initiative. Now back off.”

“I know you had the safety on, you know. Like… I knew that.”

“I don’t need the safety off to beat the shit out of you.”

Alpha seems like he’s about to argue, then recalculates. “Look, just don’t be weird.”

“You’re the one being weird.”

“I’m not being weird!” squawks Alpha, squeaky with indignation. “I’m being an adult. You’re the one pointing guns and flipping out.”

Washington is infinitesimally appalled by the notion Alpha might be right so he squashes the thought and says, “Tex threw me off. That’s all. I got mixed up. That happens to me and you know it so keep it to yourself. That wasn’t…” It wasn’t lost time, that’s for sure. “That wasn’t me.”

“Okay. Well, uh, good.” Alpha rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Right.”

“Please get the fuck away from me, Church.”

Alpha beats a hasty retreat back to the vehicles, leaving Wash on the grassy slope with his encroaching sense of doom. For a moment, Washington contemplates sitting down in the grass and just going to sleep, letting Carolina and the AI depart without him and the day dream, though inconsistent in its logic, comforts him. But only for a moment. The elation of his imaginary surrender is undercut by the reality that he cannot do that and is committed to this.

A numbness enters his limbs, not exactly unwelcome.

It terminates up from his palms, from the curls joints of his fingers around the rifle. Like his grip is cutting off the circulation to the rest of his body and choking off sensation, slowly filling his veins with pins and needles. It’s almost narcotic, the apathy. A sedative against stimulus, but even as the senseless numb rises some animal nerve twists in him, an eidetic flash – weight forward, pinning him against the wall with his mouth on his, so fast it’s violent. Bruising violent. Can’t bruise though. Inhale, lips brushing, a spark of hyper sensation jolting down the back of his throat to the root of his guts. Fuck it. The next kiss hurts, is teeth, is tongue, is an arrested scream, fingers digging hard, and –

Wash jerks, physically, shaking his head.

“Calm down,” he mutters. He inhales. He exhales. He clenches and unclenches his hand. “Calm down. Stop it.”

Blue Team is busy loading up. Wash gives himself thirty seconds, then heads up the last fifty meters to join them.

Blue Team is almost ready to move out. The two parked Warthogs idle on the lawn outside while Beta and Carolina hand each other equipment and do vehicle checks. Washington helps Tucker load up the second Warthog, mostly tuning out the man’s complaints about him, life, the AI, whatever else he sees to complain about. Most of Washington’s attention terminates toward the clipped prioritization and task managing that is how Carolina and Beta are working together.

Carolina has the Warthog’s hood up and shouts ‘gas’ and ‘let up’ to Beta who wordlessly does as she says until Carolina slams the hood and declares everything good. Beta nods. Carolina moves on to the next task and Beta watches her go. In his mind, Agent York is hacking a holographic lock while he watches, the spin of iridescent tumblers and pins – representative only, the physical trigger embedded in the numbers they embody – waiting for the wrong brush of code and motion to set off everything.

That’s what it’s like – watching Carolina interact with Beta.

“Hey, dickbag, are you listening?”

Washington blinks at Tucker who is glaring up at him. “No. I wasn’t. What did you say?”

“Jesus. You’re like a second Caboose.”

“Don’t ever say that.”

“Look, can I ask you something?”

“I can’t stop you.”

“Church Point Oh, says you and him took down Command basically. Says you set off an Emp in his face.”

Washington grits his teeth. “An EMP? Yeah.”

“Whatever. Wouldn’t that kill an AI, usually?”

“Yeah. That was a possibility.”

“But you did it anyway.”

Tucker doesn’t like him. Washington doesn’t blame Tucker for that. He tries to picture himself from the Blue soldier’s point of view – a complete stranger upon whom all the AI converge, irritating and dull, probably shorter in person than expected, a bit run down, constantly in a state recovery from one calamity or another. He’s a weird, melodramatic fixture in the narrative of the AI’s wayward spinning goals. Tucker glares at him. His eyes are lizard gray. Wash can’t what quality makes them feel reptilian but it’s there. Maybe it’s the fact Tucker seems like he might bite Washington’s face off if he doesn’t answer.

“We both went in there with no exit strategy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“And Church… went with it? The maybe dying thing?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Wash cannot account for the sudden stab of regret, a red flush of shame for his desperation back at Command. Church climbed into that Warthog and told him to go die by himself and fuck off and he’d panicked. Even now it comes back, like a phantom pain, surging through his chest: The compound chemical of elation and terror at facing Maine alone, gun in hand, envisioning a death as ugly as North’s – his knee cap blown open, his skull slammed apart against a console until the corpse could not be identified by facial or dental records. His remains parsed through by indifferent recovery teams, they would comment, with interest, that it took many blows to crush his head in.

