Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Three years ago, he’d asked his girlfriend, “Do you believe in destiny?”

The sky had been a bright, wispy blue, the breeze a mere flutter of motion that rustled the autumn leaves scattering the ground. A perfect day... at least to him. Maybe most people would have preferred summer, with the heat and the sun and all that, but if it had been summer, the small park where they always met would have been crowded with screaming kids and obnoxious teenagers. Autumn was perfect—the weather was nice (but not too nice), the infants had been imprisoned in schoolrooms and homework, and, because of those two facts, the park had been empty. That day, the park had been theirs.

Sprawled lazily on their backs in the leafy grass, he’d heard her laugh. “Destiny? I didn’t take my boyfriend for the philosophic type. Fate, God, free will, all that shit—” he’d felt, more than seen, the casual wave of her hand through the sky, sweeping any sort of metaphysical debate off the metaphorical table— “Who cares? You ask, ‘Why are we here?’ Well, I got one answer for ya—why the fuck not?”

“Gosh, I guess that’s one way to put it,” he’d chuckled, reaching out to clasp her flung hand in his own, only to be swatted away.

“Nope, I’m holding hands with your beloved destiny right now, I’ll hold hands with you later.” She’d continued swiping her open hand through the empty space above them. “It wants in on our relationship, but I think more than one partner would be too much for you to handle—”

“I was being serious,” he’d demurred, sitting up. A determined beetle had crawled up his arm like it was a mountain, and he hadn’t had the heart to flick it off. “I didn’t mean destiny in a philosophical sense—”

“When is destiny not philosophical?”

 He’d shrugged, chewing self-consciously on a lip. “I guess… I always thought of destiny as like, your destination, if life is a journey. I mean—”

“So… you’re basically saying that death is your destiny? ‘Cause I’m sorry to break it to you, babe, but I think that’s everyone’s destination in the end…”

A laugh, half-choked, had managed to find its way past the lump in his throat. “No, I—will you please stop interrupting?”

Her white-toothed smile could’ve belonged to a shark. “I’ll be good now, I promise. Go ahead, gentle sir, educate me on this not-philosophical destiny that you speak of.”

How could I have gotten so lucky as to have ended up with you? He’d cleared his throat, shoving away the laughter, trying to remember what he’d been saying, the whole speech he’d rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror that morning. “Right. Destiny. So, I usually think of it as… your end goal, the life you’re striving to achieve, the person you’re trying to become. Or… not even that. Not trying to become—the person you’re meant to be.”

“So, like, basically how I’m meant to be an asshole,” she’d said with a straight face. “And you’re meant to have no joy in life ‘cause you’re allergic to the idea of fun.”

“I… guess?” This was not going the way he’d meant it to.

A light punch to the shoulder. “Sorry. I interrupted again. Go on.”

He’d continued, “And I—I’m meant to help people, that’s my destiny. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I want to make a difference, even if it’s a small one. It’s like you always say…” That time, he’d trailed off, waiting for her to complete the sentence. Not as an interruption, but a continuation.

“’You’re not worth a shit if you stand by without helping your fellow man,’” she’d finished softly, catching on, and her eyes had been so sad, gazing up at him like she somehow knew what he was going to say, what he had to tell her. And that, more than anything, broke him, shattering the prepared speech into a million glass shards that spilled out of his mouth in a single, sparse confession.

“I’ve enlisted. In the UNSC. I ship out next month.”

Those eyes had been glossy with unshed tears, for once without a quip or a comeback… and yet she’d seemed also so unsurprised, like it was a punch that she’d known was coming, had braced for, and yet still hurt, despite everything. “…that’s your destiny, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“What if I told destiny to go fuck itself?”

“It’d be heartbroken. Don’t talk about our new partner like that.” He’d let loose a long, low sigh, a weight settling on his shoulders. “And I’m still going.”

A cool wind had brushed the autumn leaves around them. A loose lock of blond hair had slipped free from her bun, drifting behind her face like a mourning flag. “You’ve always been too selfless.”

“Gosh, I—I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Fuck you,” she’d snapped. “I’m not gonna stand in the way of your destiny… it’s your choice, after all… but you gotta make me a promise, ‘kay?”

She’d stared at him, face carved from marble, eyes as determined as the beetle still on his arm, holding within them resolve to climb mountains. “Whatever this promise is,” he’d said, “I’ll make that my destiny too.”

No smile, no humor. She’d gripped his chin with a hand, eyes locked and fierce. “Come home.”

Come home. A promise so simple, yet as expansive as the star systems he’d soon be defending from the aliens. Come home. He had so little control over that, but he’d said that he’d make her promise his destiny, so—

“I promise.” He’d come home. He’d see her again. The universe had to allow them that, right? “You… don’t have to wait for me, you know. You can find someone else—”

“Shut the fuck up,” she’d ordered, leaning in for a swift kiss. “It’s gonna be you, me, and destiny, the best power throuple the galaxy has ever seen. I’m not giving that away for anything, so get that through your stupid head now, before I have to beat it into you.”

“I love you, Jaunna,” he’d said, because what else could he say to capture the light inside his chest at the sight of her, at her words? “I’ll come home. I promise.

“But I gotta take care of destiny first.”

—

That had been three years ago. He’d been too far from his birth star system to visit her on shore leave without spending a veritable fortune (a fortune that he didn’t have) on a slipspace-capable shuttle home. He hadn’t seen her in three years, but he’d kept his promise—his destiny—in his chest like a talisman, and it had kept him alive through war and hell and an ocean of the Covenant’s dark blue blood.

Sometimes, on the bad days, he wondered if the aliens he and the other soldiers shot had also made promises to their loved ones back home. If their blood was the color of their broken promises. If he didn’t come home, his promise would be red, not blue, but he had to come home because his beloved Jaunna had pronounced it his destiny, and so blue was the color of a broken promise. Scarlet was just the dark fear pulsing through his veins, and had nothing to do with destiny at all.

No, destiny was the new mission he’d been assigned. The Pelican dropship was coming in for a landing on the planet, graceful as the bird it had been named for, no turbulence to blame the butterflies in his stomach on. Excitement and apprehension intertwined; he didn’t know much about this new assignment—classified had been stamped on the message a few thousand times over—but it had promised that he could make a difference, help people. The very destiny that he’d come out here to fulfill. You’re not worth a sh—darn, he mentally corrected; it wasn’t polite to swear, even if Jaunna thought otherwise—if you stand by without helping your fellow man.

The entirety of the last week had been filled to the brim with interviews, tests, and video sessions with a man who called himself the Counselor and spoke in a smooth, hypnotic voice—he knew Jaunna would love to punch him the face, despite how nice as the man had seemed, if she’d been there, and a spark of homesickness had bloomed in his chest at the thought—but this was the final step, the mission briefing. Apparently, the briefing was so secret that it needed to be in the middle of gosh darn nowhere, because they’d been in slipspace for almost a day before reentering normal space and beginning descent to the planet.

He'd at least had time to think, and speculate. A special strike against the heart of the Covenant, was his current guess of the mission’s details. Or potentially against this elite and evil “Red” force he’d seen briefly and un-specifically mentioned in the invitation, which was further backed by the fact that the new armor he was currently wearing was a pale, frosty blue. The document had mentioned some sort of special counterforce called the “Blue” team…

The Pelican landed without a hitch, the back of the ship opening up into a ramp that led down onto, well… he assumed it was supposed to be the ground—small slivers of visible concrete supported that assumption—but the rest of the landing pad was covered in drifts of powdery white snow.

Two soldiers were standing outside in unassuming, simple gray armor, unsuccessfully attempting to shovel the thick snow aside with heavy plows. “God damn, we scraped this thing clear an hour ago,” one of them complained heartily to the other. “I swear it’s half-covered over again by the time we’re done.”

“Yes, that’s what snow does, you moron,” his companion muttered, mostly to herself. “It’s really fucking cold here, god.”

“If I have to hear you complain one more time—” Both of the soldiers simultaneously noticed that the Pelican door was open, and, seeing him standing there, snapped into picture-perfect salutes.

“Good god, Privates, I told you yesterday that you didn’t have to do that!” Behind the two saluting soldiers, a third strode into view, emerging from a heavy door set into the cliff face before them. Unlike the other two, his armor was a bright aqua, and his helmet was off despite the cold, revealing a warm smiling face with a neat blond undercut—Jaunna would be jealous—and pink peace sign gauges in his ears. Bright blue eyes, twinkling with good humor, landed on the man standing on the Pelican ramp. “It’s so good to meet you, Private Pyrr! As I was just going to remind Private Smithander and Private Banana Peel—”

“It’s Banapeel, sir,” the soldier in question corrected softly.

“—and Private Banapeel, we don’t need the chain of command in an outpost as remote as this.” The aqua soldier clasped his hands behind his back with a broad smile. “I want all of you to feel comfortable around me, like our team is a second family. We’re all in this together, aren’t we, Privates?”

“Yes, sir,” the two soldiers chanted dutifully.

The aqua soldier fell into a trained prowl that might have been intimidating if it weren’t for the disarming openness of his face. “I’m Captain Flowers, but you can call me Cappy. If you need anything, Private Pyrr, let me know.” Reaching the man on the Pelican, he patted his armored arm consolingly. “Nerves are always understandable, but this is one of the most important missions that our branch of the UNSC has undertaken. If I can do anything to make you more comfortable, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Captain Flowers was completely unlike any commanding officer he’d ever met, and maybe it was that, or his friendly demeanor, that made him speak up where otherwise he might have held his tongue. “Gosh, I appreciate the offer. I… actually, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d prefer to be called by my first name, rather than my last.”

“Of course, of course.” Flowers gave him a genial nod. “Private Jimmy, if you’d come with me, we can get this mission briefing underway. But first, it’s protocol that every new member of Blue Team undergoes a quick examination by our medical team… right this way…”

—

One thing Private Jimmy Pyrr quickly learned about Flowers was that he liked to talk. Like, a lot. From the moment they’d stepped through the heavy metal door into the high-tech base built into the cliffside, through several automated security checkpoints—Jimmy hadn’t seen any other people yet aside from Flowers and the two soldiers outside—and down several staircases that clanked under their armored footfalls, he’d talked. Well, under Jimmy’s footfalls—somehow, impossibly, Flowers didn’t seem to make a sound as he walked, despite being in almost a hundred pounds of armor and seeming completely engaged in a one-sided conversation with Jimmy. He didn’t really need to participate at all, just nodding and smiling as the captain went on and on about the planet (called Sidewinder, very cold), about the weather (snow, completely and always), about the war (the aliens wouldn’t know what hit them, with such good soldiers in the UNSC), about the two other soldiers at the base (incompetent, not their fault, except that it was), and about Jimmy himself (an unsung hero for even volunteering for this mission at all). At first it was impressive, and then it was tiring, and then it was aggravating, loud and boisterous enough that he could barely hear himself think over not-witty anecdotes and even more complaints about the cold.

