what you are in the dark
Sep. 18th, 2012 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysTitle: What You Are In The Dark
Rating: PG 13+
Series: Red Vs Blue (Washington, the Meta)
Wordcount: 3709
Warnings: Some language, spoilers through to the end of season six.
Summary: In the moments after the EMP goes off, Wash faces an unexpected choice.
Remarks: This is the longest thing I have ever completed and it's machinima fanfiction in which very little happens asdfjghjhk the extent to which my brain is terrible cannot be defined.
The EMP lit up, and Wash’s lights went out.
The last bright flash from his right had been warning enough for him to close his eyes before his internal monitors sparked through their final, failing moments, but there was no way to avoid feeling it. Fine mechanics ground to a halt, turning his armour into little more than hunks of heavy metal strapped to his limbs, and the reverberation shuddered through his whole body when his knees hit the ground. The radio gave one sharp whine before audio cut out altogether, the external tactile sensors went numb; each and every technological advancement that had been woven into his suit choked and died.
Including the oxygen circulation system.
He’d been prepared for this, of course. Making it to this point hadn’t been high on his list of probabilities, but he’d known how comprehensive the failsafe was, and he’d known what it would do to his suit. Having to handle it with only one hand wasn’t precisely what he’d hoped for, though.
Wash ground his teeth together as he strained his right arm against the weight of his useless armour, biting back a dozen curses and valuable air as the movement tugged sharply at his latest unnecessary puncture. Some distant part of him noted that it was a bad hit; not his worst, but then it didn’t have to be the worst to be the one that got you, and York’s unit couldn’t help him this time round.
Christ. This time round. Three in the back and one in the front, and that was only counting what had been dealt in the past few months by fellow Freelancers. Maybe it was fortunate the war had ended before they’d been properly dispatched. They didn’t seem to be very good at this.
He heaved again and finally got his elbow high enough that he could fumble with gloved fingers for the latch. It was ridiculous to think this was harder to do in the dark, because it wasn’t like he could see under his own jaw, functioning visuals or no, but he felt clumsy and blind even though he’d done more often than he’d pulled a shirt over his head and where the fuck was it—and then something shifted under the pressure, clicking in, and he felt the sudden loosening around his neck. He didn’t bother with the slow, dignified removal, just reached over his head and hooked his fingers into the ridge on the back and yanked.
The helmet clanked as it hit the ground, loud and heavy and hollow, and Wash drew in a long, slow breath through his nose. It wasn’t fresh air, not really; the base was wedged deep underground, so he was breathing the same kind of filtered air he would be in the suit. Which meant that the base would eventually be undergoing the same oxygen-related issues, but there was plenty of time before that claimed highest priority in things to be concerned about.
Right now that spot was occupied by the fact all the exit plans, concocted out of reflex more than any real hope, had officially been rendered unworkable. He might have managed to slip out with just a gunshot wound, or just disabled armour, or just a pitch black maze-like command centre devoid of power, but all together? He wasn’t going anywhere; not by himself. On top of that, he could probably consider himself lucky if he was left to his own devices for the hours it would take for the air supply to turn stale. An entire base going dark was going to draw plenty of attention, even if he didn’t factor in the urgings of the Director and the Counselor.
Wash tilted his head back, glancing up towards where the security camera had been, though it was impossible to do anything more than imagine the faint curves of deadened machinery lurking above. Yeah, he’d have company soon enough.
With that comforting knowledge in mind, he began to ease himself forward, the left arm still braced against his side not quite sufficient to stop the wince that slid across his face, and reached out carefully with his free hand. He’d dropped his pistol when the bullet had struck home, and though his rifle was still strapped to his back, he wasn’t certain he could move enough to pull it free, let alone aim and fire with sufficient accuracy. One small gun and the handful of ammo he had left wouldn’t get him much further, but it was an improvement on fists he had to struggle to raise.
He hadn’t lied when he said he wasn’t expecting to survive. That didn’t mean he planned to sit back and allow them the satisfaction of proving him right.
Waving and patting his way across the floor was not his most dignified act of the day, but contrary to what that might lead him to expect of the activity, it didn’t take long before his hand bumped up against something. Wash frowned, quickly splaying gloved fingers across a surface that was hard and metallic, though he could already tell it was not even remotely the kind of hard and metallic he was after. It was too big, too high off the ground to be any sort of gun. Still, it was a familiar shape. Part of another suit, maybe, a chest-plate-
The Meta.