“I didn’t want to go alone.” He glances toward the other Warthog, where Carolina is climbing into the driver’s seat. “I suppose Church wanted to do the right thing.”

“That gets him killed a lot, I’ve noticed.”

“I… guess so.”

Tucker’s glare is such Wash feels a push, like negative magnetic poles resisting each other. “Don’t get anyone killed. We just got Blue Team back together. Do not fuck that up.”

“I’ll try, Private.”

Washington climbs into the passenger seat of the Warthog with Carolina. He has to readjust his weight in the seat three times before he gets it right. The rifle on his back seems to catch against every angle in the car, like he’s the wrong shape for the vehicle. Carolina remains quiet, facing forward until he settles in, awkwardly, arms folded over his chest just to give them somewhere to go.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you ready?” she says.

“As I’m ever gonna be. Might be a bit tense here for a while.” He tries to shrug. “It’s not like back in the day, boss.”

Her voice softens a little. “Why do you still call me that?”

“Habit.” He swallows. “Sorry.”

“Look, Wash, tense I can deal with, but are you ready?”

He inhales, deeply. “Carolina, I honestly don’t –”

But that’s when the polka music starts playing.

Washington jerks, a Pavlovian reflex and immediately unfolds his arms. He grabs the back of the seat and stands up, looking down the hill. From the Red Base, a single Warthog is racing up the slope with a Mongoose in tow. He can tell by sight that Grif is at the wheel, Sarge sitting (as he would) shotgun, Simmons at the gunner. Donut is on the Mongoose. The Mongoose has pink decals. As they approach the god-awful music gets louder and louder and Washington realizes he’s grinning far too late to take it back, far too late for the appropriate parts of his eidetic memory to remind him he should feel guilty.

“Never mind,” he says, sitting back down while Carolina stares, bewildered. “I’m ready.”

Chapter 28 Chapter Text

“I have no idea how she got here.”

“That’s because she didn’t.”

“If what you’re saying is true, how could this have happened?”

She sighs, “I dunno, Wash. Bad goddamn luck.”

Carolina is crouched in the desert holding Agent Connecticut’s helmet.

Washington’s shadow stretches over the dune, just barely touching the boots of her armor where they sink into the sand. The sun smears Carolina in mirage, rippling her where she hunkers down staring down into the helmet’s cracked eye lenses. Like it’s a skull. Her right thumb is set against the corner of the shattered orbital socket, restlessly stroking the metal there, Kevlar composite fibers catching slightly against the silver scratches in the metal.

Eventually, she says, “We need talk about Connecticut.”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“Let’s have it again. The last time we had it, I told you she was a traitor.”

His rifle is back in the Warthog with Donut. If Carolina’s noticed that, she hasn’t made a comment and she doesn’t remark now as he moves to sit beside her on the slope of the sand. The weight of his armor shifts the grains under him a little, the loose surface dislodging and gathering at the back of his ankles. He drapes both arms over his knees, leans forward, stares out over the ocean of desert baking the life out of everything around them. Inside his armor, the drive-suit keeps him comfortable, his skin dry, his heartbeat and blood pressure monitored. He’s nearly four hundred pounds of Freelancer in titanium ceramic skin and none of that will protect him now.

“You didn’t say she was a traitor. You just said –“

“No.” She grabs him, shoves him. “You listen.”

Carolina cages him still with one arm braced against the locker beside him, so close the green of her eyes seems radioactive. The locker room’s emptied of everyone but her and Maine, Maine who’s standing with his back to the wall adjacent, fully armored and wordless in a way that makes Washington’s guts churn over. Connie went rogue and Maine stopped taking his armor off in the evening.

Carolina says, “I’m not offering to take her down because I feel bad for you I’m telling you I’ll do it because I think she’ll fucking kill you.” And when he doesn’t say anything just stands there she says, softly, “Don’t you feel sorry for her, Washington. Don’t you fucking dare feel sorry for –“

“You just said she was dangerous.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Carolina, “You were dangerous too, Wash. But Connecticut and her mod? Smart money was on her.”

“No argument there, boss.”

“Boss,” says Carolina, a rueful spin on the word. “Connie was the one who used to call me ‘boss.’ Did you pick that up from her?”

“I don’t…” he starts to say ‘remember’ but the fact is he does. “I don’t think I picked it up. I just always called you that.”

A beat.