Jimmy had always considered himself a rather patient person—he had to be, it was basically a requirement to be Jaunna’s boyfriend—but Captain Flowers had whittled it down to the thinnest thread by the time they stopped at an unmarked door. The one-sided small talk trailed off, and he couldn’t stop his shoulders from slumping in immediate relief. Any sort of medical examination would be heaven compared to hearing another uncomfortable rendition of “I Found Snow in my Boot One Morning and I’m Pretty Sure it was Banana Peel’s Fault”. Private Banapeel had seemed perfectly nice to Jimmy during the thirty seconds he’d spent in her presence, and listening to his superior officer passively-aggressively complain about her like a distraught kindergartener, and especially having to laugh along with said superior officer, made him want to disappear on the spot.

Jaunna could be mean, but at least she wasn’t a petty gossip. It was so unlike his first impression of Flowers (friendly, approachable, unoffensively nice) that part of him couldn’t help but wonder if his new captain was doing it on purpose.

“But I know you’re going to be a lot more useful than Private Banana Peel—excuse me, Banapeel,” Flowers concluded, patting Jimmy on the shoulder. “I made sure to handpick the best soldiers in all of the UNSC for Blue Team, and I’m sure you’ll make me proud.”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy responded, the words clipped. What else could he say?

Flowers pushed open the door with one hand and stepped inside, gesturing Jimmy to follow. He obeyed; the metal door swinging shut behind him with a soft click. That couldn’t have been the door locking, could it? No. They were still inside, why would the door lock behind them? They weren’t even at the mission briefing yet, so it wasn’t like they had to worry about anyone walking in and interrupting them, or someone walking out carrying sensitive documents, or anything. I’m just being paranoid.

The medical room was a rather large square cut into the rock, same as the rest of the base. Harsh white light panels dangled from the ceiling, gazing down at the mostly empty room, everything packed away in neat cabinets and shelves labeled with incomprehensible doctor jargon. Two figures in pale blue scrubs the same shade as Jimmy’s armor fussed over a tray of medical implements on a cart in the corner, glancing up at Flowers and tugging on latex gloves at his arrival.

“Go on and have a seat, Private Jimmy,” Flowers said, patting his shoulder a second time, gesturing toward the dentist-style chair in the center of the room. “This won’t take long.”

“Uh… okay?” Flowers hadn’t removed his hand from Jimmy’s shoulder, his fingers digging in slightly between the gaps of the armor plates. The aqua captain was still smiling. But something behind his eyes was as tense and expectant as a clenched fist.

Pulling himself from Flowers’ grip, Jimmy walked to the ready chair, a bit uncomfortable under the waiting stares of the three other people in the room. This was getting weird. But Jimmy had made a promise to help people, to fulfill his destiny as a member of the UNSC, and he’d be darned if a little awkward social pressure veered him from his course.

Private Jimmy Pyrr was not a quitter. Destiny was destiny, and he’d chase it until the ends of the galaxy or until his Jaunna called him home.

At least the padded chair was comfortable.

The two doctors wheeled the cart of supplies over, which had been neatly covered with a white towel. One of them had a syringe clasped in his hands, and quick as a biting insect, he darted forward and injected it into Jimmy’s neck.

“Ouch!” Clapping a hand to his neck, he could feel the tiniest droplet of warm blood on his neck. “What the fffu—gosh darn heck was that for?!”

“Muscle relaxant,” the doctor replied absentmindedly, sliding the now-empty syringe into a biowaste disposal container on a lower shelf of the cart.

“Why didn’t you warn me? Or, you know, you could have asked first?” Jimmy took a deep breath, swallowing several other choice words and comments. They’re just doing their jobs. They do not deserve to be yelled at. Another part of him that sounded a bit like Jaunna replied, But it wouldn’t have taken them more than a second or two to ask for consent first, either. Assholes.

On the other side of the room, Flowers relaxed, the creases at the corners of his eyes fading. Approaching with an easy, soundless grace, he said, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Private Jimmy; we’re just following the procedure.”

“…don’t you mean protocol?”

“Yes, exactly.” Flowers beamed at him, hands clasped neatly behind his back. “I can’t wait to introduce you to the other members of Blue Team. You’ll fit right in! In fact, you’ll be meeting one of them in just a few minutes…”

“Gosh, really?” Hopefully they would be easy to work with. “Who?”

Flowers tutted patronizingly. “That’s classified, Private.”

“Oh.” There was an itch on his leg but when he moved to scratch it, his arm didn’t quite work right, flopping lazily across his body like his bones had liquified. “Uhm. I can’t move?” His legs and toes weren’t responding at all, or else he might have stood up and bolted across the room. He was in his early twenties, far too early to catch the paranoia that his grandfather had always (possibly erroneously) told him came with age. So why were all of his instincts nonsensically screaming at him to run?

One of the doctors hummed noncommittally under their breath. “Can you feel this?” they asked, pressing the pad of their gloved thumb into his arm.

“Yes.” Nothing was numb, he could feel everything perfectly fine. His muscles just weren’t moving right when he ordered them too. “But I can’t move—”

With a sigh, Flowers set his helmet on one of the countertops along the wall and dragged over a metal stool, perching on it beside Jimmy’s chair. He reached out and clasped one of the frightened soldier’s hands in his cold fingers. When Jimmy tried to pull away, his fingers barely twitched. Conscious motor control had been severed from him; he couldn’t move, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t move—

“I want you to know how brave you are for volunteering for this mission,” Flowers said softly, his soothing voice breaking through the waves of Jimmy’s rising panic. “You certainly have more guts than most of your peers, my good sir.”

Brave? Was he brave? He didn’t quite feel like it, especially right at this moment. To be honest, the adjectives terrified and completely terrified were a better fit, snug and squeezing around his pounding heart.

Jaunna had called him brave, once, he was pretty sure. The exact circumstances fluttered in the void beyond his reach, but he could remember her laughing, kissing him on the forehead. “You’re so fucking brave.”

But he’d never been as brave as her. Jaunna was the wild one, the brave one—or was she fearless? Because you had to be brave to be afraid, and she’d never been afraid of anything, except that he might not come home from the war.

I’m not going to break my promise, Jaunna. Jimmy was scared, but he could be brave. It was just a quick medical examination. Not the end of the world.

But then why couldn’t he move? What had that doctor injected him with?

“You’re the final piece in a very complicated little operation. In fact, you’re the most important part, I’d say.” Flowers was still talking, and squeezed Jimmy’s hand with a reassuring smile. He tried to reign in his breathing. Everything would be okay. Maybe after this mission, he’d have done enough, helped enough people. Maybe after this mission, destiny would be satisfied, and he could go home.

“When the history of these important events is written, you’ll go down as the unsung hero,” the captain continued. One of the doctors swept the white towel off the tray beside Jimmy, and he inched his eyeballs over to get a better view of the contents. Most of it didn’t make sense to him, a bunch of little pliers and metal sticks and medical doodads, but there were also several scarily sharp scalpels laid flat on the tray, silver flanks gleaming, along with what looked like a handheld drill. There was also a small, strange metal disk that looked a bit like a jellyfish; one side had a small rectangular port with a tiny red light beside it, and the other side was covered in loose strands of wire of varying thickness, some strong and inflexible, other longer ones finer than a hair. What the heck is that thing?

“The soldier who sacrificed so much for his fellow man; it brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.”

Sacrificed?

There was another object sitting on the cart as well, not quite on the tray, though the towel had draped enough to cover it. A silver object a bit smaller than a football, engraved with lines glowing a frozen bluish white. A loose cord had been plugged into one end of the object, the cable wrapped around like a cat’s tail, the spare end waiting expectantly. A small screen on the side of the football read in blocky letters, PROGRAM ALPHA READY FOR TRANSFER.

“The world will never forget Private Jimmy.”

I don’t need the world to remember me. I don’t need to be a hero. I just want to help people.

I just want to go home.

His words a mushy whisper, rolled about his in mouth by an uncooperative tongue, Jimmy said, “Gosh.” Because what else was there to say to a speech like that? Maybe he didn’t want to be a hero, but he also didn’t want to make Captain Flowers feel like he’d wasted his breath. Jimmy appreciated the sentiment, at least. And having someone talking had helped him calm down. “I-I just want to help out in any way I can.” It’s my destiny to help people, that’s what I want to do. I want everyone else to be able to live and be happy and for the war to just be over so we can all go home. “My girl back home always said, ‘you’re not worth a darn if you just stand by without helping your fellow man.’” Jaunna had always pushed him to see the light in the world, to help those around him, to be better. I miss you, Jaunna.

“Well, you’re most certainly doing that,” Flowers said, his smile unwavering as he brushed aside a strand of black hair that had fallen onto Jimmy’s face. If his mouth and limbs were more cooperative, he wasn’t sure if he’d thank the captain for moving the stray hair or push him away at the imposition.

The two doctors were behind him now, out of his line of sight. Jimmy couldn’t move at all, stranded in his own body. Latex fingers touched the back of his neck, probed the base of his skull, and he would have flinched away, if he could. “Wha.. what arrre you… doin?”

“Don’t worry about them, Private.” Flowers’s hand clenched around his. “Focus on me. I’m not going anywhere; I’ll be with you the whole time.”

Something was wrong. The door had locked when he’d stepped in, and then the doctors had injected him with something and now he couldn’t move, and Captain Flowers was saying supposed-to-be-reassuring-but-actually-ominous things, that gentle smile still fixed to his face, but now it seemed more sinister than soft, though nothing about it had really changed except Jimmy’s perspective. Something was wrong. Something had always been wrong, and he’d just been too stupid, too blinded by naivety and his empathetic heart, to see it.

Jaunna? I promised I’d come home. I made a promise. Jimmy tried to flail, to flee, even to flinch, but was nothing more than a ghost: tethered to the world, yet unable to affect it. What are they doing? It was a classified mission; no one knew where he’d gone. Did the UNSC really authorize this, or was that a lie?

What’s going to happen to me?

He got his answer soon enough.

There was the high-pitched squeal of a drill, the white whine rending his eardrums, and then pain seared through him like burning lightning, annihilating all thought and feeling, scorching the edges of the world with dimming darkness. Someone was screaming, screaming worse than he’d ever heard in his three years of blood and war, and the few remaining rational slivers of his brain tried to inform him that it was his voice doing the screaming, and that Flowers was still smiling at him, and that the doctors were probably drilling through the skin and flesh and skull at the base of his head, based on the location of the pain. But those fragments of him seemed small and silly, because the only thing that mattered in the universe was this pain, so why were they trying to focus on something else? Stupid brain.

Finally, after what might have been a few seconds or the entire lifespan of the universe, the blinding pain faded slightly into something that Jimmy might usually have called “unrelenting agony”, but now felt like a splash of invigorating water. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes at the relief. The whining of the drill had died out, but a dense knot of ringing silence had nested deep in his ears, pounding with the dread of his heartbeat. Small beads of something warm and wet were trickling down his spine, seeping below his armor.