He jerked his hand back, like a child in a dark cave who had just remembered that boulders weren’t meant to be scaly, and was that really the least insulting comparison his mind could provide? He hadn’t realised the other had fallen so close. Hadn’t heard him fall at all, but then he wouldn’t have, because by then the EMP had cut through his ears.
He could hear now, hear his own breath hissing out as he tensed every muscle and tried to draw his body into some sort of defensible position. He didn’t hear any movement from below, however. No displacement of air as a hand snatched for his wrist. No rasp of metal on metal to suggest the form sprawled somewhere at his feet was preparing to lunge for his throat. Not even the faint scratching of fingers as they twitched in time to the slow return of consciousness. If Wash could move in disabled armour then the Meta most certainly could, so it wasn’t that which was keeping him down.
He licked his lips, tried to draw moisture back into his mouth.
“Church?” he said, and his voice was hoarse, rough, far too loud in a silence this complete. “Delta?”
No flicker of projection. No tinny voice. No offer of assistance or sullen growl of What?
Wash crouched in the dark and wondered if it was a bad thing that his first response to victory was to regret that not even one had survived to provide a little light.
It did, at least, confirm why the Meta was down, and suggested he would be staying down for a good while yet. At last count the rogue Freelancer had been in possession of at least eight or nine AIs. No one had ever carried that many, let alone had them all extinguished in one go. Not just removed, but wiped out. Erased. Deleted from inside his mind. Given previous responses in vaguely similar cases—and yes, his own existed among them, there was no chance of forgetting that—the Meta could be completely brain-dead.
Though if he wasn’t…Wash narrowed his eyes at the darkness. If he wasn’t then he would be soon anyway, because all those enhancements clearly hadn’t managed to stop the pulse, which meant his suit was as dead as Wash’s own and being unconscious did make it somewhat hard to pull your helmet off before you suffocated.
To think he’d gone through a dozen firefights when all he’d needed to do was hit one button and sit back as the Meta’s hoarded technology killed him.
He almost laughed at that, though it came out as a single, muffled snort, partly because it hurt to do anything more and partly because it wasn’t funny. Single button or no, he’d won. The Meta was defeated, and the Project couldn’t recover from this; he knew their back-ups and he knew they weren’t enough. The failsafe was a leftover from the war, an absolute last resort for when all was already lost and the only thing left was to get rid of anything the enemy might use. Why the Director had decided to keep it around afterwards was probably known only to the crazy old man himself, but the whys weren’t important. What was important was that he’d done it. He’d won.
Pity there weren’t many left who would appreciate that.
It was a sobering thought, if not precisely an unfamiliar one. They’d fallen from fifty of the elite to a scattered handful of shell-shocked wrecks, with nothing more than memory to mark their passage; the last few months alone had seen them practically culled. But then that was exactly why he was here. It wasn’t about justice. Justice meant making things right, and there was no fixing this. He could shut the Project down, he could even line the Director up for a world of pain and disgrace, but there was no returning what had been lost, and the ones who had been most affected weren’t exactly in a position to benefit. York wouldn’t be thanking him for his efforts. Carolina wouldn’t be making him feel better.
Maine would definitely not be patting him on the head.
He found himself glancing back down, as useless a gesture as that was. They’d been here before, one of them helpless and dying at the feet of the other, though it didn’t seem entirely fair that Wash was again the one with the bullet lodged in his ribs. Perhaps, once he found his pistol, he could at least fix that little inequity. Return the favour and finish it the same way the Meta had…
Well. Had not.
That went a long way towards killing what was left of the mood, and Wash grimaced, tucking his arm tighter against his side. Of all the places a walk down memory lane could lead, this was not one he was keen to stop at, especially when Command had already made a point of going over every inch of it. In all fairness their scepticism regarding what had happened after South’s betrayal was one of the very few things he couldn’t blame them for, not when the small part of him that hadn’t been busy being angry and in pain had felt just as disbelieving upon the unexpected return of consciousness. The combined might of numerous AI fragments and a rogue agent well-trained in Freelancer technology, and they had somehow managed to miss the fact he was carrying extra equipment? Ridiculous.