“Your armor.” Carolina is looking at him. The topic change, painfully transparent, wins itself in how desperately she alights upon the new subject. It kindles a painful affection in unused atriums of Washington’s chest. Carolina nods to him. “It’s still the real deal, isn’t it? None of the sim soldier crap.”

“Yeah, it’s what they gave me in Recovery. All the bells and whistles.”

“Mine too. It’s what I went over the cliff in.”

Wash waits for her words to hurt, to dig into the parts of him that imagine Maine killing their squad leader… but when she’s sitting alive beside him, somehow it doesn’t come. Or maybe that’s the only way to talk about it now – casually.

“Boss, not to sound too amazed but how did you survive? The Meta boarded the ship and started… well, they didn’t have time to send people looking for you. You were MIA. KIA in implication.”

“Honestly?” Carolina shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember most of it.”

“Losing Eta and Iota?”

“Wash, there’s whole reams of time I don’t remember after I lost them. You relate to that?”

“Yeah.” Washington gazes out over the sand with her. “I relate to that.”

There’s a gut shot of silence here, a sucker punch of it. Carolina’s been on the move from the moment of her high-velocity arrival until now. He wonders if she ever stopped after that one brutal and murderous stopping where Maine stopped her fucking cold in the coldest blood possible and turned that same merciless focus back on the Invention.

Holding still feel dangerous. Stopping is what will really kill him. Not aliens, not assassins, not war, not disease, not The Meta or South or the Director or firing squad lining up shots at the wide target of his fucking ribcage.

Here’s proof of life – the grind of a street under the wheels of board, momentum, blood. There is no difference but mental in the tempo of a kick-flip to hurdling a blast wall in combat. Moving to survive – sprinting down a dark street with a backpack and enough cash for a train ticket and a burger. Moving to survive – crouch-dashing the length of a low wall as Sangheili sharp shots pick mortar off the wall by your head. Moving to survive – opening his eyes when Donut wakes him, then getting out of bed.

He imagines Carolina like this: waking to the scream of war on an alien world, weaponry in hand, and proceeding into the chaos.

Eventually she says, “What happened to Maine, Wash?”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened to him with Sigma? Do you know?”

“Sort of. I know what Alpha says happened, that he and Sigma decided to become something new. That doesn’t mean I understand it. I don’t think I ever really understood what he was going through.”

“You were his best friend.”

“And I didn’t know a goddamn thing about him.” He bites the sentence off at the end, imagines it between his teeth. “Same way I didn’t know a goddamn thing about Connecticut. I’m the best at befriending people I’m completely incapable of understanding. They both turned on me and I never saw it coming so, really, boss, I’m not the guy to ask.”

“That’s unfair to yourself, Washington.”

“Maybe. I know one thing. I’ve got two people with all the answers and I still haven’t asked them a single thing about either of them. Maine or Connecticut. So maybe I just don’t see what I don’t want to see.”

“Who could you ask?

Wash jerks his head toward the two figures standing down at the bottom of the dune behind them. Beta-Texas standing like a shadow in the golden burn of the desert. Beside her, Church looks oddly small though he stands inch for inch as tall as she does. It’s probably because he’s pacing, restless, chattering indistinctly while Beta looks on, motionless, absorbing his momentum and his noise like a heat-sink consuming thermal power. Watching them together, it’s easy to estimate how they’d been a single entity before. Balancing variables in an equation.

“Alpha is every AI fragment in one and Beta flipped for Connecticut. Fuck me if they don’t know more about my best friends than I ever did.”

Carolina inhales. She exhales. “Something I wanted to ask you.”

“Shoot.”

“If Alpha is the Meta now then Eta and Iota are still inside him somewhere. Right?”

Washington freezes. His own shock, the penetrating suddenness of it, hits him hard. When she says their names there’s something in the syllables that seems far too much like affection – that low-grade kind of sorrow exclusive to the dead. She says ‘Eta and Iota’ like she says Maine’s name. How she used to talk about Connecticut. Like she’s talking about Connie right now. Like he could never say Epsilon’s name and he recollects that not every AI lit their Freelancer’s thoughts on fire. Envy, a stab of it, low in his belly then rejected.

“I don’t know about that, boss. I know Alpha can’t get himself back into one piece exactly. But I don’t think they’re like Beta or Epsilon. I don’t think they can go solo again.” He pauses uncomfortable then: “Sorry.”

“No, that’s not why I was asking.” Carolina sighs. “It’s strange, the Alpha just being here like this. There’s a goddamn man-hunt out there right now – for you, Maine, and the missing ship’s AI. There’s whole sections of ONI trying to find him right now. He knows that right?”