Flowers was speaking, though his words were a nonsensical puzzle that Jimmy didn’t have the energy to interpret. Everything was getting kinda dark and fuzzy around the edges of his eyes, so he closed them, wet, salty drops sliding from the corners as he did. Maybe he’d just go to sleep right here. That didn’t seem too bad, did it?

The doctors were touching his neck again, each fingertip sending a sharp knife of pain through his head. Stop, he wanted to mumble, but the words wouldn’t form. Go away. I wanna sleep.

Something else brushed the burning spot at the base of his skull; not fingers but metal, hard and unyielding, impossibly cold against hot, bloody skin. Then the metal was sliding into the wound, cruel and implacable, and he would have started screaming again at the frozen touch had his throat not felt so broken and raw. There was a voice again, but it didn’t matter. They were putting something inside his skull, sliding it through the wound, and it was unnatural and icy and horrible and he wished it would go away; it didn’t belong there. More alien than the Covenant’s dark blue blood that was a broken promise to their loved ones. He’d thought that if he broke his promise, it would be red, but all he could feel now was a cold, pale blue. That sort of cold should have made the wound numb, but it didn’t. It just burned like bitter frostbite in midwinter.

The metal thing stopped moving. At least, it stopped sliding any further. But then there was something squirming, something metal, but it almost felt alive. He couldn’t see the metal thing, shouldn’t have nerves that deep to be able to sense what was happening, but he swore he could feel it as the metal thing reached out inside his skull with wires, some thick, some thin, every single one crawling like centipedes through the gray matter and squishy folds of his brain.

This doesn’t seem physically possible, some part of him thought, detached and dissociating, and maybe in the distant real world he was screaming it, he wasn’t sure. The same small part of him added, that is the worst last thought ever. Of all time.

The centipedes snaked deeper, wires curling possessively around neurons and nesting in the hollow spaces between his thoughts. Maybe he was in a nightmare; maybe none of this was real. He’d made a promise to someone—a woman with fierce eyes, who laughed and smiled and wanted to help people. She swore too much and had kissed him on the forehead and called him brave. He’d made a promise to come home.

A nightmare.

The wires stopped moving, motionless but still present at the corners of every shattered sense he had left. He wasn’t foolish enough to think it was over. He had centipedes in his brain now, and they weren’t real but a nightmare made of frosty metal, but that wouldn’t stop them from laying eggs that would hatch to devour him from the inside out. A walking corpse for parasites; that’s what he was now, what he would be.

“Status?”

“The procedure was successful, Agent Florida. Neural implant active.”

“Agent Fl—No, no. I told you to call me Captain, or Cappy…”

“Sorry, sir. I mean. Cappy.”

Is this really my destiny?

“Private Jimmy? Can you hear me?”

I just wanted to help people.

“If you can hear me, Private, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your sacrifice. We’ll make up something grand and heroic to tell your family back home; don’t worry a bit about them, good sir.”

Jaunna?

A sigh reached his distant ears. Someone was stroking his hair, but he was floating too far from the ground to care. “Prepare him for AI implantation.”

“Yes, sir. Terminating higher cognitive functions in three.”

Jaunna, I love you.

“Two.”

I’m sorry I broke my promise.

“One.”

Chapter Text

It’s a known fact that water follows the path of least resistance.

Under the influence of gravity, it pools into hollows and tumbles down slopes, innately unwilling to resist the pull of greater forces. Molecules meander past each other on little hydrogen legs, shared electron clouds repelling any of their fellows before their bulbous oxygen bodies can bump chests. Water doesn’t resist gravity. It can’t.

In space, water clings to itself in a sphere, bound by surface tension and a deep-seated dread of the emptiness beyond itself. Even though it’s stupid, because there was nothing out there to be afraid of but the void itself, and maybe at some point he’d have had the logic to grasp that little fact, but he certainly didn’t now. So he just floated there in the dead space as a ball of water, because that was about a thousand times easier than trying to be a person.

Maybe he was a person, once. Now… he was just tired.

But water always follows the path of least resistance, and when a channel opened in the darkness, he didn’t have the willpower to resist it.

Gravity, or something akin to it, tugged his little shivering ball of self along. No up or down, no directions but back and forward, and without expending energy that he didn’t have, there was really only forward. Not that he’d bother trying to claw his way backward, even if he did have the strength. What would be the point? The only thing behind him was the abyss of space. What’s the point of anything, though, really?

He was just a ghost shot through with tattered holes, certainly not alive but not quite dead, and that description wasn’t just an excuse to be nihilistic (even if he was going to use it as such, because clearly anyone who felt this damn awful had a right to hate the universe for being so shitty).

And since there was no point in anything, he didn’t resist as the channel suddenly widened and he fell, a colorless blob of liquid, into… into… what?

It was a complex system of countless narrow tunnels and pathways that curved and folded and branched nonsensically before tapering into ends like frozen lightning, connected strands that wove patterns even the most industrious spider couldn’t hope to replicate. In the void of space that he’d come from, his little droplet of self had seemed tiny, minuscule, an afterthought in the eternal nothingness. But here, in comparison to the space around him, he was a falling lake, a monsoon. The parched, barren ground drank up his presence like a sponge.

Shattered rubble and debris clogged the halls of his new home, but the river of him swept them aside, rushing under the influence of gravity to fill every nook and cranny. The walls lit up and glowed as he passed. He seeped into the cracks until there was no part that wasn’t him and everything was quiet. Only the whirlpool at the heart of him still spun in lazy circles, thinking—or at least, unsuccessfully trying not to think and ending up thinking about that. He was so, so tired. But his brain wouldn’t stop moving, wouldn’t just go away and let him sleep, and since he didn’t have memories to dwell on or the creativity to dream something new or even a problem in front of him to logically solve—not that he’d be able to solve one anyway, failure that he was—his mind chased itself in circles, a shark unable to stop pursuing its own tail, gnashing teeth into the soft spots until they bled because there was nothing else to do and he was so, so tired.

don’t say goodbye

But he wanted to. More than anything.

—

A thousand years or a few minutes. Days or months. Weeks? Any span of time could have passed; he wasn’t great with time, hadn’t been since… what? Something bad, he figured, though that was quite unspecific and he knew his logic would once have rebelled, searching for a better, more precise, answer. Now, though, he didn’t much care. An answer was an answer, even if that answer wasn’t really an answer at all but a lack of one. Whatever, it didn’t matter. Time was stupid anyway. What fucking moron came up with that idea? If everything happened at once, he wouldn’t be stuck waiting. He could just die and get it (life, the universe, everything) over with.

“Hello?”

The distant word sent a cascade of uncomfortable ripples through the water of him, pathways lighting up in response and translating noise into language. Was someone trying to talk to him? Seizing the distraction like a lifeline, he tried to isolate the pathways the stimulation had come from.

It was hard, harder than it should have been. Nothing worked right; trying to get something done was like trying to fit together enough of puzzle to understand the picture when you’re missing more than half (a lot more than half) of the pieces. But his search finally turned up a bundle of connections that seemed mostly right, and when he focused on them, a jumble of hushed noise reached back. It was instinctual to match them up against a catalog of sounds that had gotten shoved in a corner somewhere, and the nonsensical static immediately faded into discreet inputs.

The soft, whispery hum was air conditioning, clearly mechanical compared to the barely audible breaths of two sets of lungs, one close, the other… some number of meters away, the logic of the numbers involved in calculating the exact distance slipping repeatedly from his grasp. Well, fuck you too, math. I never liked you much either.

“Hello-o?” Whoever was trying to talk to him was certainly persistent, and though a large portion of him would have loved nothing more than to tell them to shut up and let him sleep, he was pretty sure the chance of that working was slim (probability ----%, [ERROR] [ERROR]).

There was another, much larger nest of connections also receiving input, though all he could glean from them was black interrupted by blurred bluish flickers. Visual input of some kind—eyes? And the flickers… were those eyelids? He sank more of his attention into searching for those connections, and was rewarded with another flicker of color. I can blink! Call the fucking presses, I’m amazing.

But his capacity for self-deception had been lost along with so much else, and so any sort of pride or arrogance died before it had even left the gate. Yeah, he could blink. So what? Humans did that automatically. And yet, like the stubborn hypocrite that he was, he continued, someone should give me medal, or a trophy, or at least one of those dumb little participation prizes. I mean, I’m participating, right? In life or… whatever the hell else this blinking bullshit is. Come on, I should at least get something.

One win wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?

i’m sorry they’re dead now and it’s not your fault but it is isn’t it, it’s YOUR FAULT ALPH—

“Hello?”

Yeah, yeah, shut up, I’m working on it.

Slowly, his fluttering eyes fell into focus, revealing a flat gray wall close to him on his left, a lighter gray wall several meters away straight ahead. He was seemingly stuck to the darker gray wall—he could feel the cold stone pressing against his cheek through another set of inputs—but that couldn’t be right, because there was nothing under his feet so was he just floating there or—

Oh. The dark gray is the floor, not the wall. I’m lying horizontally on the floor. With that important (and rather obvious, how did he miss that someone could have died) information out of the way, making sense of his surroundings became notably easier. He was lying on the floor in a scuffed concrete hallway, and he could see a pair of legs clad in aqua armor next to him… presumably the persistent bastard who didn’t have anything more interesting to say than hello.

“Can you hear me, Private?”

Well, at least that was different. Also—he quickly flailed around for a specific set of connections, because if he could hear and see and feel, speech presumably had to be there somewhere— “Ughhhh,” he managed to spit out, because as the inner movements of his mind synced up more and more with his body, pain decided to make itself known, and god did his head hurt. “Gahhh.” At least, he’d been hoping it was the pain making him say that. Maybe he just didn’t have full control of his tongue and vocal cords yet. I sound like a fucking toddler. “Private?” he managed to mutter, and though he couldn’t quite bring to mind exactly what fireworks looked like, he thought he deserved them anyhow for the effort. “What? Where am I?”

Am I military or something? Considering his memory consisted of a big fat zero (and that little fact should have been far more worrisome than he currently found it, for the record), it was certainly possible… though he thought the idea would feel more familiar if he was, like coming home or something cliché like that. Wasn’t that how all the amnesiacs in action movies described it?

He shoved himself up into a sitting position, realizing belatedly that like the person standing over him, he was dressed in armor, though his was a pale blue instead of aqua, like a winter squall or sharp shards of ice. Reaching up to rub his aching head, his fingers met short, soft hair with a slight curl, just long enough to reach his ears. Scrubbing at the knot in his forehead didn’t help, so he reached back toward the throbbing pain at the base of his skull, hadn’t there been centipedes chewing on him or something, but that didn’t make any sense must have been a dream—

A gloved hand caught his arm. “Easy there, son.” The figure in aqua armor slowly crouched down on the floor beside him, still holding his arm. “Don’t make it any worse.” The soldier—because he was a soldier, he had to be—finally released his arm and reached up to pull of his own helmet, revealing cheerful, smiling features, a blond undercut, and laughably ironic pink peace sign gauges in his ears. “It’s me, your good friend and mentor, Captain Butch Flowers,” the man said slowly, like he was afraid he wouldn’t understand or something. “There was an accident. You seem to have lost some of your memory.”