Of course, the only other possible explanation made even less sense. Not that Command had dismissed it out of hand; they were, after all, in the business of getting results, and he’d had no illusions about why they had kept him on the mission afterwards. He might have sometimes danced above Maine on the leaderboard of old, but rarely then and never now, so his selling point had not been his aim or his strength. No, they’d decided he was advantage at best and sacrifice at worst, and in making that assessment—in seeing even a shred of evidence to support that assessment—the Project had put him in a position to find the exact opening he’d needed to tear it down.
What was that saying about the flap of a butterfly’s wings?
“I suppose I should say thank you,” he said, and his voice fell flatly upon the darkness around him without even a distant echo in response.
It hardly mattered now. They’d all made their choices. It wasn’t like one good deed—if you could even call it that—changed anything about the last year, because tracking the Meta from corpse to corpse? That had definitely happened. Kentucky, Iowa, North Dakota; like some sort of twisted road trip that had barely managed to skim by the state of Washington.
Leaving him here again, crouching above a once-upon-a-time comrade. Just one more recovery mission, except there was nothing to be collected. The AIs were gone, the equipment was non-functional, and the man…
He lifted his eyes instinctively, but of course his helmet was still on the floor somewhere behind him, its HUD blank and inoperable. Without the display he could only guess at how much time had passed, though even his wildest estimate suggested it had to have been at least a few minutes. The residual air would be starting to thin out in there. At this rate the Meta wasn’t going to regain awareness at all; he’d just slip over from this into a more permanent state of unconsciousness. No pain. No struggle. Just fading away, quietly and surely.
About as quietly and surely as Wash would have bled out without the healing unit that, unlike his own armour enhancement, hadn’t been stripped from him.
“Fuck,” Wash muttered, and dragged his hand up close enough to his mouth to sink his teeth into the glove. Two sharp tugs had his hand free, and he stretched out again. There. Cold metal under naked fingers. Rough ridges of patchwork armour and battle scarring. Chest-plate. Shoulder. And the curve of the bottom of the helmet.
He paused, which wasn’t the greatest idea because this was not a comfortable position and he could already feel trembles beginning to work their way up his arm as the constant pull of the armour wore away at tired muscles. He was still bleeding, for Christ’s sake. Bleeding because the Meta had shot him. In the chest. Without hesitation.
Shot him from less than a yard away and still missed his heart.
Wash thumbed the latch, pushed, ground out a curse as pain flared, and shoved roughly again. The helmet shifted, bit by bit, gradually pried away from the Meta’s head until at last Wash gave one final push and felt it roll free—felt it fall away and unmask the man behind the Meta for the first time in God only knew how long.
This, he supposed, was meant to be the moment where he gazed at his former friend’s face and reflected on the visible changes and what they represented in terms of mental ones.
Pity he couldn’t see a fucking thing, then.
Groping around for a pulse was liable to end with his fingers accidentally lodged in an eye, so Wash slowly skimmed a flat palm around where the Meta’s head lay until he felt the heated air of an exhale. Still breathing. Good. He wasn’t all that sure what he was doing in the first place, but he knew he drew the line at resuscitation.
He hunkered back, resettling the pressure on his wound, filtering his breath through clenched teeth until it began to even out into a less ragged rhythm. He wasn’t coughing blood or anything so dramatic, but it was hard to deny the moving around was not going over well with a body that just wanted to lie down for a while. So, really, it was extra fantastic that he was ignoring it in favour of helping out the guy who shot him in the first place. Best day ever.
And he still didn’t have a weapon of his own.
Wash cursed again, which felt good, and clenched both fists, which did not. His energy reserves hadn’t exactly been high after the days of walking and trekking and bickering and catching bullets, and this whole crawling around on the floor thing? It was taking energy. Lots of energy. And despite throwing all this energy around, he hadn’t actually narrowed down where his gun was, leaving him even further back from square one than he’d started at and with no real idea how he was meant to approach square two. He should have just risked trying to reach his rifle. There wasn’t even some sort of nice convenient armoury he could make a beeline for, unless-
Unless you counted the walking arsenal next to him.