“He doesn’t bring it up much.”

“You really don’t talk to him about any of this?”

“With respect, boss, Alpha is an asshole completely independent of Epsilon and it’s commendable that we didn’t shoot each other dead in the last five months.” He waits for her to laugh, but she doesn’t and that makes him nervous so he blurts, “Okay, I lied. I actually did shoot him. I don’t complicate things further by asking about his feelings.”

Carolina’s face says that she wants to hear that story, but instead she says, “Connie used to ask about him.”

“She did?”

“Not later in the program. It was before the fragment AI talked about the Alpha by name, when he was just the ship’s AI. The Director restricted AI direct communication programs to the bridge. No one was allowed to talk to him. We all knew he existed but Connie was the only one who asked about him, asked why we couldn’t see him.” Carolina is staring down in the face of CT’s helmet again. “I wonder if the only reason she figured all of it out… was just because she wanted to say ‘hello.’”

“I was slightly more complicated than that, but not much.”

The two Freelancers look over their shoulder. Beta-Texas crests the top of the dune, her shadow falling over the both of them. She looks between the two of them.

“Sorry, but Church sent me up. We should let him look at the helmet. Epsilon went postal while he was in that alien orb thing. Vaporized it and fucked up the solid state drive.”

“You still have to explain to me,” says Carolina, “How the idiot –.”

“Caboose.”

“—managed to upload an AI fragment to a piece of alien hardware.”

“Don’t hold your breath, kid. It’s Caboose.” Said like ‘an unholy act of God.’ “Either way, the helmet’s the last bastion for backup data. If Connie had any other info about the Director’s… hideaways, Alpha might be able to get it out.”

“Alpha seems skittish,” says Carolina, not offering Connecticut’s helmet but, rather, keeping it tucked against her chest. She’s peering down the hill where Church is indeed retreating back to the configuration of parked Warthogs near the temple. “Hope we don’t scare him or anything.”

“He gets nervous around Freelancers,” says Beta, matter of factly. “Your shooting Tex in the head didn’t really do much to change that. I’ll be shocked if he talks to you directly.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” says Wash.

“You don’t count. He met you again while he was amnesiac and crotchety. Also, you’ve shot him a couple times. Honeymoon’s over.”

Before Washington can protest the turn of phrase, Carolina says, skeptically, “Alpha’s nervous around me?”

“Don’t tell him I said so,” says Beta, shrugging. “But it was his primary issue back in the Program. He couldn’t handle the stress from losing agents in real time and that’s a problem when you’re leveraging your ship’s AI like a backpack combat program.”

“Stress?”

“AI have emotions. The smart ones. It’s part of what makes them smart. Granular integration causes some AI to… get attached which is bad when those attachments strap into droppods and rocket themselves at planetoids. Standard reg is ship AI integration stays top level. Director had Alpha up in everyone’s neural and bio-metric feeds and, surprise, surprise, he couldn’t handle losing his assets.”

“An AI can’t edit that? Just… write that out of themselves?”

Beta stares long enough that even in full armor, her gaze penetrates.

“Well,” she says after a while, “if they are the kind of AI that is okay lobotomizing part of themselves for efficiency, yeah sure. I’ve known a few programs like that. Alpha wasn’t one of them. So he did the next best thing. He made me.” When they both stare wordlessly up at her, she continues. “Alpha couldn’t handle ship logistics and real-time field combat, even when there was a server link. I’m the personality matrix he partitioned off to deal with front-line combat. If there was ever a clean pipeline, it was me in the hardware. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“You –” Wash hesitates. “You never told me that, Beta.”

“You didn’t ask. It’s fine. It’s not like the Director recruited based on our winning personalities.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Beta cocks her head.

“What did you think they recruited Freelancers based on? Pure fighting skill? Think we were all assholes by accident?” When Wash and Carolina, again, say nothing, Beta says, “Jesus. They looked at the top combat scores and field performance, then cross-checked that l against neuro-atypicals and trauma victims. Then they ran you all into the fucking ground and none of you twitched at it. Did it ever occur to you that they recruited you because you were already pre-adapted to this bullshit?”

“That’s ridiculous,” says Carolina, but in a tone that lacks conviction.

Wash just murmurs. “Connie used to say that.”

Carolina looks at him. “What did she say?”