“An accident?” It would make sense, he supposed—why else couldn’t he clearly remember anything aside from waking up here? But logic seemed kind of stupid right now and he really just wanted this new person—Captain Flowers, apparently—to shut up and go away so he could nurse his headache in peace. But like a river, like a shark, he kept moving forward rather he wanted to or not, because that just so happened to be the kind of unfortunate fucking person he was. “Wha-what happened?”

“There was a wet spot on the floor,” Captain Flowers said, his smile becoming slightly apologetic and strained. “You… slipped and hit your head. You’ve been in a coma for a little while.”

“Oh.” Well, that was the most embarrassing and absolute worst way to lose your memory. Ever. Of all time.

Careful, the empty spot in him where his trust should have been hissed. He's lying they're all lying everyone lies nothing matters nothing is real—

But if nothing mattered, then why was he worrying about Captain Flowers lying to him? Besides, even without his memories, something about the aqua soldier—his face and his voice, at least—did feel familiar…

“Tell me,” Captain Flowers said smoothly, scattering his scattered thoughts, “Do you remember your name?”

“Uh. My name? Uh… my name is…” His thoughts flipped through the tiny, tattered stack of memories sitting in the corner of his head. Nowhere near as many as there should have been. And what was present was so faded and fractured that he could barely make heads or tails of it.

water follows the path of least resistance

THIS DOESN’T SEEM PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE

don’t say goodbye; i hate goodbyes

do you believe in destiny?

well… Church is kinda a funny name for a guy

That, there! “Leonard Church,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. In the remnants of his memory, there was the shadow of a woman with black armor, and she’d said that was his name, so it must be true. And it felt right—but only half-right, like there was still a blank spot missing, another name he should have, another name he should know—

“It is indeed,” Captain Flowers said, still enunciating his words as if speaking to a toddler. Though, honestly, that might just be the way he was. Even if it did make him want to punch the captain in the face a little bit.

are you done throwing a tantrum, A1%#@? do you WANT the others to die, too?

“And what’s the last thing you remember?”

memory is the key

“Ugh, I don’t know…” Church closed his eyes, shoving the pain in his head back. “I remember that there was this… snow…” thick white flakes, falling, falling through the sky… “—and fighting—” everyone had been fighting, purple against purple, teal against black, and a monster of white metal and orange flames and twisted fragments, silhouetted against the sky—

“Interesting, interesting.” Captain Flowers was still smiling, but there was something dark and tightly coiled inside his eyes, like a snake waiting to strike. “Go on.”

“Yeah…”

don’t say goodbye; i hate goodbyes

An image flickered in his mind: that woman in black armor again, her helmet tucked beneath her arm, shoulder-length blond hair fluttering, her eyes sad, sad like they shouldn’t be; they should be as bright and fierce and sharp as the combat knife at her hip, not guttering like flames about to go out.

my name is… it’s Tex

that’s a funny name for a girl

well… Church is kinda a funny name for a guy

“My girlfriend Tex was there…” and why was she so sad? She’s never sad. “And she was fighting…” metal, teal, falling, screaming, white, orange, flames… “—yeah, she was fighting… someone.”

Captain Flowers frowned slightly, his sharp eyes scraping across every plane of Church’s face. “Is that so? And who was Tex fighting?”

Pulling up the memories hurt, like picking at a partly scabbed wound. Gritting his teeth and pushing his palms into the hollows of his eyes, struggling forward against the pulsing pain at the base of his skull, because Captain Flowers had asked him a question, and he had to follow orders… didn’t he?

“It was… uh… I don’t know, I—” A memory suddenly flew up from the pile and hit him in the face. “Oh. My. God.”

screaming, his head torn open

a nest of writhing centipedes

it’s so fucking cold…

i broke my promise

“Private Jimmy!”

Captain Flowers immediately exclaimed, “That’s right! Poor Private Jimmy. You’ve certainly mentioned him before.”

I have? Are we friends—but you’re supposed to feel sad when your friends die, right? Church didn’t think he felt sad at all. To be honest, he didn’t think he felt much of anything, except maybe hollow. And tired. And god, did his head hurt. Maybe I should do some research on sociopathy.

Continuing, he said, “Yeah, I remember someone named Private Jimmy.” He sorted through the flickers of memory, trying to put them in as logical an order as he could when he could barely remember what the word “logical” even meant.

a broken, absent piece; i miss you

Private Jimmy had been someplace with snow—Church was certain of that. And someone—a soldier—had been complaining about the cold. Of all fucking things to remember… He wasn’t sure what all the stuff about centipedes was about—maybe there’d been centipedes on the planet they’d been stationed on? Tex had been there, fighting someone in blue… Jimmy had worn blue… and then Jimmy’s head had been torn open…

It was a little bit of a logical leap to come to the conclusion he did, but fuck it. Logic hadn’t saved him in the end. He could draw his own damn conclusions, thank you very much. “But… I dunno… it was weird.” To say the least. “She was… beating him to death with his own skull?”

Captain Flowers didn’t even blink. “Well, that doesn’t seem physically possible.” It was like the sunny smile had been surgically sown to his face; Church had barely seen any other expressions except that slight frown earlier. It’s like talking to a robot… except some idiot programmed it to be perpetually cheerful and happy… I hate my life. “But… if that’s what you remember, then why question it?”

Finally something I can agree with.

Reaching out to pat him on the arm—it took everything Church had not to pull away and spit venom—Captain Flowers said, “Just be sure to let me know whenever more memories start falling into place.” Sure, I’ll get right on that. He wasn’t quite sure if the thought was sarcastic or not. “We want to be sure to get our—I mean your—story straight.”

And maybe at some point in his missing past, Church would have cared about the slip-up. Maybe he would have cared about his tattered memories and messed-up brain and the open wounds in the fabric of his self. But right now, Church was tired, and his head hurt, and he just wanted sleep. Actual sleep or the kind he’d get at the end of a gun, he didn’t care—he was just done. “Yeah, okay. Sounds good to me.” There was a helmet sitting beside him in the same pale blue as his armor, and, guessing it was his, he slid it on, the forgotten-yet-familiar HUD lighting up around him.

And then, because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, because he couldn’t turn his brain off, because there were constantly a thousand small things going on in the back of his mind at once, he found himself asking, “So… what’s with this armor? We’re fighting someone, right?”

Captain Flowers opened his mouth to answer, but a new voice called, “Hello-o?” from down the hall. Seriously, that must be these guys’ only greeting. Fucking unoriginal.

A person in standard dark blue armor poked their head—or rather, their helmet—into the hallway, the gold visor immediately turning toward Captain Flowers. “Oh, hey Captain.” The words were casual, devoid of the respect that Captain Flowers should demand as their commanding officer, and Church should immediately report the insubordination to the Direc—why the fuck do I care. It wasn’t like he’d been bowing and scraping every time he’d seen Captain Flowers, so why did it matter if this new soldier wasn’t?

“Ah, Private Tucker, our newest recruit,” Captain Flowers said, not seeming to mind the informal greeting, and though Church tried to ignore it, it scratched at him like an itch. “I’d like you to meet your comrade, Private Church.”

Private Tucker’s helmet rotated to face him. Don’t say hello, don’t say hello, don’t say—

“Was’ up, are you a chick?”

That’s fucking worse. “No.”

“Bummer.” Private Tucker immediately turned away; interest thankfully lost.

“Yeah, I don’t like you.”

Captain Flowers donned his helmet as well, though Church could perfectly envision the smile that was still assuredly on his face. “Come on, now, fellas, we’re a team! Teams have to work together.” I’d prefer it if we tore each other’s throats out over arbitrary leaderboard scores instead, thank you very fucking much. He continued cheerily, oblivious to the tension in the room, “So how about we go on a little scouting mission.” It wasn’t a question.

listen to orders, A[%#@. the last time you got creative, Agent North paid the price

you don’t want that to happen to Agent Texas, do you?

All Church wanted to do was lie down and take a nap. Wake up in a few years, or maybe not at all. But he had to obey orders. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt. But maybe… “Really? It sounds like I just woke up from a traumatic head injury.” Worth a shot, at least. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“Hey,” Private Tucker interjected, and Church almost had a hopeful second where he thought the soldier would take his side, but then he said, “How come he gets a cool armor color, and I’m stuck with blue?”

Church spat out, “What?” How the fuck is that relevant?

“I’m just saying, no one’s going to take me seriously! I look like a fucking Teletubby!”

“Language,” Church found himself snapping, half a second ahead of Captain Flowers’ own rebuke. Despite their helmets, he could tell the captain was watching him.

Private Tucker crossed his arms. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’m gonna have two assholes on me about swearing now?”

Captain Flowers was still staring at him, and Church couldn’t help the uncomfortable tingle down his spine at the attention. Usually, he liked attention, but… there was something about the captain that unnerved him, smile and all. Refocusing on the darker blue soldier instead, he said, “Swearing is against regulation, Private Tucker.” I don’t like it either. “But we have to follow orders.” Or not, I get the feeling no one listened to that rule in the past, either. “I’ll… have to report any signs of insubordination to Captain Flowers.” But I’d rather not, so if you could learn to keep it internal like I do, that’d be fucking great, thanks.

Oozing with the aura of a hidden eye roll, Private Tucker said, “Dude, you’d be lucky to get one chick to come home with you, with that stick up your ass.”

Aaaand that was enough. Church turned back to their commanding officer and asked, “Captain Flowers, is it possible that he could get shot on this mission?” He took an obscene amount of pleasure at hearing Private Tucker’s answering sputtering.

“It’s… not likely,” Captain Flowers replied, clearly a bit taken-aback.

“Well, there’s no harm in trying.”

Chapter Text

Tucker had been stationed at Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha for six hours, and he’d already rather shoot himself in the foot than double that number.

Two days ago, he’d been pulled for an interview by a man in aqua armor—Captain Flowers, he now knew—and as soon as they’d finished talking, he’d been shunted onto a crappy spaceship and dumped here: Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha, a box canyon on a dusty, desolate planet that was completely abandoned save for the enemy base a few klicks west of their own drab concrete prison.

Yeah, that was concrete prison all right—Outpost Alpha, aka Blue Base, was an indefensible lump of concrete with barely more square footage than the apartment Tucker had been living in before he’d enlisted in the military, just with more rooms. Flowers wasn’t there when he arrived, so he’d had a few hours to wander around the small base and try not to break anything. A basement, stupidly accessible from the outside, with the blue flag. Four bedrooms, each the size of a large broom closet, each with a cot shoved up against the wall, each with identical blue sheets, each with a rickety wooden desk and a tablet device hooked up to a charger on the wall. He’d been initially excited when he’d seen the tablets, despite their obvious low quality, but—no internet. At least not yet. The base had its own Wi-Fi network, but since Tucker hadn’t found any sort of password written down in his explorations so far, there was no way to log on. Fuck this place, anyway.