Wash turned his head slowly. For half a second the idea of scavenging seemed absurdly offensive; less because of the action and more because he’d just finished squaring whatever-the-fuck debt he’d deluded himself into thinking was owed. There was also something a little creepy about taking gear from someone who’d gone out of his way to massacre himself a desired selection of equipment.
The desire to not join that particular crowd won out over his apprehension, though, and for what felt like the hundredth time, Wash leaned towards the Meta. This time he let his fingers drift down along the body, instead of up towards the face, spidering cautiously over the armour and keeping his ears pricked for any sign of a change in the dull rasp of the other man’s breathing. All he needed was a pistol. The Meta had been holding one, of course, which he’d so kindly used to incapacitate Wash, and that was probably as lost to the darkness as his own weapon. If there had been anything left of Maine in that thing, however, he’d be bound to have…
His fingers found the holster and the shape of the weapon tucked snugly in it.
“Never could settle for just the one,” Wash muttered. A long known truth that, now that he thought about it, summed up quite a lot about the Meta.
Pulling the gun loose was a lot easier than playing around with the armour, and he could feel the weight of its ammo as he drew it out into the air. Even better. He might have decided to take a slightly insane detour along the way, but that was his plan of action settled at last. Just having the pistol in his hand made the command centre feel a lot less like it was waiting patiently for him to die.
That didn’t change the fact there were still plenty of people out there probably hoping rather impatiently that he would die, however. He could still pull up the layout of his surroundings in his mind’s eye, and if he was right about his position, he was further out in the open than would be in his favour should he have company. The corner he’d ventured from was a more secure choice in comparison, giving him full scope of the room while keeping him out of sight of anyone on the approach until they were past the doorway and well in range; not much of an issue now, of course, but torchlight marked movement even better than footsteps and his armour had always done well in shadows.
And hey, maybe the sight of the Meta sprawled on the floor would serve as a further distraction and he could pretend he was still capable of reasonable, rational decisions. You know, mix things up a little.
After running his thumb along the familiar edge of the pistol to ensure the safety was on—it would be just so fucking typical if he managed to empty a misfire into the Meta’s skull after all this—Wash braced his free hand against the armoured chest, pushed…and promptly swayed as vertigo hit hard and fast, harmonising nicely with the streak of agony up his side. Whether or not his vision swam was a little difficult to gauge, but the threatening lurch of his stomach was not a sensation he could misplace.
Still bleeding. Blood loss. Right. No wonder he was feeling so uncharacteristically optimistic.
He managed to force his slightly strangled gasping back into the bearable realms of semi-rapid breathing after only a few moments, and his stomach mercifully followed its lead. It looked like he would have to approach the idea of significant movement with a little more caution. Slow and steady. If no one had come barrelling into the centre yet there was no reason to believe they’d be doing so in the next five minutes, and there was no point in rushing things if it left him passed out in the middle of the floor.
He resettled his hand against the chest-plate. Slow. Steady. One, two-
Oh, fuck me.
The next few minutes of his life would have been struck from his mental record had he any say in the matter. Naturally, he had no choice at all over what went on in his own goddamn mind, and the memory of dragging himself back across the floor would no doubt remain crisp and clear for years to come. The bump of the wall against his shoulder took a few seconds to penetrate, being not so demanding a sensation as constant screaming pain, but as soon as it registered he leaned into it, turning enough that gravity and the pathetic scrap of movement known as his own momentum carried him into a reasonable facsimile of a sitting position. A few more minutes passed as he just sat and breathed and tried not to consider the possibility his hands were now shaking too badly for him to hit anything smaller than the entire opposite wall.
This last concern was assuaged slightly when he managed to pull his right knee up against his chest and prop his arms across that to stabilise them, pistol held loosely in a two-handed grip. Without his helmet, his armour and the rifle still strapped there set him too far out from the wall to make leaning back comfortable, but frankly comfort was out of the question already, and he let his head thump wearily against the cold concrete.
There. All done. He’d made his choices and there was nothing to do now but wait. Let them come, let them go, let them stay away and leave him to die in the closest thing he’d had to peace for years—Wash would deal with it when it happened and not a second before. He was done.
And if he kept his gun trained in the direction of the doorway rather than the enemy already in the room, it wasn’t as though there was anyone to see.