“That bit about recruiting off non-combat scores.” He gestures slightly with one hand, like he’s pointing at something hazy in the distance. “Same wording too. ‘Pre-adapted.’” He can feel Beta staring at him, her strange gaze a cross between mechanical and alive. “I told her she was being paranoid. That it was normal for high-stress ops to recruit people suited to take on high stress. That we were just good soldiers and, sometimes, good soldiers are…” He scours the ceiling, squinting for the exact wording, finds it. “Some cold motherfuckers.”

Softly, Beta says, “He didn’t look for psychopaths, Wash. Just… survivors.”

“Right.”

Carolina stands up.

“Figures.” Her tone razors between amusement and something dangerous. “He always did have his little experiments.”

Beta, still quietly, says, “He just forgot to take a few variables into account.” She sighs. “Look, he didn’t take Connie into account. He didn’t take Maine into account or Sigma or his own goddamn –”

“Poor Maine.”

“Carolina,” says Beta, “it wasn’t your fault.”

“But it was my AI.”

“The Director was going to give Sigma to Maine no matter what. Carolina, listen to me: He would have manufactured a reason to give him to Maine, but telling you that Sigma would help Maine with his injuries?” She shakes her head, just a fraction, a restrained motion. “That was easy, wasn’t it?”

“Shut up, Texas.”

“It’s Beta.”

“Shut. Up. Texas.”

“It wasn’t your fault. It was him.”

“Is that how you make yourself feel better, Tex?” She looks over her shoulder. “About the fact he fucked us all over to make you a real girl?”

Beta steps back, lifts her chin slightly. “You gonna give me Connie’s helmet or not?”

After a while, Washington gets up and moves to Carolina’s side. He waits a moment, then loops his forefingers into the lip of the helmet where it hangs in her hand. “I’ll take it,” he says. When Carolina doesn’t relinquish her grip he lies to her. “Alpha’s annoying but I’m used to it. I’ll take care of her. Okay?”

It’s a whole ten seconds before she lets it go.

Washington jogs down the dune, the sand sliding out from under him and making a skid out of his descent. Beta follows him, silently. About ten steps from the dune, he looks back and she’s gone. Briefly, he scans the desert for her, any sign of the shimmer, but can’t find her and can’t speculate about her reasons for vanishing. So he turns around and keeps his eyes fixed on the multi-colored heat-blurred figures of the Reds and Blues who are, it appears, slap fighting in the shade of the temple. Or at least Donut and Alpha are. Sarge is leaning against his Warthog with, inexplicably, Epsilon-Tex seated cross-legged on the hood behind him.

When he’s in speaking distance, Wash says, warily, “Where are Grif and Simmons?”

“Lookin’ fer Caboose,” says Sarge, who’s looking skyward for some reason.

“Okay, so Simmons is looking for Caboose. Got it. Where’s Epsilon?”

“On the roof,” says Tex, also looking skyward.

“On the --?”

“Sonofabitch!” Epsilon lands with a thud in the sand directly to his right.

Washington, slowly, looks skyward as well.

From the roof Tucker crows, “Suck that you robot fuck!”

“Never mind,” says Washington, wearily dodging Epsilon as the AI races past him, blue-on-blue violence as his end game. If it seems like Epsilon very specifically doesn’t look at him as they pass each other, he doesn’t think about it too hard. “Hey, Donut?”

“Yes?” he says, cheerfully, but grunting slightly with the effort of holding Church at bay. Donut is gripping the AI’s armor at the collar and using it as leverage to yank him around in a kind of clumsy circle. Alpha appears to be helpless to stop this abuse, shrieking with indignation as Donut leads him in a merry waltz. “What’s up Wash?”

“Why are you fighting Alpha?”

“BECAUSE HE’S A FUCKING LUNATIC!” screams Church as he’s yanked into another spin.

“Because he wouldn’t mind his own bees wax.”

Wash nods, slowly. “Kay. Sounds about right, but I need you to stop spinning him around so I ask him computer questions.” From the Warthog Sarge grunts an ‘ah phooey’ in disappointment and Wash ignores the way Tex gives him a consoling pat on the shoulder. “Feel free to punch him if he keeps being nosy in the future though.”

“Okay-dokie!” Donut spins, hard, once, and shotputs Alpha face-first into the sand at Washington’s feet.

“Thanks, Donut.”

“WHAT THE FUCK!?”

“Beta says you can get some logs out of the helmet?” Wash hunkers down in the sand while Alpha stares, incredulous, up at him. Golden streams dribble from the crevasses in his helmet, sand-blasted by the meteoric force of Donut’s throw. Wash points at the helm under his arm. “Want to take a look?”

“YOU’RE A REAL PIECE OF WORK, WASHINGTON.”