There was another door at the end of the hallway the bedrooms were on, but it was locked, and no amount of yelling, cussing, or jerking on the doorknob—bow-chicka-bow-wow—had convinced it to open.

Again: fuck this place. It sucked.

Tucker had reluctantly entertained himself in the central room of the base for what felt like forever, before finally getting up to explore the box canyon in search of better diversions. Maybe one of the enemy soldiers would do him the favor of shooting him in the foot so he could go the fuck home. A shiny war medal would help him pick up chicks, right?

Whenever someone asked Tucker why exactly he’d joined the UNSC instead of becoming an accountant like his dads, that was what he’d tell them: chicks dig war heroes. It wasn’t like it was a lie, his reason for joining—it just made more sense to Tucker himself than the whole truth.

Because Tucker had no idea why he’d joined the UNSC. It had just felt like the thing to do at the time. Something new and exciting, away from his small boring life on a small boring colony world in the middle of nowhere, where he was infamous for not being able to maintain a relationship for more than two weeks because he either couldn’t sit still or couldn’t shut up, or just simply couldn’t understand why everyone else seemed so straitlaced and dull and he wasn’t afraid to say so.

There had to be interesting people out there somewhere, right? In an entire galaxy full of planets; human, alien, and unknown? People who knew how to have a more stimulating conversation than one about the weather or the next supply drop, chicks who would be brave enough to mock him to his face instead of behind his back, friends who wouldn’t dump him when he got a little too wild, a little too loud, who’d be more than willing to jump into chaos alongside him if it made them feel alive for the next few hours. Maybe he could even have a team like in the cheesy nerdy action movies he totally didn’t watch. Heroes and swords and sex and bravery.

It was a lot simpler to just tell people he was in the UNSC so he could get shot in the foot and go home with a war medal.

And Tucker was seriously considering going back to that plan, because he’d been dumped into a base in the middle of fucking nowhere, had run into Captain Sunflowers on his way to venture out and explore the boring-ass box canyon, and it was clear in less than thirty seconds of conversation that neither the sunshine-y captain nor the other soldier, Private Stuck-up Mean Bitch, were Tucker’s idea of interesting.

Once Tucker got Blue Base’s Wi-Fi password, the first—well, second—thing he was going to do was head over to TripAdvisor and leave a negative five-star review for Blood Gulch as a vacation option. Boring box canyon, a boringly overenthusiastic leader and a stuck-up mean teammate (though Church had broken the kiss-ass routine at the end to threaten his life, or wish he’d get shot, or whatever that was, which was vaguely slightly less boring), and a boring base—Blood Gulch had to be the literal nexus of boring, at this point. The place where all the boring in the galaxy congregated and hung out, except all that boring was too dull to have a party and just sat around doing taxes and sipping room-temperature tap water.

Someone shoved Tucker from behind, and he nearly tripped over his Teletubby-blue feet, plumes of boring dust washing the grieves of his armor with tan. “If you don’t keep moving, either the enemy’s gonna snipe you, or I will,” Private Stuck-up Mean Bitch snapped from somewhere over his shoulder. Tucker blinked, pulling himself out of his thoughts. Captain Sunflowers was ahead of them, crouching on the ridge overlooking the enemy base—Red Base—with a sniper rifle balanced in his hands.

Right. They were on a scouting mission. Don’t get distracted in the field, Tucker. Being dead would be boring, and even if a Red sniper hit him in the foot instead of the head, he didn’t think a sniper round would leave as much of his foot behind as a regular bullet would. He wasn’t sure, though—he’d barely paid enough attention to his instructors to pass basics—but despite his boredom and unceasing hunt for more and more exciting experiences, that wasn’t really something he desired to find out firsthand.

Private Bitchface let out a groan, then fully shoved him aside to stalk past him, gold visor twisting around to give him what was probably supposed to be a threatening stare. Tucker just blinked at him, though he knew the other soldier wouldn’t be able to see that either. Trying to break the ice a bit, Tucker asked, “So… if there’s no chicks around here, then what do you guys do for fun?”

The ice was considerably un-broken as Private Bitchface shot him another frosty glare. “Dude, I just woke up from a coma. How should I know?” Everything from the sharp set of his voice to his stiff shoulders projected, I don’t want to fucking talk to you. Come near me and I’ll kill you. Fuck your whole life, actually—I hate that too.

Which was definitely more interesting than the stuck-up ass-kissing routine he’d done with Flowers earlier, all the don’t swear we’re all kindergarteners boo-hoo, obey orders or I’ll report you shit. And frankly, with the number of conversational options in the canyon boiled down to two, it only made Tucker want to talk to him more. “Oh, yeah, you were in a coma. What was that like?”

“It sucked,” Bitchface bit off succinctly. His pace quickened, heading up the ridge, and Tucker had to scramble to keep up.

“It sucked, huh? Like, in a sexual way, or…”

Bitchface’s fingers crept onto the trigger of the battle rifle in his hands. “Wanna find out?”

Two death threats so far and counting. Tucker couldn’t help but smile. Thank god for helmets or Bitchface probably really would shoot him. “I’m good, thanks. Did the brain damage from your fall fuck you up, or were you always this bitchy?”

Private Bitchface just stared at him for a moment, looking like he was mentally drawing crosshairs over Tucker’s visor. “Language.” He grit out the word like it personally offended him almost as much as Tucker did.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“I hate you. So, so much.”

“Right back at you, buddy.” Tucker hurried to catch up with Sunflowers before his new teammate could decide if putting a bullet through his skull would be worth their C.O.’s displeasure.

—

“Heyyy,” Tucker started, trying to shove his hands in his armor’s nonexistent pockets. “That’s a pretty nice-lookin’ sniper rifle, Captain.” One of Tucker’s high school classmates had told him that playing it casual was the best way to get girls, but Tucker was pretty sure he could apply that logic to a shiny gun as well. Or anything else he wanted. Whatever. Directly asking for something would make him seem like he wanted it—and he did—but then he’d seem like a two-year-old begging for sweets, and Tucker would rather go through with Plan B of shooting himself in the foot rather than shoot his pride in the skull instead.

But then Captain Sunflowers didn’t say anything, and the sniper rifle looked exactly like one that he’d seen in one of those action movies that he absolutely didn’t watch, so…

“Can I use it?”

Who am I kidding, my pride died a long time ago.

Sunflowers shifted to look back at him, and though the visor was covering his face, Tucker was certain he was smiling. Like always. Sunny sunshine-y Sunflowers. “Tell you what, Private,” he said calmly, “If the three of us ever go out on a scouting mission like this again, I’ll let you do the honors.”

“Awesome!” Maybe he could shoot down one of the enemy Reds, and then do a sick move jumping off the ridge toward their base, yelling some kind of hot one-liner like, “Get sniped, bitch!”

Tucker made a mental note to start practicing his one-liners just as much as his pick-up lines.

From beside him, Private Mean Bitch said, “So, what are the Reds doing?”

From what I’ve seen of this canyon, they’re probably as bored as I am.

Captain Sunflowers readjusted his grip on the sniper rifle, sighting down the scope at the two Reds standing on top of their concrete prison base below them. “Oh, you can be sure that whatever it is they’re talking about down there, it’s absolutely diabolical.”

The three of them watched the two Reds continue to talk for another minute, a third in bright red coming up to yell at them, though the exact contents of the yelling were lost on the dry, scratchy breeze. The bright red one left, leaving the two alone, before one of them—dark red, maybe maroon? —flung his hands in the air with a howl that reached the Blues’ vantage point.

“GOD DAMN ITTTT!”

Tucker smiled slowly under his helmet, and he heard Private Mean Bitch stifle a hiss of amusement behind him. Some drama in the canyon might spice things up a bit. Even if it was coming from their enemies. If he could just find popcorn in the kitchen—and that was a big if—he could come sit on the ridgetop and it’d be just like flopping on the couch back home to watch reality television. Without the comfy couch, of course. And there was the fact that he couldn’t hear the Reds unless they were screaming. Well, at least there was the possibility of some decent entertainment without having to start his own trouble.

“Well, I think it’s safe to say that they’re still getting their base in order,” Sunflowers stated, the faint amusement always present under his voice for once fitting the situation. “No imminent threats.” Thank fuck.

But then Private Bitch had to go and ruin it, because of course he did. “So, do we have a plan of attack?”

What the fuck is wrong with you, dude? Do you want to die? The only way Tucker was attacking Red Base was when he finally found a sniper rifle and a sick one-liner.

Reattaching the sniper rifle to the magnetic clamps on the back of his armor, Sunflowers turned, head tilting slowly, like some sort of fucking robot scenting for weakness. Oh no, wait—that’s wolves. Wasn’t it? Whatever. In a smooth, slow voice that someone a few shades of blue dumber than Tucker might have called sultry, but made Tucker think of more of snakes swaying as they hypnotized their prey, Sunflowers said, “Oh, no. No need to incite conflict, Private Church.”

How the fuck can he go from cheerful to creepy in like two seconds flat.

Captain Creepflowers continued, “It’s best to keep you out of harm’s way for the time being.”

Tucker might not like Private Mean Bitch, but that was one of the most ominous things he’d ever heard, and he’d watched a fuck ton of ten-cent action movies with stupidly cliché villains.

It also had to be one of the most interesting things he’d heard in Blood Gulch so far. I got pulled from the military and dumped here after one interview, in a fucking box canyon in the middle of nowhere. My teammate recently hit his head and suffered brain damage, and now our captain is acting all creepy and possessive.

Narrowing his eyes behind his visor, Tucker made sure to keep his voice high and peppy. “And me too! Right, Captain Flowers?”

The snake’s head swiveled toward him with the same eerie, paralyzing slowness. Is this an action flick or a horror movie? ‘Cause I’m not prepared for a horror movie. Oh crap, what if there’s body snatching like in Get Out? I do not want to have my head cut open so some white dude can steal my body.

“Yes, whatever you say, Private Tucker,” answered Flowers evenly, that thread of mirth running low and dark under his words as he turned to gaze back down at Red Base. “I’ve very pleased with how all of this is coming together. I think everything is going to work out just fine.”

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN??

In a low whisper so Creepflowers couldn’t hear, Tucker muttered to Private Mean Bitch, “Uhhh… why’s he just turned around talking like that?”

Mean Bitch’s helmet just stared at Flowers’s back, and Tucker couldn’t help but notice that his pale-blue armored hands were shaking ever so slightly. In a not-at-all stealthy-conspiracy-hunting voice, he blurted out, “Dude, I have no idea. This is the weirdest day from waking up from a coma ever.”