Rating: PG 13+
Series: Red Vs Blue (Washington, the Meta)
Wordcount: 3709
Warnings: Some language, spoilers through to the end of season six.
Summary: In the moments after the EMP goes off, Wash faces an unexpected choice.
Remarks: This is the longest thing I have ever completed and it's machinima fanfiction in which very little happens asdfjghjhk the extent to which my brain is terrible cannot be defined.
The EMP lit up, and Wash’s lights went out.
The last bright flash from his right had been warning enough for him to close his eyes before his internal monitors sparked through their final, failing moments, but there was no way to avoid feeling it. Fine mechanics ground to a halt, turning his armour into little more than hunks of heavy metal strapped to his limbs, and the reverberation shuddered through his whole body when his knees hit the ground. The radio gave one sharp whine before audio cut out altogether, the external tactile sensors went numb; each and every technological advancement that had been woven into his suit choked and died.
Including the oxygen circulation system.
He’d been prepared for this, of course. Making it to this point hadn’t been high on his list of probabilities, but he’d known how comprehensive the failsafe was, and he’d known what it would do to his suit. Having to handle it with only one hand wasn’t precisely what he’d hoped for, though.
Wash ground his teeth together as he strained his right arm against the weight of his useless armour, biting back a dozen curses and valuable air as the movement tugged sharply at his latest unnecessary puncture. Some distant part of him noted that it was a bad hit; not his worst, but then it didn’t have to be the worst to be the one that got you, and York’s unit couldn’t help him this time round.
Christ. This time round. Three in the back and one in the front, and that was only counting what had been dealt in the past few months by fellow Freelancers. Maybe it was fortunate the war had ended before they’d been properly dispatched. They didn’t seem to be very good at this.
He heaved again and finally got his elbow high enough that he could fumble with gloved fingers for the latch. It was ridiculous to think this was harder to do in the dark, because it wasn’t like he could see under his own jaw, functioning visuals or no, but he felt clumsy and blind even though he’d done more often than he’d pulled a shirt over his head and where the fuck was it—and then something shifted under the pressure, clicking in, and he felt the sudden loosening around his neck. He didn’t bother with the slow, dignified removal, just reached over his head and hooked his fingers into the ridge on the back and yanked.
The helmet clanked as it hit the ground, loud and heavy and hollow, and Wash drew in a long, slow breath through his nose. It wasn’t fresh air, not really; the base was wedged deep underground, so he was breathing the same kind of filtered air he would be in the suit. Which meant that the base would eventually be undergoing the same oxygen-related issues, but there was plenty of time before that claimed highest priority in things to be concerned about.
Right now that spot was occupied by the fact all the exit plans, concocted out of reflex more than any real hope, had officially been rendered unworkable. He might have managed to slip out with just a gunshot wound, or just disabled armour, or just a pitch black maze-like command centre devoid of power, but all together? He wasn’t going anywhere; not by himself. On top of that, he could probably consider himself lucky if he was left to his own devices for the hours it would take for the air supply to turn stale. An entire base going dark was going to draw plenty of attention, even if he didn’t factor in the urgings of the Director and the Counselor.
Wash tilted his head back, glancing up towards where the security camera had been, though it was impossible to do anything more than imagine the faint curves of deadened machinery lurking above. Yeah, he’d have company soon enough.
With that comforting knowledge in mind, he began to ease himself forward, the left arm still braced against his side not quite sufficient to stop the wince that slid across his face, and reached out carefully with his free hand. He’d dropped his pistol when the bullet had struck home, and though his rifle was still strapped to his back, he wasn’t certain he could move enough to pull it free, let alone aim and fire with sufficient accuracy. One small gun and the handful of ammo he had left wouldn’t get him much further, but it was an improvement on fists he had to struggle to raise.
He hadn’t lied when he said he wasn’t expecting to survive. That didn’t mean he planned to sit back and allow them the satisfaction of proving him right.
Waving and patting his way across the floor was not his most dignified act of the day, but contrary to what that might lead him to expect of the activity, it didn’t take long before his hand bumped up against something. Wash frowned, quickly splaying gloved fingers across a surface that was hard and metallic, though he could already tell it was not even remotely the kind of hard and metallic he was after. It was too big, too high off the ground to be any sort of gun. Still, it was a familiar shape. Part of another suit, maybe, a chest-plate-
The Meta.
