Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[...]

At this point, Sage didn't know why she kept trying to prove to Viper she was useful and wouldn't fail her anymore. Every time she tried, she just made it worse.

"Viper, Viper wait, please." Trying to catch up with the chemist's long, furious strides proved to be pointless. How pathetic did she look, really, almost running to stop the other woman from walking away from her? "Viper, wait. I swear it wasn't my intention, I didn't mean to―"

"SHUT. UP."

The healer almost tripped over herself, stunned by the yell echoing in the lonely, quiet hall, the only witness to how Viper, with her eyes fixed on her as if she were tearing her skin apart with her gaze alone, brusquely turned around and seized both her arms with enough strength to bruise.

"DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!"

"I-I…" Unable to hold her gaze, Sage's eyes darted between the continuously-tightening grip on her arms and how Viper, dangerous as ever, kept leaning her head more and more to her. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry―"

She couldn't even finish her apology.

Sage gasped sharply, frozen by the sudden sting on her cheek that spread through the whole left part of her face. Her mind was struggling to understand what had happened as her eyes, glued to the floor on her right, blurred with tears caused by how hard Viper's slap had been.

Viper slapped her.

She gulped hard, feeling dizzy. In all the time they knew each other, despite everything Sage had done wrong, never, ever had the chemist dared to become physical with her.

"Imbecile," Viper snarled, pulling her close by the collar to look at her directly in the eye. "I told you to follow orders. I told you to stay away from my work, and I told you to do only what I asked you to, if you actually wanted to help." She gripped Sage's chin when the healer's eyes started avoiding hers, lowering her voice enough to instill panic in her. "I told you Lucia's medical condition was delicate and that any procedure, listen to me, any procedure, could alter her health. What the fuck were you thinking when you healed her?"

"...She was in pain―"

"She's dead now," Viper cut her off, and Sage desperately wanted to sob. "Lucia is gone. Her heart was already weak on its own, the souls Reyna gathered weren't enough, she couldn't handle how Radianite was affecting her body, and your service act on trying to, what, soothe her pain when the meds were supposed to do it― Do you have any idea what you did to her?" The chemist was panting now. "I'll tell you, you altered the procedures keeping her alive, you exposed her to even more Radianite than necessary, and, yes, Sage, we have a kid's corpse in my lab growing cold right now."

The way Viper worded it just made it worse.

God, Sage would give her own life and the next, if reincarnation existed, only to let Lucia live once more, the same way she would give everything of her to fix each and every mistake she'd made with Viper. Trying to revive and save the man who was now Omen had gone wrong, and she thought she was wiser now, stronger, better. And now this, another pitiful attempt at helping that ended in catastrophe once again.

Blood wouldn't stop staining her hands, it seemed.

"You knew how big this was, you knew how much this mattered to― Fuck, do you even imagine how Reyna will react when she finds out?" Viper finally stepped away from Sage to brush her fingers through her short strands of hair, letting out a distressed, anguished laugh that wasn't meant to stab Sage's empathetic heart, but did. "Reyna is in this organization because I promised her I would find a way to stabilize and heal her sister. But guess what? There's no child now, there's no child to heal, and Reyna will find out, and no one knows what she's capable of― Shit, who knows if―"

A crack in her voice. Viper's gaze suddenly snapped to the side, quiet.

And Sage? Sage couldn't breathe. Her throat was being squeezed by anxiety and regret and the overwhelming feeling of knowing there was nothing she could do now. Her limbs were heavy, guilt gnawing at her from her insides, and her face―God, her face―burned so much she didn't know if it was from Viper's slap or from how disappointing she was as a person, supposed to heal, to soothe, to emanate peace, bringing grief and dead when the only thing she wanted was to help.

An innocent child's life, taken away by a mistake. Her mistake.

Sage wanted to cry.

"Please forgive me." The words left her mouth faster than she planned. "I-I mean, I… I am aware that this can't be fixed, this is way too grave and… no, I am― No, forget everything, I do not deserve your forgiveness." Even her English was against her right now, stumbling over words and apologies as she tried not to cry while saying them. She took a breath, sharp, panicked. "Let's not fight. Please, I― Let's not fight. For the protocol, for everyone's sake. Let's solve this first, talk to Reyna, see what we can do. You can yell at me as much as you want, but let's fix the bigger problem first." She found the chemist's gaze, trying to get her to understand. "Please."

Viper just stared down at her. The pure, raw ire contained in her emerald irises dulled, if only a little, but was still there, burning, waiting for the next opportunity to lash out. Past the stoic filter, though, Sage found a tiny spark of something different. Something akin to fear.

Before the healer could add anything else, Viper was already walking away.

"Let's only hope Reyna spares my life, then we can talk about forgiveness."

Once alone in the middle of the hall, Sage could finally sob.

[...]

Chapter Text

[...]

Sage has never seen Viper as someone violent. Stern? Yes. Vengeful? That too, but never as someone whose only purpose in life was to deliberately inflict pain. For Sage, she was someone who liked to hold hands.

The first time it happened, they had been resting on the couch Sabine kept in her lab. The woman had spoken so, so quietly, that, for a fraction of second, Sage believed that it was a product of her mind.

"Hold my hand?"

But Sage then saw her girlfriend offering her palm facing up to her so tentatively, so afraid of rejection. The woman was always so gentle with her. God, how could she be violent?