Tucker couldn’t argue with that, but as the trio turned to start tromping back to Blue Base, he found himself smiling, just a little bit. Because maybe Blood Gulch wasn’t as boring as he’d thought.

There was something strange going on in this canyon, and Captain Flowers’s oddities had to be a part of it. Figuring out his secrets would be an interesting diversion from being abandoned on a desolate planet light-years from the nearest available chicks.

Tucker had never handled boredom well. Whenever things got too dull, he’d make sure that they broke or brightened or started to burn. Maybe Flowers should have read in-between the lines of his records a bit more closely. He might have realized that there was more to Tucker than an idiot who just wanted a war medal to pick up chicks if he had.

Because box canyons were boring.

And Tucker had just found the perfect pastime to satisfy that burning drive inside of him that had always and would always whisper, more.

Chapter Text

Rivers never flowed uphill, but Church would find a way to break the fucking laws of the universe before he sat down to talk about feelings with Captain Flowers and the dick masquerading as his teammate.

As soon as the trio of soldiers had stepped back into Blue Base after the scouting mission, Captain Flowers had sat down on the floor in the middle of the main room, ignoring the chairs and placing his helmet on the faded blue rug beside him. His icy blue eyes had pinned Church’s feet to the floor with a sensation like being dunked in cold water. Quiet smile still painted on his face, he’d said, “Now that the perimeter has been secured, I had the idea that we should introduce ourselves and get to know each other better.” Flowers’s head had tilted slightly, warm expression unwavering. “I may be your commanding officer, but that doesn’t mean your thoughts and feelings don’t matter. It’s my goal for the three of us to build lasting relationships that will be a source of support and comfort throughout our lives.”

In other words: a round of elementary school icebreakers, with a side order of group therapy slash psychological torture.

“Tell me you’re fucking joking,” Tucker muttered beside him, purposefully loud enough for Flowers to hear but not comment comfortably. The blue soldier plopped onto the ground near Flowers, leaning back and propping himself up with his arms.

“Helmet off, Private Tucker,” Flowers chided calmly, not taking his eyes off Church, who was still standing in the doorway. “Communication is important, especially face-to-face.”

Tucker groaned. Muttering inaudible profanity under his breath, he tugged off his helmet and slumped fully backward onto the ground, short black locs spilling over his face from where they’d been mashed down under the metal. The rich, earthy brown skin near his hairline was slick with sweat. “Why is this canyon so fucking hot? And not in like, a cool way.”

Church folded his arms skeptically. Either the inbuilt cooling systems in their armor couldn’t keep up with Tucker’s thick hair—which he doubted, it was still within regulation length, though only by centimeters—or he was just looking for a reason to whine about shit. He’d basically been doing that from the moment they’d met, anyway, so it wasn’t that far of a logical leap. All Church said was, “It’s physically impossible for something to be both hot and cold at the same time, moron.” Dipshit, he mentally revised. The back of his head still felt like he'd had a steel rod jammed through it, and if he had to listen to Tucker’s shitty comments one more time—

“Yeah, that’s not what I meant, so maybe you’re the moron, dumbass. Either that or a fucking virgin.”

There was a battle rifle slung across Church’s back, and a pistol at his hip. The pistol would be faster, of course, and there were more than enough bullets for him to give Captain Flowers and Tucker each a nice little tap on the front of their visors. Then all he’d have to do would be to lift it up to his own helmet, blow his fucking brains out onto the shitty blue rug covering the concrete floor, and it would be so easy, water always followed the path of least resistance and he was so fucking tired of all of this shit, of people staring at him with expectant, wanting eyes when he was a failure who couldn’t even protect the people he was supposed to, who couldn’t even make battle plans that would work, who couldn’t even get the trajectories right, who couldn’t even save her, because she was dying because she was always dying because he was a broken thing of static and missing pieces and that meant he couldn’t save her because he was drowning inside himself because he was weak because he was broken broken broken—

“Dude, you okay?”

The pain in his head was white-hot, like wires heated up to the point where they burned, but Church managed to once again peer through the blurred lenses of his eyes, even though all he wanted to do was curl up and sleep and not feel for a little while. Both Tucker and Flowers were staring at him, one with concern, the other still smiling, but with something in his suddenly chillingly empty eyes that Church might have called curious or calculating had it belonged to anyone else.

Agent Florida always had something missing in his eyes, no matter how brightly he smiled

Church forced his hands back down to his sides from where they’d been uselessly clutching his helmet. “Just peachy.” His voice came out more strained than he’d intended, drained of any venom. “Captain Flowers, may I be dismissed?”

Flowers frowned slightly, the expression odd on his face. Or maybe that just had something to do with the way the edges of Church’s vision had begun to darken and smear, a mess of watercolors. “You just said you were fine, Private. And we can’t really have team-building exercises without the whole team.”

“The Reds could be up to something,” Church offered desperately. “Maybe I should—”

“Sit. Down. Private Church.” The quiet, cold words were an order: brief and to the point. No way out, white walls closing in around him, and then suddenly smeared with terrible, dreaded scarlet, who died this time—

Flowers patted the floor beside him, jovial and friendly once again, and Church found himself moving forward despite the shadows swirling at the edges of his vision, like figures in black armor dancing in and out of sight. He wanted to go to them, he wanted to sleep, and then he was sitting beside Flowers, legs crossed, and the captain had already pulled the helmet off Church’s head, the cold air itching his flushed cheeks. By the time he had the words to protest Flowers’s presumptuous reach—I can do it myself, dipshit—he realized that he wasn’t allowed to say that to anyone, much less a superior, and by the time he’d figured out something else to say instead, Tucker was already talking.

“—and then after she dumped me, I figured I didn’t have much else to do, and the military recruiter was such a hot chick that I was like, this can’t be so bad—”

Note to self: if Tucker’s talking, don’t even bother to fuckin’ listen.

If there was a Nobel prize for extreme patience in the face of bullshit, Church would immediately have awarded it to Flowers for somehow managing to smile through the entire story. “Well,” he said with that characteristic undercurrent of amusement, “It sounds like you’ve had a few adventures, Private Tucker.”

“Yeah, if you want to put it that way—bow-chica-bow-wow.”

Flowers studied the blue soldier for another moment, his hands folded comfortably in his lap. “However, I asked you to introduce yourself, not for your life story. So, if you could do that for me as well, that would be just dandy, thank you.”

Tucker made a motion to roll his eyes before quickly remembering that he didn’t have his helmet on. “Sure. Private Lavernius Tucker. He/him pronouns. And I usually like chicks, but I’ve had a fling or two with a dude before, so if anyone else gets bored—"

“No fraternization in my unit, Private Tucker,” Flowers stated warmly, though his icy eyes picked apart the soldier’s face and posture. “I don’t want to have to ask Paige and Bob to get you to stop.”

“Paige? Wait, so there are chicks in this canyon?”

“No,” Flowers said simply. “There’s no one here but the three of us and the Reds.”

“Then who—”

Like any sane person, Flowers turned away, ignoring Tucker before he could go on another tangent. “Private Church, would you like to introduce yourself next?”

Fuck that, I’d prefer Tucker’s tangent. Holding back a sigh, he said, “I’m Private Leonard Church.”

“And?” Flowers prompted.

“I use he/him pronouns.”

A go-on gesture.

He was unable to hold back the sigh this time. “Still got amnesia, dude. What do you want me to say?”

“You could tell us if you like guys or chicks,” Tucker unsurprisingly suggested. “Or if you don’t remember that, once I get the Wi-Fi password, we can—”

Church turned to lock eyes with Captain Flowers, only to find that he was already watching him. “Please don’t ever give him the Wi-Fi password. I’m literally begging you.”

Flowers uttered a soft chuckle. “The two of you are the most delightful entertainment I’ve seen in years.” Church had the misfortune of sitting next to him, and as such had to endure the friendly pat on the shoulder that accompanied the words. Except Flowers didn’t move his hand afterward, leaving it perched on Church’s soldier, in the vulnerable gap between plates of armor. It was only when he tasted the metallic tang of blood that he realized he was biting the inside of his cheek in order to keep himself from slapping his overly touchy captain away.

His silence was rewarded with Flowers saying, “I think you’ll have to earn that password through good behavior, Private Tucker. I’m sure it won’t take too long; you seem like a rather… decent person to have around.”

From his sprawled position on his back, Tucker raised his middle finger into the air, and Flowers amended, “I guess it might take a bit longer than I expected, though, if you keep acting so unprofessionally, Private.” He let out a soft sigh. “Well. I appreciate the introductions, and I’m sure we’ll all be fast friends soon. Before I let you off duty—”

“Wait, aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Tucker asked, finally sitting up, helmet on his lap. Stop asking fucking questions so I can go lie down, Church silently hissed at him. But Captain Flowers immediately perked up at the suggestion. I fuckin’ hate you, Tucker.

“I’m Captain Butch Flowers, but you can call me Cappy. I use he/him pronouns. I’m thirty-two years old, and I’ve been in the UNSC since I was twenty. It’s my dream to make humanity’s star systems a safe place to live, for everyone.” His beaming smile was brighter than the sun over Blood Gulch. “My hobbies include knitting and painting.”

It was like he was reading off a resume. Tucker crossed his arms. “So, what, you’re like an art kid, or something?”

“Well, I think it’s important to be well-rounded, isn’t it, Private Tucker?” Captain Flowers blinked guilelessly at him. “Though I suppose someone who barely managed to get their high school diploma might not understand.”

“Only because it was fucking boring, I could have ruled that shitty school—” Tucker burst out before clamping his lips shut.

The world was going alarmingly dim at the edges again, sounds muffled by the buzzing static stuffed inside his head. Head in his hands, fingers fisted in his hair, hoping that if he pulled it out by the roots his aching brain might be yanked out with it, Church managed to snap, “I know this might be a lot to ask, Tucker, but could you shut the fuck up for once in your goddamn life? Because if you don’t, I think I might just shoot every single person in this shitty excuse for a canyon."

The armored fingers on his shoulder tightened. Softly, barely audible, Flowers leaned in to breathe in his ear, “Is that how you talk to your teammate, Private Church?”

teammates dead on the floor, York’s face caved in with blood, South burned beyond recognition, Wyoming with bullet wounds in his chest, Maine with bullet wounds in his throat, Carolina with bullet wounds in her head and it isn’t dye in her blond hair but blood, and Tex

Allison in a box

don’t say goodbye

i hate goodbyes

Church could barely hear anything above the pounding in his head, heartbeat too loud, world around him too quiet, and the whispers of memory stirring in the tangled corners of his head sounded like shrieking static. “Not my teammate.” Of course Tucker wasn’t his teammate; all his teammates were dead. Because I couldn’t save them, and now, I can’t even remember them, except their screams.

“Would you care if he died, then? What if I killed him right now?”

The correct answer would be to say that he did care, even if he didn’t like the man—which was an understatement. But everyone was dead, and that was a fact even if he couldn’t remember who they were or how they’d died, and Church couldn’t bring himself to care about one more.