He jerked his hand back, like a child in a dark cave who had just remembered that boulders weren’t meant to be scaly, and was that really the least insulting comparison his mind could provide? He hadn’t realised the other had fallen so close. Hadn’t heard him fall at all, but then he wouldn’t have, because by then the EMP had cut through his ears.
He could hear now, hear his own breath hissing out as he tensed every muscle and tried to draw his body into some sort of defensible position. He didn’t hear any movement from below, however. No displacement of air as a hand snatched for his wrist. No rasp of metal on metal to suggest the form sprawled somewhere at his feet was preparing to lunge for his throat. Not even the faint scratching of fingers as they twitched in time to the slow return of consciousness. If Wash could move in disabled armour then the Meta most certainly could, so it wasn’t that which was keeping him down.
He licked his lips, tried to draw moisture back into his mouth.
“Church?” he said, and his voice was hoarse, rough, far too loud in a silence this complete. “Delta?”
No flicker of projection. No tinny voice. No offer of assistance or sullen growl of What?
Wash crouched in the dark and wondered if it was a bad thing that his first response to victory was to regret that not even one had survived to provide a little light.
It did, at least, confirm why the Meta was down, and suggested he would be staying down for a good while yet. At last count the rogue Freelancer had been in possession of at least eight or nine AIs. No one had ever carried that many, let alone had them all extinguished in one go. Not just removed, but wiped out. Erased. Deleted from inside his mind. Given previous responses in vaguely similar cases—and yes, his own existed among them, there was no chance of forgetting that—the Meta could be completely brain-dead.
Though if he wasn’t…Wash narrowed his eyes at the darkness. If he wasn’t then he would be soon anyway, because all those enhancements clearly hadn’t managed to stop the pulse, which meant his suit was as dead as Wash’s own and being unconscious did make it somewhat hard to pull your helmet off before you suffocated.
To think he’d gone through a dozen firefights when all he’d needed to do was hit one button and sit back as the Meta’s hoarded technology killed him.
He almost laughed at that, though it came out as a single, muffled snort, partly because it hurt to do anything more and partly because it wasn’t funny. Single button or no, he’d won. The Meta was defeated, and the Project couldn’t recover from this; he knew their back-ups and he knew they weren’t enough. The failsafe was a leftover from the war, an absolute last resort for when all was already lost and the only thing left was to get rid of anything the enemy might use. Why the Director had decided to keep it around afterwards was probably known only to the crazy old man himself, but the whys weren’t important. What was important was that he’d done it. He’d won.
Pity there weren’t many left who would appreciate that.
It was a sobering thought, if not precisely an unfamiliar one. They’d fallen from fifty of the elite to a scattered handful of shell-shocked wrecks, with nothing more than memory to mark their passage; the last few months alone had seen them practically culled. But then that was exactly why he was here. It wasn’t about justice. Justice meant making things right, and there was no fixing this. He could shut the Project down, he could even line the Director up for a world of pain and disgrace, but there was no returning what had been lost, and the ones who had been most affected weren’t exactly in a position to benefit. York wouldn’t be thanking him for his efforts. Carolina wouldn’t be making him feel better.
Maine would definitely not be patting him on the head.
He found himself glancing back down, as useless a gesture as that was. They’d been here before, one of them helpless and dying at the feet of the other, though it didn’t seem entirely fair that Wash was again the one with the bullet lodged in his ribs. Perhaps, once he found his pistol, he could at least fix that little inequity. Return the favour and finish it the same way the Meta had…
Well. Had not.
That went a long way towards killing what was left of the mood, and Wash grimaced, tucking his arm tighter against his side. Of all the places a walk down memory lane could lead, this was not one he was keen to stop at, especially when Command had already made a point of going over every inch of it. In all fairness their scepticism regarding what had happened after South’s betrayal was one of the very few things he couldn’t blame them for, not when the small part of him that hadn’t been busy being angry and in pain had felt just as disbelieving upon the unexpected return of consciousness. The combined might of numerous AI fragments and a rogue agent well-trained in Freelancer technology, and they had somehow managed to miss the fact he was carrying extra equipment? Ridiculous.