“Right, but can you –?”

“YEAH, I’LL FUCKING LOOK AT YOUR SHITTY HELMET THING YOU JACKASS.” He snatches the piece of armor from Wash’s arms and sits back cross-legged in the sand, rolling CT’s helm between his palms until it’s sitting in his lap. “Fuckin’ crazy Red Team piece of…” Church mutters incomprehensibly before falling silent, head bent over the Freelancer armor. Distracted, he says, “Pretty corrupted. Gimme a minute.”

“Why are Epsilon and Tucker fighting?”

“Do you want me to recover this data or speculate on Blue Team domestic problems?”

“You can’t do both?”

Church scoffs. “Of course I can, I’m just saying…”

“So why are they fighting?”

“They’re always fighting. It’s how they communicate.”

From the rooftop comes the din of yelling and what sounds like a Covenant plasma sword being activated. Before Washington can become reasonably worried, however, Tucker starts yelling something to the effect of ‘stab stab motherfucker!’ while Epsilon howls ‘you wouldn’t dare!’ Sarge and Tex glance at one another then hop off the Warthog to surreptitiously relocate for a better view. Alpha never even looks up from what he’s doing.

“I guess if I were Epsilon, which I’m not, maybe I’d remember being in Bloodgulch and fighting with Tucker just feels normal, you know?” He glances briefly up at Washington. “Old habits and shit.”

There’s a silence for a moment, broken intermittently by the sound of Epsilon yelling at Tucker on the rooftop.

“Carolina’s back,” says Washington.

“I fucking noticed.”

“You worried about that?”

”Why would that worry me?”

“Eta and Iota.”

Alpha flinches. “Yeah that… that makes things a bit…” He fishes for a word, desperately, an AI that can calculate the top spin of a ninety MPH fast ball and determine the arc of its ricochet before it moves an inch in real time. “…complicated,” he decides at last. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated as in you remember what her AI remember about her?”

“Wash, why the fuck are you asking me about this?”

“Because Carolina just got back and facing your old AI isn’t easy, actually.”

“Wash, I’m not gonna, like, go to pieces in front of her, you know.”

“You did in front of me.”

“I was working on it!”

“You went full Theta.”

“I did not!”

Washington levels a look at him that transmits through the helmet.

“Okay, I did, but I’ve got it totally under control now. Sides, I’m not gonna flip out in front of Carolina.” He mutters. “Last thing she needs after the Director left her for dead,” and Washington blinks. There’s an intimate loathing in how he says that. Wash feels Eta and Iota in how he enunciates ‘left her for dead’. “He didn’t go back for her. Who does that?”

“Guess you’re a better person than him.”

Alpha’s head jerks up. Wash peers back, interested in how a featureless piece of equipment can somehow magnify a small movement. Church seems to realize he’s staring because he makes a sound like he’s clearing some non-existent blockage from his throat and grunts. “Goddammit, this data is corrupted.”

“Take your time.”

“Y’know,” says Alpha, far too casually, “I liked Connecticut. I mean, before everything. She was smart.”

“CT was always the smartest person on the team.”

“Yeah.” A beat. “No, but, literally. Her IQ was higher than all of yours. It was in the personnel files.”

“Keep talking, Alpha. I’m sure that’ll work out for you.”

“I’m just saying that she was an admirable and generous person who befriended underprivileged rookies that got themselves stuck in airlock doors and spilled hair dye on her stuff. Seriously. What a Pepsi.”

Wash blinks. “Uh, sorry. Pepsi?”

“Huh? What about Pepsi?”

“You… just called Connecticut a Pepsi?”

“No I didn’t. I just said she was cranberry.”

Wash stares.

Alpha stares back. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

“Alpha, are you feeling okay?”

“Of course. I feel cryptographic.”

“I… you feel cryptographic?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“That’s what you just said.”

“No, I didn’t I said –”

Wash waits.

“Yeah?” Church stares at him, shakes his head and leans forward slightly, his right hand chopping the air for emphasis on something he doesn’t actually say. Wash continues to wait, a vague unease building. “Uh, did your helmet mic short out?” The silence breaks into a sudden violent pantomime, Church standing up, reeling slightly, clutching CT’s helmet under one arm, scrabbling at his helmet seal with the other. “Church. What’s happening?”

He gets the helmet off.

There is something wrong with his eyes. The right pupil keeps changing, the tiny diaphragms that compose the iris spinning wide and shrinking closed. There is light, faintly white, in the back of his retinas, some internal power source going awry as his lips pull into an agonized grimace. His shoulders heave like he’s panting, but no air comes and goes. He has, absurdly, terrible helmet hair. Alpha clutches his throat, fingers digging into the high collar of his drive suit. He drops CT’s helmet in the sand.