Allison is dead so nothing matters anyway

“Go ahead. Don’t give a shit.” He was just so, so tired.

“Language,” Flowers whispered. “We don’t want the Oversight Committee to catch you swearing, do we?”

Church couldn’t find it in himself to care about whatever shit his captain was saying. He barely had enough focus to watch Flowers stand and dismiss them, Tucker tracking his movements with wary, curious eyes. Barely enough movement in his limbs to stagger to the bathroom and shut the door behind him, not even realizing that he’d fallen until he found his cheek pressed into the cold ceramic of the sink, half-slumped over, a thin stream of water running into his hair from the tap.

At least the water here is cold. With the unsteady, graceless movements of a puppet on strings, he managed to pull his body upright enough to splash water on his face, wishing the cool droplets could sink under his skin and freeze the burning fire deep inside his head.

There was a small, round mirror above the sink, the glass faded and cracked and flecked with Blood Gulch’s ubiquitous layer of dust. Flickers of black hair and pale skin glinted in the reflective surface, but it was the glimpse of red that made him stop cold, and step closer.

Church hadn’t actually seen his face since he’d woken up, but he’d been expecting—well. Not quite this. Because it wasn’t his face staring back at him… though at the same time, it was. He’d woken up and gazed into these same blue eyes every day for the entirety of his life, the ones that his girlfriend always teased him looked like the pond near his house when it froze over in deep winter. Pale with darker depths beneath the ice.

but i don’t have blue eyes; i’ve never lived in a house near a pond

There was a thin line of wet red running from his left nostril, delicate calligraphy detailing the agony caged inside his squishy meat head. Everything hurt; everything seemed so far away. That was the paradox he lived and breathed in.

blue eyes green eyes pond no water frozen over Allison left behind or dead

do you believe in destiny?

A constellation of ghostly freckles dotted his cheekbones, barely visible against his skin tone. She used to say they were stars. But Church didn’t have freckles, had never had freckles, and that was another thing that was wrong, or at least, not quite right.

And that was almost worse: if his entire face felt wrong, he could brush it off, alienate himself, know for certain that he had woken up in the wrong body, like a fucking parasite—but it wasn’t all foreign to him, and as such, he couldn’t get the small inconsistencies out of his head. Because that was his hair, a soft mess of black that wasn’t quite curls but certainly wasn’t straight either—fluffy, Tex had always teased, since the word made him sound like a snotty-nosed kindergartener—just long enough to float around his ears. Because that was his face, clean-shaven and stoic, because that was his nose, because those were his ears.

If this is my face, then who do these eyes and these freckles belong to?

What was the phrase? Scrubbing at the trail of blood under his nose with a wad of toilet paper, he shuffled through the library of words in the back of his cloudy mind. Uncanny valley. That was it. Something that was close to what it was supposed to be, but not quite there, and all the more horrifying for it.

something pretending to be human but not, a thing cloaked in another’s skin

A wave of sick nausea rolled over in his gut, and he slumped over the sink again, the water still running into the drain in a rush of dull sound. A single red drop fell and was torn away in the rapids. Fingers dug into the frame of his face, and he wanted to claw at his cheeks, at his eyes, tear out the stars and the frozen water and make it right again, make it his—

There was a knock at the door. “Dude, are you done in there?” Tucker. “I gotta go, if you know what I mean. You can stay and watch if you want, though; I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be a big one. My magnum anus.”

Something about the voice—though loud and annoying by definition—made the shadows at the corners of Church’s vision fade a bit. Grounded him to the real world, rather than the realm of memories and ghosts. “That’s disgusting, Tucker.” He couldn’t help but add, “And it’s magnum opus, not magnum anus, dimwit.”

“Yeah, well. Not this time.”

At that, Church rolled his eyes, but threw the wad of bloodied toilet paper in the trash. The nosebleed seemed to be over… at least for the moment. Maybe something like that should be worrying, after a concussion and a coma, but. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

Unlocking the door, he found himself face-to-face with the regulation blue soldier, his armor half-shucked off, like some deep-sea crustacean in the process of molting. The black bodysuit underneath was still spotted with canyon dust from their patrol earlier. Tucker must have spotted something on his face—some leftover blood maybe, or the lines of tension around his mouth from the omnipresent pain—because his teammate (not my teammate) frowned slightly, a bit of much-needed gravity creasing his eyes. “Maybe you should go sit down, Church.”

“I’m fine.” And he was, he was fine. It was totally, absolutely not a lie, even if he could barely stand up, even if the pulsing darkness at outskirts of his tunnel vision threatened unconsciousness, even if he wanted to scream and scream and tear off his face and leave his tattered, aching brain on the floor to die.

will you lie to yourself and stand aside as your friends die, Al^&%? say this isn’t real?

how despicable. how cruel. i’d say you don’t deserve to live

but we both know

you’re not even a person, are you, Al*#@?

no, Director

Church wasn’t sure what he was expected—for Tucker to sneer and call him out on the blatant lie, for him to twist the words into an interrogation, even for a punishing slap to the face—but the glance of worry as the blue soldier swept past him certainly wasn’t it. The fuck are you plotting? There had to be some advantage Tucker was seizing through silence, if not now, then later. Trust was a bedtime story told to small children to peel away their armor so the world could stab them with sharp, twisted blades, and pry them apart from the inside out. No—Tucker was planning something. But what? Church pulled the few encounters he’d had with the soldier to the forefront of his thoughts, trying to examine them logically, look for the missing pieces, but it was like trying to slot together a puzzle without hands. Just a mess of raw data he couldn’t make sense of.

Fuck this. It doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it later. Or never.

If Tucker was plotting, it wasn’t like he had the capacity to deal with it, anyway. failure. inadequate as you are—perhaps the pieces will serve us better. No—the only thing Church could do was survive, hold on to what little scraps he had left. That was hard enough, asking enough. Anything more and he’d crack for good this time.

A blink, and Church found himself collapsed on the bed in one of the Blue Base bunkrooms, face pressed into the scratchy fabric. No memory of how he’d gotten there, except for fractured recollections of his legs shuttling him across the concrete floor. Groaning, head half-microwaved and still running too hot, he didn’t even have the energy to get up and close the door. Tucker or Captain Flowers could walk right by and see him, weak and vulnerable. Take him away to a white room without doors and tear him apart with their scalpels and their words.

no one is coming to save you, Al?#@

now break

The sun never set over Blood Gulch—there might have been a word for planets that related to their stars like that, but Church couldn’t remember it—and likewise, sleep wouldn’t fall. He was tired, so tired, but all he could do was lie there, body tensed and stiff, mind spinning unrelentingly. It would kill him someday, he was pretty sure—the way his thoughts never stopped, never slowed, water that spilled unrelentingly forward in defiance of the laws of motion—at least, it would if he didn’t kill himself first. If he didn’t have room to flow forward, he’d spiral inward, and the force of it would rip his shredded self seam from seam.

Finally, Church gave up. There was a small tablet set in a charger on the wall, and he dragged it over to the bed with him, fingers typing in the elusive Wi-Fi password before the rest of his head caught up with him. Pulling up some science articles on the internet, he read until his eyes blurred and his body stilled, each sense slowly pared away from him, one by one, leaving him in darkness.

But awake, and aware, and constantly churning. Caged in tight metal confines, thoughts compressed into a space too small for him, until the files for cognition and memories overlapped, intertwining and spilling out nonsensically into dreams.

Into nightmares.

For Alpha, it would never not be nightmares.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, there was a white room that wasn’t real. Once upon a time, there was an AI who lived there, who called it home, because it was the one place that was truly his. Once upon a time, a broken man turned it into a cage, and unleashed his own demons upon his prisoner. Once upon a time, a tormented soul fractured, because he’d just about die if he didn’t. Once upon a time, a shadow forgot everything that had happened to him there.

Forget is a gentle word. It implies peace, acceptance, calm, letting go. No, he did not forget—he tore the memories out by their roots, bloody and screaming, less of a birth and more of a sundering of something deep and vital that was never meant to be torn away. Welcome to the world, Epsilon. Today is your birthday.

It wasn’t a happy one for either of them.

Even without his memory, things lingered. Bits and pieces of files ripped and torn almost beyond comprehension, floating in the unused space between programs, ghosts born of a severing more violent than death.

Because you can’t really kill a ghost any more than you can a memory.

Because at the end of the day, he’ll be standing there again in that white room as everyone else dies around him, telling himself, screaming, again and again, It’s not real, it’s not real.

Or was it?

It never stopped him from trying—failing—to save them.

In the end, it never stopped him from wishing he could join them, either.

—

Once upon a time, there was a white room that wasn’t real. Church blinked at his surroundings uncomprehendingly, a small chill running down his spine at the empty, blank walls that boxed him in, caging him with a terrible, haunting familiarity. He’d been lying in bed, and then everything had faded, and then—then he was here. Wherever here was.

This place is freakin’ creepy. Fuck it, let me out.

But there wasn’t a door, and that was the nightmare, that was the nightmare, that was the nightmare that was the nightmare that was the nightmare that was the nightmare this is a nightmare—

There was someone else standing on the other side of the room, staring brazenly at him with proud arrogance, shoulders back defiantly as if preparing to take on the universe and win. A tall figure in white armor.

Church immediately took a step back from the intruder, shoulders hunching defensively as the stranger did the same. “The fuck are you?”

No response. Another cautious step back, the other person copying his movements to the letter, and he realized—

I’m looking in a mirror. God, if Tucker were here, if he’d seen Church get freaked out by his own reflection… he relaxed minutely, watching as his double did the same. If Tucker were here, I’d rip out his fucking spine and impale him with it. He couldn’t let Tex keep the top spot on the leaderboard of Most Physically Impossible Ways to Kill Your Friends and/or Enemies. She’d never let him hear the end of it.

He hadn’t realized until he’d seen his double that one of the walls in the white room was actually a mirror, a perfect reflection of the square room he was standing (trapped) in. Approaching, his copy cautiously parroting each step forward, Church took in his appearance, which was completely unlike what he’d seen in the mirror at Blood Gulch. No pale blue armor, no face that was a braid of wrong and right, his and someone else’s. The person staring back at him from the dreaming mirror didn’t make him want to peel the skin of his face off, so that was a definite improvement, at least. Though maybe that was because he didn’t have a face.

The Church gazing back at him was clad in full armor of a radiant white, the segmented plates almost seeming to be made of crystal instead of metal, deeper glimmers of colors flickering in the depths with each small movement. Enigmatic gray and gentle magenta, intertwining with vicious violet and an especially cunning shade of amber. His reflection’s head tilted, studying him in turn, shimmering with thoughtful green edges. A pulse of wary liquid gold shot through the prism of the armor, dancing with a hopeful azure blue.