Of course, the only other possible explanation made even less sense. Not that Command had dismissed it out of hand; they were, after all, in the business of getting results, and he’d had no illusions about why they had kept him on the mission afterwards. He might have sometimes danced above Maine on the leaderboard of old, but rarely then and never now, so his selling point had not been his aim or his strength. No, they’d decided he was advantage at best and sacrifice at worst, and in making that assessment—in seeing even a shred of evidence to support that assessment—the Project had put him in a position to find the exact opening he’d needed to tear it down.
What was that saying about the flap of a butterfly’s wings?
“I suppose I should say thank you,” he said, and his voice fell flatly upon the darkness around him without even a distant echo in response.
It hardly mattered now. They’d all made their choices. It wasn’t like one good deed—if you could even call it that—changed anything about the last year, because tracking the Meta from corpse to corpse? That had definitely happened. Kentucky, Iowa, North Dakota; like some sort of twisted road trip that had barely managed to skim by the state of Washington.
Leaving him here again, crouching above a once-upon-a-time comrade. Just one more recovery mission, except there was nothing to be collected. The AIs were gone, the equipment was non-functional, and the man…
He lifted his eyes instinctively, but of course his helmet was still on the floor somewhere behind him, its HUD blank and inoperable. Without the display he could only guess at how much time had passed, though even his wildest estimate suggested it had to have been at least a few minutes. The residual air would be starting to thin out in there. At this rate the Meta wasn’t going to regain awareness at all; he’d just slip over from this into a more permanent state of unconsciousness. No pain. No struggle. Just fading away, quietly and surely.
About as quietly and surely as Wash would have bled out without the healing unit that, unlike his own armour enhancement, hadn’t been stripped from him.
“Fuck,” Wash muttered, and dragged his hand up close enough to his mouth to sink his teeth into the glove. Two sharp tugs had his hand free, and he stretched out again. There. Cold metal under naked fingers. Rough ridges of patchwork armour and battle scarring. Chest-plate. Shoulder. And the curve of the bottom of the helmet.
He paused, which wasn’t the greatest idea because this was not a comfortable position and he could already feel trembles beginning to work their way up his arm as the constant pull of the armour wore away at tired muscles. He was still bleeding, for Christ’s sake. Bleeding because the Meta had shot him. In the chest. Without hesitation.
Shot him from less than a yard away and still missed his heart.
Wash thumbed the latch, pushed, ground out a curse as pain flared, and shoved roughly again. The helmet shifted, bit by bit, gradually pried away from the Meta’s head until at last Wash gave one final push and felt it roll free—felt it fall away and unmask the man behind the Meta for the first time in God only knew how long.
This, he supposed, was meant to be the moment where he gazed at his former friend’s face and reflected on the visible changes and what they represented in terms of mental ones.
Pity he couldn’t see a fucking thing, then.
Groping around for a pulse was liable to end with his fingers accidentally lodged in an eye, so Wash slowly skimmed a flat palm around where the Meta’s head lay until he felt the heated air of an exhale. Still breathing. Good. He wasn’t all that sure what he was doing in the first place, but he knew he drew the line at resuscitation.
He hunkered back, resettling the pressure on his wound, filtering his breath through clenched teeth until it began to even out into a less ragged rhythm. He wasn’t coughing blood or anything so dramatic, but it was hard to deny the moving around was not going over well with a body that just wanted to lie down for a while. So, really, it was extra fantastic that he was ignoring it in favour of helping out the guy who shot him in the first place. Best day ever.
And he still didn’t have a weapon of his own.
Wash cursed again, which felt good, and clenched both fists, which did not. His energy reserves hadn’t exactly been high after the days of walking and trekking and bickering and catching bullets, and this whole crawling around on the floor thing? It was taking energy. Lots of energy. And despite throwing all this energy around, he hadn’t actually narrowed down where his gun was, leaving him even further back from square one than he’d started at and with no real idea how he was meant to approach square two. He should have just risked trying to reach his rifle. There wasn’t even some sort of nice convenient armoury he could make a beeline for, unless-
Unless you counted the walking arsenal next to him.