Wash immediately opens a comm with Beta. “I need you at the temple. Now. Something’s wrong with Alpha.”

“What? I left you alone for five minutes.”

“A terrible idea, honestly. Get back here.”

Church mouths something, enunciates. It takes three times and pointing before Washington gets it.

“Donut? Get… you want me to get Donut?”

He nods, desperately.

“DONUT!”

“Yes?” A pink helmet pops up from behind one of the Warthogs.

“I need your help.”

Donut bounds eagerly to his side. “On it, Agent Wash! I’m behind you all the way!”

“That’s not –”

“Oooh!” Donut singsongs with delight. “I didn’t know you knew ASL, Church.”

Washington blinks. Alpha is now very purposefully signing at Donut, hands moving rapidly through what seems like a complicated message. Donut is nodding and nodding, saying ‘uh-huh, okay, right’ very intently. Church’s expression crumples into annoyance and he gestures very violently at Washington, flinging his hands at the Freelancer, eyes wide, mouth scrunched. Both of the diaphragms in his eyes are acting up now.

“Oh, right!” says Donut. “Wash, Church says there was a virus in the data and it’s messing him up but he can totally fix it. Also, don’t freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out. Church, you –”

And that, of course, is when Alpha falls face-first into the sand.

“—have got to be kidding me.”

Donut rubs the back of his neck. “Umm, maybe that’s what meant when he said not to freak out?”

“Fuck me.” And before Donut can say anything Wash adds, “Don’t say anything. Just… go get the others.” Wash kneels down, picking Connecticut’s helmet out of the sand with one hand, laying the other on Church’s shoulder. He sighs. “That Tucker guy is going to be pissed if he dies again.”

Notes:

Heads up to all readers going forward. There's a lot of shit to look out for such as semi-explicit sexual situations, extreme violence, mental illness, character death, did I mention that violence? Let me know what you think. Importing more chapters shortly.

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GingerShambles on Chapter 1 Sat 07 Feb 2015 08:22PM UTC

I'm glad to see this uploaded here. this is one of my favourite fics and the very thought of someone missing out on it because they aren't on tumblr is a travesty.

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 1 Sun 08 Feb 2015 07:36AM UTC

Alpha you're supposed to be smart. Why are you so stupid?
Seriously, why didn't the Meta protect himself from something so obvious?
Love this story and I'm glad I can read it again and just leave my log of comments. I hope they don't annoy.

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Bloopaloop on Chapter 1 Mon 09 Feb 2015 10:41PM UTC

YESSS its on ao3 now!! Re-reading the shit out of this when the weekend rolls around, hell yeah

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Death7559 on Chapter 1 Sun 09 Apr 2017 03:19AM UTC

This looks really good. Hasn't been updated in a while though...

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FredrickthePig on Chapter 1 Thu 12 Apr 2018 01:49PM UTC

<3

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SaltCore on Chapter 1 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:25PM UTC

I just really love the way you write Wash, and the rawness of this? Like I can feel it. It's amazing. Also: “Well, okay, you can’t jump a fuckin’ power core.”

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 1 Fri 21 Aug 2020 08:53PM UTC

I don't know why, but just the image of Church in Maine's body made me fucking cackle. This is gonna be great!

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 2 Sat 07 Mar 2015 11:44PM UTC

There is a grim sort of poetry to Wash's coming conscious and I just love it. Malarial heat and memory burning white phosphorous hot... Can't help but be riveted.
I really love the fact that you take this time to set up Washington falling into memory and being so drowned in it, being so... visceral for him. That is such an important experience for the story as it follows, and that makes the set up here, so early, and even how confusing it can be for him so vital. Thank you for that.

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GollyGamma (Guest) on Chapter 2 Mon 23 Mar 2015 07:14PM UTC

Wait. Is this a sequel to WoT? You mentioned Circumstance after all...

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RisingFlames on Chapter 2 Tue 02 May 2017 06:10AM UTC

'WHY AREN’T YOU DEAD?!”'
Haha I love wash's freak out it was hilarious
And omg Alpha I forgot how fucking funny he is. I loved ' You’re a smartass, that’s what you are.”'
That whole scene was amazing, I especially liked Alpha's angry speech at the end

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SaltCore on Chapter 2 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:30PM UTC

“Heeey, you’re awake!”
Nope. His eyes roll back into the top of his skull and goes limp again.
Yeah that's a mood buddy.
You can just hear that shrill scream Wash does, you captured his voice perfectly.