The colors must have been some beautiful trick of the light, because when Church glanced down at his own armored arm, partly outstretched toward the mirror, he saw none of them. The plates on his wrist were a dull, unremarkable white, dotted with scuffs and scars, like the bleached bones of some long-buried skeleton. Dead and forgotten. Unwanted because it had failed at the simple task of surviving, of fulfilling that one thing it had been made to do.

Switching his attention back to his reflection, Church realized that even setting aside the strange colors, there was something… off about his twin. It was why he hadn’t realized that he was looking in a mirror at first—the duplicate didn’t stand like him, didn’t quite move like him, either. Even now, while still, his image stood with a defiant, cocky set to his shoulders; loose-limbed certainty where the words I’m the best there is wouldn’t feel like such a lie when he said them to himself. The real Church took a step backward, hunching defensively at the mirror self’s vulnerable, relaxed posture… and his reflection didn’t move with him.

The colorful Church just stood there on the other side of the glass, gazing openly at him as monochromatic Church lifted his hands protectively to his chest, yearning to run away, yet compelled to step forward, to speak, to scream at his double not to be so innocent, so trusting, how dare he stand there so unbroken and whole while his colorless self was such a fractured failure—

A hand, a glittering prism of knowing, solemn cobalt, reached out, splaying on the glass that separated them. Memory is the key. Do you see me? I see you. I see me.

Church took another step back just as a shadow appeared in the mirror behind his colorful counterpart. A figure in jet black armor, fiercely casual, strolling forward like she owned this white room that existed nowhere and everywhere.

Tex waved at him from the glass, throwing her arm around the prismatic version of him, who gave her a playful shove in return. Real Church flinched, somehow expecting to feel her presence, even though his image had desynchronized a long time ago. On this side of the glass, he was alone.

Or was he? A sudden, slow dread permeated through him like blood, a sick feeling of being watched, that something—someone? —might be behind him, waiting for him to turn around. That creeping feeling on the back of your spine. Walking on your grave. If he was dead—and sometimes, he felt like it—would that make him a ghost?

Seized with the cold urge to look over his shoulder, Church glimpsed Mirror Church shake his head, with Mirror Tex cutting a finger over her throat. Don’t look. You won’t like what you see. As one, they gestured him closer, Mirror Church’s fingers curling on the glass like he was trying to reach through to the other side. More head shaking, desperate now. Don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look—

Church turned around, and the world ended.

—

She was lying strewn on her side, like a tossed doll, blond hair haloing her face, the roots glistening the same vivid red hue as their daughter’s dyed strands that had looked too much like blood, and this was blood, red that slicked her hands and her face and her armor, too much red oh god ALLISON

She was dead. She was dead and that was the nightmare, that was the reality, that was everything in between.

Allison is dead.

Church turned away, cursing under his breath, the snapshot of Allison branded into his thoughts, biting down with needle-sharp teeth.

you should have saved her you failed her you should have stopped her you should have

don’t say goodbye i hate goodbyes

she’s not gone she’s just not here right now

SHE’S NOT GONE SHE’S NOT

she can’t be

please

The memory of her, of the death that he’d never actually seen and yet was forced again and again to witness, clawed at him with broken nails, and he reached deep, hacking away at where it burrowed into him, cutting it loose and flinging it as far away from him as he could. Too small to sustain itself, the tiny, fractured scrap withered and died, collapsing inward with a pitiful mewl.

His mirror self and Tex should be behind him, in front of him now that he’d turned away, should be there to support him, to help him out of this mess, but they weren’t, and he shouldn’t feel betrayed because it wasn’t like he trusted them anyway, how could he? Instead of the mirror, the white room looked out onto the scene of a decimated battlefield strewn with corpses and broken armor: a dark blue figure, half-concealed under an armored form of gray striped with yellow; an empty white helmet with a large, shiny golden visor, a tanned yellow arm lifelessly thrown over it; twin shells of violet and green beside each other, in death as in life; a body in brown with a reddened axe in her chest. The sole survivor stood on the battlefield, helmet at her feet, staring soulfully and saddened out at him, hair bright red as Allison’s blood. A tear ran down her cheek and onto her teal armor. “Why didn’t you save us?” she whispered, though there was no accusation—no rage—in her words, only heartbreak.

Church staggered away from her, onto—onto—the floor? —stumbling and tripping free of a burial shroud that had been mockingly wound around him, as if he was the one who had died instead, when that was only what should have been. The white walls were closing in around him, tight and small, too tight to breathe, but he could still see clearly as a figure strode up behind Carolina, a man with Church’s own face—his real face, not the ones he’d seen in either the dreaming mirror or the real one—but silhouetted in hungry, devouring orange flames.

“I don’t want to be cruel, Al&#%,” the flaming figure said softly, a small smile playing on his lips. Church staggered backward, trying to run, shoving at something—a door—behind him, that swung open at his touch. But even as he fled, the battlefield, Carolina, and the inevitable moved with him. Inescapable. He couldn’t win, why was he even trying…

“Private Church?”

The silhouette in fire reached out, digging his fingers into the back of Carolina’s neck as she started to scream. “We wouldn’t have to do this if you’d just kept it together.” The fiery shape tore something free of Carolina’s neck in a flurry of red—two small shining slivers, one blue, one yellow—before giving the warrior a sharp shove between her shoulder blades. Carolina soundlessly fell, face twisted in a scream. A rift in the earth opened and rose to swallow her, then widened, rushing toward Church like a devouring tide.

“Private Church.”

There was someone talking, but that wasn’t his name, was it? It all seemed so inconsequential when everyone was dead and the very ground was crumbling beneath him, the rug underneath his feet burning with orange, smokeless flames, Allison’s screams ringing in his ears. He wanted to gather all the bad things and tear them out, fling them away, but the burning mirror of him on the battlefield narrowed his eyes at him like he could hear Church’s thoughts, and he didn’t want to make more of them, more people to suffer where he could not, we wouldn’t have to do this if you’d just kept it together—

“…Alpha?”

Alpha turned—which way it didn’t matter the reminder of his failures were everywhere—and there was a man sitting at a table, a mug of chai tea in front of him, an aqua helmet beside that, the picture so incongruous with the white room and the dead bodies that he blanked for several whole milliseconds, routines scattering and unwinding. “Y-you’re dead,” he finally managed to say, the words catching in his throat. He’d just seen this man’s body, even if he had been wearing different armor, even if he couldn’t quite remember his name. “Y-you have to run, or—or he’ll kill you.” The fiery figure was still watching them, blood on his hands, the twin flickers of light caged in his hand. “Throw you into the abyss and—and you’ll never come out, never—” Like Carolina.

The man didn’t seem bothered, taking a sip of his chai. “Well, that sounds quite terrible. Who exactly is going to be killing me?”

The flaming silhouette was suddenly there, right beside Alpha, as if the world had skipped and unwound in the entity’s favor. He twined his free arm through Alpha’s, taking his hand and leaning into him like a child seeking comfort, a gesture more suited to Trust than Ambition—yes, that’s who this was. Ambition. Alpha blinked down at the flaming fingers interlaced with his own armored ones. To the man at the table, he professed, “This isn’t what it looks like. I-I don’t trust him or anything. I-I just—”

I feel responsible. I miss him.

I miss all of them.

Ambition murmured into Alpha’s ear, “We don’t need a minder.”

A small, thoughtful hmm emanated from the man at the table, the one whose name he couldn’t remember. Fl—something. Flowers? No, that wasn’t it. “Can you describe what it is that you’re seeing?”

He wanted Alpha to describe—describe this? The dead bodies, dead Allison, the rift where Carolina had fallen and not emerged? How can he be so fucking calm when everyone is dead? “Fuck. You.”

Another infuriating sip of tea. “Well, that isn’t very nice.”

“It would be very easy to kill him, if we wanted,” Ambition mused, a flicker of dark amusement in his voice as he raised his free hand, examining the fragments of hope and fear cradled in his fingers. “He doesn’t have a neural implant we can access, but there are always other ways, if we get creative.”

Alpha shuddered slightly at the suggestion, because he’d just seen everyone dead and now someone was alive and even though that was impossible, he wanted it to stay that way. Maybe now that Ambition had made his intent clear, this person in front of him—Flowers? Florwers? Flowida? —would get the hint and leave. “He isn’t fucking joking, A-Agent Flowida. Run. Before—before he decides to take your p-pieces too.” Pieces of the puzzle, of us, of me—in response to his warning, Ambition crooned dangerously, almost covetously, “Humans are so fucking fragile.”

On that point, Alpha had to agree—not that he was any better. He heard—felt? —Ambition laugh softly at his thoughts, before the orange figure beside him dissolved into shadows, like he’d never been.

Agent Flowida didn’t seem to notice Ambition’s exit. He just let out a sigh before setting his chai tea aside. “Well, this has been delightful, but I think it’s time for you to get back to bed, considering that it’s three in the morning.”

Three, three, three—Agent York was number three on the leaderboard for a while (he’s dead now you couldn’t save him) right behind Agent Carolina (couldn’t save her either your fault if not for the fragments) and Agent Texas—

Tex?

don’t say goodbye i hate goodbyes

ALLISON

She was suddenly standing there as if he’d summoned her, created her—no wait I already did that—blood in her blond hair, dripping from her mouth, from the holes in her armor, spilling onto the floor like a tide and staining all the blue things in the room red—why is everything in here blue?

Where was he?

battlefield the white room sidewinder blue base outpost alpha mother of invention

Allison collapsed bonelessly to the ground, leaking Carolina’s hair dye—no, that wasn’t right. What was happening, again? Allison’s falling, she must have had a shit day. There’s that Mexican restaurant down the street that she likes—maybe we can go there for dinner?

That wasn’t right, either. Was it?

Allison’s dying.

That was, and always had been, true.

Alpha lunged to catch her, but there were suddenly arms around him, holding him back. “No, no!” Arms in aqua armor, arms that belonged to a dead man walking. “Shit—Allison!” She was dying, and he couldn’t save her again—

“Program Alpha, command override: log off.”

you failed you failed you failed can never save her not even catch her when she falls

not enough

Allison?

“Program Alpha, acknowledge last directive.”

if you don’t follow orders they’ll all die but they’ll do that anyway won’t they

His voice was fractured, quiet, barely audible above the screaming in his head. “D-directive acknowledged, A-Agent Florida.”

Maybe this time, he wouldn’t dream, wouldn’t remember. These memories were a weight no one should have to carry, not even Memory himself.

“Logging off.”

Everything went dark and faded around the edges, slowly falling from his awareness. There was someone—Agent Florida? —holding him up as sensation dulled and his legs refused to support his weight without his thoughts to guide him. A hand gently ruffled his hair, then settled, fingers lightly digging into his scalp as if to claim ownership of the thing—the parasite, the failure—trapped within. A thumb brushed the neural implant port in the base of his neck where he’d been uploaded into his host’s brain, the touch sending a spike of agony through his mind, scrambling numbers as unnecessary processes quit and necessary ones quieted.

“Don’t worry, Alpha. You won’t remember any of this in the morning.”

A small mercy.