Wash turned his head slowly. For half a second the idea of scavenging seemed absurdly offensive; less because of the action and more because he’d just finished squaring whatever-the-fuck debt he’d deluded himself into thinking was owed. There was also something a little creepy about taking gear from someone who’d gone out of his way to massacre himself a desired selection of equipment.
The desire to not join that particular crowd won out over his apprehension, though, and for what felt like the hundredth time, Wash leaned towards the Meta. This time he let his fingers drift down along the body, instead of up towards the face, spidering cautiously over the armour and keeping his ears pricked for any sign of a change in the dull rasp of the other man’s breathing. All he needed was a pistol. The Meta had been holding one, of course, which he’d so kindly used to incapacitate Wash, and that was probably as lost to the darkness as his own weapon. If there had been anything left of Maine in that thing, however, he’d be bound to have…
His fingers found the holster and the shape of the weapon tucked snugly in it.
“Never could settle for just the one,” Wash muttered. A long known truth that, now that he thought about it, summed up quite a lot about the Meta.
Pulling the gun loose was a lot easier than playing around with the armour, and he could feel the weight of its ammo as he drew it out into the air. Even better. He might have decided to take a slightly insane detour along the way, but that was his plan of action settled at last. Just having the pistol in his hand made the command centre feel a lot less like it was waiting patiently for him to die.
That didn’t change the fact there were still plenty of people out there probably hoping rather impatiently that he would die, however. He could still pull up the layout of his surroundings in his mind’s eye, and if he was right about his position, he was further out in the open than would be in his favour should he have company. The corner he’d ventured from was a more secure choice in comparison, giving him full scope of the room while keeping him out of sight of anyone on the approach until they were past the doorway and well in range; not much of an issue now, of course, but torchlight marked movement even better than footsteps and his armour had always done well in shadows.
And hey, maybe the sight of the Meta sprawled on the floor would serve as a further distraction and he could pretend he was still capable of reasonable, rational decisions. You know, mix things up a little.
After running his thumb along the familiar edge of the pistol to ensure the safety was on—it would be just so fucking typical if he managed to empty a misfire into the Meta’s skull after all this—Wash braced his free hand against the armoured chest, pushed…and promptly swayed as vertigo hit hard and fast, harmonising nicely with the streak of agony up his side. Whether or not his vision swam was a little difficult to gauge, but the threatening lurch of his stomach was not a sensation he could misplace.
Still bleeding. Blood loss. Right. No wonder he was feeling so uncharacteristically optimistic.
He managed to force his slightly strangled gasping back into the bearable realms of semi-rapid breathing after only a few moments, and his stomach mercifully followed its lead. It looked like he would have to approach the idea of significant movement with a little more caution. Slow and steady. If no one had come barrelling into the centre yet there was no reason to believe they’d be doing so in the next five minutes, and there was no point in rushing things if it left him passed out in the middle of the floor.
He resettled his hand against the chest-plate. Slow. Steady. One, two-
Oh, fuck me.
The next few minutes of his life would have been struck from his mental record had he any say in the matter. Naturally, he had no choice at all over what went on in his own goddamn mind, and the memory of dragging himself back across the floor would no doubt remain crisp and clear for years to come. The bump of the wall against his shoulder took a few seconds to penetrate, being not so demanding a sensation as constant screaming pain, but as soon as it registered he leaned into it, turning enough that gravity and the pathetic scrap of movement known as his own momentum carried him into a reasonable facsimile of a sitting position. A few more minutes passed as he just sat and breathed and tried not to consider the possibility his hands were now shaking too badly for him to hit anything smaller than the entire opposite wall.
This last concern was assuaged slightly when he managed to pull his right knee up against his chest and prop his arms across that to stabilise them, pistol held loosely in a two-handed grip. Without his helmet, his armour and the rifle still strapped there set him too far out from the wall to make leaning back comfortable, but frankly comfort was out of the question already, and he let his head thump wearily against the cold concrete.
There. All done. He’d made his choices and there was nothing to do now but wait. Let them come, let them go, let them stay away and leave him to die in the closest thing he’d had to peace for years—Wash would deal with it when it happened and not a second before. He was done.
And if he kept his gun trained in the direction of the doorway rather than the enemy already in the room, it wasn’t as though there was anyone to see.