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 2 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:19PM UTC

The waking parts of this were absolutely beautiful, in a both wistful and desperate sort of way. I love how you write these two- you captured their characters perfectly!

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 3 Sun 08 Mar 2015 12:22AM UTC

I almost wonder what Wash was thinking when he thought that maybe the gun would be the solution to get himself killed. Part of me says that it's because of how Alpha was previously handling Maine's body inexpertly. And then there is Wash, dealing with Alpha who is learning how to handle a body. And do it well.
Poor Wash, losing everything he was after. And yet I don't fully pity him. His goal to die a man with a clear name was something that probably only came about because he felt so hopeless. There was nothing else for him.
The conversation about Wash wanting to bury Maine is just... god. It's so much more satisfying when I've read far enough for his final goodbye to Maine later on in Valhalla. And just the thought of that makes me want to cry. Because in reality it does take so long for him to get that particular closure.

Last Edited Sun 08 Mar 2015 12:22AM UTC

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RisingFlames on Chapter 3 Tue 02 May 2017 02:48PM UTC

'Teamkill McGee. What the fuck was that about?”'
TEAMKILL MCGEE HAHAHAAA I fucking love Church
'“Fuck you, Alpha. You’re just a rampant fucking –”
Oh shit the whole Wash Alpha fight was super intense and I honestly didn't know who to root for. They're both about as right as they are wrong and I love them both.

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SaltCore on Chapter 3 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:52PM UTC

You can just feel Wash's raw misery and desperation. “One thing right.” christ fuck me right up

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 3 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:24PM UTC

Felix was right about exactly one thing. Wash is INCREDIBLY melodramatic and it's gorgeous.

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 4 Sun 08 Mar 2015 01:05AM UTC

Part of me will always be intrigued by what Wash smells here after the rain. The mud makes sense, the dirty copper can probably be explained away. But what creates the scent of jasmine? Maybe some memory just tickling at his sense? Who even knows.
You know? Alpha could totally be subtitled: Wash should not get his gun back for a very long time. For good reason.
Strange, somehow I forgot about this part of the story. I can't wait to see what happens. Again.

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Egg (Guest) on Chapter 4 Fri 24 Jul 2015 09:09PM UTC

holy shiiiiit i am so into this story i am eating this UP
POOR WASH BUT ALSO WASH YOU ASSHOLE
POOR CHURCH BUT ALSO WOW CHURCH YOU ASSHOLE
i can't wait to see everyone's reactions to them omg I'M SO HAPPY I LOVE ALPHA CHURCH

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SaltCore on Chapter 4 Sun 05 Aug 2018 01:31AM UTC

Wash still has the capacity, after all the shit he's been through, to worry if Church hurt anyone in order to keep him alive. That breaks my fucking heart.

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 4 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:29PM UTC

Wash being as petty as he possibly can gives me LIFE

Last Edited Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:29PM UTC

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GingerShambles on Chapter 1 Sat 07 Feb 2015 08:22PM UTC

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 1 Sun 08 Feb 2015 07:36AM UTC

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Bloopaloop on Chapter 1 Mon 09 Feb 2015 10:41PM UTC

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Death7559 on Chapter 1 Sun 09 Apr 2017 03:19AM UTC

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FredrickthePig on Chapter 1 Thu 12 Apr 2018 01:49PM UTC

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SaltCore on Chapter 1 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:25PM UTC

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 1 Fri 21 Aug 2020 08:53PM UTC

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 2 Sat 07 Mar 2015 11:44PM UTC

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GollyGamma (Guest) on Chapter 2 Mon 23 Mar 2015 07:14PM UTC

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RisingFlames on Chapter 2 Tue 02 May 2017 06:10AM UTC

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SaltCore on Chapter 2 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:30PM UTC

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 2 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:19PM UTC

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 3 Sun 08 Mar 2015 12:22AM UTC

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RisingFlames on Chapter 3 Tue 02 May 2017 02:48PM UTC

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SaltCore on Chapter 3 Sat 04 Aug 2018 09:52PM UTC

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 3 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:24PM UTC

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Churbooseanon on Chapter 4 Sun 08 Mar 2015 01:05AM UTC

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Egg (Guest) on Chapter 4 Fri 24 Jul 2015 09:09PM UTC

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SaltCore on Chapter 4 Sun 05 Aug 2018 01:31AM UTC

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Jemmacatt14 on Chapter 4 Fri 21 Aug 2020 09:29PM UTC

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