It became an habit, their own little way of looking for comfort and security in the warmth of each other's hand. It was occasional at first, something rare that popped up whenever Sabine was feeling her lowest, but Sage soon realized how the chemist actually loved to hold hands. For someone like her, cold and intimidating and "They call me a monster, shall I prove them right?", Sage was really enjoying the progress her girlfriend was making in letting herself feel, letting herself experience something good after so long, and letting herself be more open about that.

Sage never realized there was something wrong. To this day, she still couldn't understand when things twisted this bad. Maybe the way the younger agents stopped approaching her when Sabine was with her should've said enough for her to notice, but it didn't—Or she didn't want to see.

In any case, she ended up brushing it off, thinking the others just wanted to give them some privacy or something of that sort. Sabine had never been directly involved with the younger agents to the point of them actively talking to her, and the chemist had a certain reputation that shaped their view of her. Maybe it was just that.

"Hold my hand?" Sabine used to say whenever they were walking side by side down the protocol's hallways. As always, she gladly did.

For weeks, Sage learned to live with how the duelists looked at Sabine, with how they fell quiet whenever the two of them walked nearby, even with how Neon would fidget and talk faster when they trained while Sabine watched from a distance. That was part of her work as second-in-command, checking that all the agents were doing well. Plus, it was just Sabine, she knew Neon needed training as much as she knew she was improving, they'd talked about that. Why was Neon so nervous, then?

Days later, she overheard an argument from a distance. Reyna was yelling at Sabine, but she couldn't understand the words being said. She never asked, and her girlfriend never said anything, either, but she soon realized Neon's training had something to do with it. The next days, Viper stopped checking on her.

Odd.

Then, the questioning came.

It was subtle at first, enough for Sage to mistake the other agents' questions as simple politeness, or even curiosity―she knew who she was dating, everyone had been so surprised when they found out, and she wouldn't blame them if they wanted answers. But then, it became odd. It was as if they—

"Hold my hand?" She jumped in her seat, blinking fast at the hand Sabine was offering to her. It took her a second to compose herself, eyes fixated on how the chemist, head buried in her arm and resting over Sage's desk in the infirmary, even with a headache and everything, still asked for her hand.

Soon, the cold, almost bony fingers were enveloped by the feeling of warmer, softer ones.

Did they know something Sage didn't?

"How're you doing with Viper?" Brimstone asked her one day. It was casual a conversation in his office while he looked for some documents, nothing else, but she could feel an edge of worry in it―worry?

"We're doing fine," she answered, the same way she'd answered each and every single inquiry that had Viper's name in it.

He hummed in acknowledgement, quiet. Strangely quiet. There was something going on here.

"Has she been treating you well?" he continued.

Enough.

"May I ask what do you mean with that?" She tilted her head, a hint of passive-aggressiveness in her voice, so unlike her usual, gentler tone. There was no way no one wanted to tell her anything.

He stopped. His eyes were glued to the papers he'd grabbed before, but his eyes, troubled and absent, weren't even close to being focused on what he had in his hands. Brim took a breath, held, sighed…

"Viper has been acting… very unusual lately," he started, hesitating. She could see there was something else he wanted to say—he wanted to elaborate, but didn't. "I just wanted to make sure you're doing alright."

…

What?

Sage didn't know what to say. What was he talking about? The situation had become so absurd and cryptic that her first reaction was to smile. Then, she laughed.

"What do you mean?" she chuckled, unbelieving. "What do you mean, Brimstone, what's wrong?"

He then turned his head, finally facing her, and the way his eyes looked at her, pity and concern encapsulated in sky blue irises, erased any trace of the smile that was still gracing her face.

"That's what we don't know."

[...]

…

Viper wasn't violent.

She couldn't be, right?

Sage tried not to throw up as she walked through the aftermath of what had been an Omega-Earth attack, legs heavy from running, having rotated as fast as she could, only to be met by stillness, silence, and death.

When did things go wrong?

She couldn't even breathe. The strong iron smell and gunpowder mixed in the air were reason enough, but she could also feel herself hyperventilating, and was unable to calm herself down.

Why were there so many corpses?

Omega Viper, Omega Cypher, Omega Skye, Omega Reyna— Was that Omega Chamber, too?

Pale skin, dull eyes, bodies bent in positions that no fall could ever cause. Omega Skye was dangling over a window; Omega Cypher had bullet wounds impossible to be aimed from a distance; Omega Reyna's body, with her limbs broken, was tossed to the side. She spotted broken glasses, and, if it weren't for his suit, she wouldn't have even recognized Omega Chamber's face.

Omega Viper's body made her gag. Still fresh blood ran down her mouth, her suit ripped open, cuts on her wrists made by a knife, a single bullet wound on her leg that was nothing compared to the pieces of glass stabbing her stomach and heart.

She continued walking, almost tripping over a well-known boot.

"Sage," Viper's voice called from behind.

Her chest constricted the second she looked down. Choked to death, face bruised, hands bloody and fingers so broken that, even if alive, they'd be useless now.

Useless. Useless to help.

She was going to faint. She— She didn't—

"We're safe now."

Omega Sage was dead at her feet.

Sage turned around. Her Viper's suit was red now.

"Lingying," Sabine called her attention again. Her head was spinning now. Was this the same Sabine she knew?

"Beans?" she whispered, terrified with the way her girlfriend looked into her eyes.

Viper just smiled, as if her hands weren't bathed in what was meant to keep people alive.

"It's fine."

"…"

"Hold my hand?"

[...]