November catchall

[tuskenlancer]

Who: CT and you!
What: Hanging around, trying to recall her lost memories...or maybe just enjoying life without them
When: Early to mid November
Where: Enso
Warnings: None!

CT followed a ghost off a cliff last month, with a result that honestly shouldn't surprise anyone. The gap in her memory became apparent pretty quickly, but although she knows she's missing a lot, try as she might, she hasn't even been able to remember so much as a second of it.

On the one hand, that sucks. She hates not knowing what had happened to her, hates how cryptic Wash has been about the whole thing, hates the fact that she can't even remember the man who urged her to her willing death. Helplessness has never sat well with her, but in this case, there doesn't seem much that she can do.

On the other hand, she's living without the burden of a lot of pain and horror and loss that's been weighing on her for months. Rather than mooning over her absent fiance and dreaming of the day she'll get back to him, she's actually enjoying life on the islands. It is, after all, the first real home she can remember having. Intermittent horrors and punishments for dying aside, it's actually pretty nice here. She lives with her friends on a tropical island, she has no worries and no responsibilities beyond figuring out what to eat and how to get Wash to wear actual clothes rather than his armor once in a while, and whenever she's able to forget that gaping hole in her memory, she's actually pretty content.

The recent renovations to the huts and cottages mean that she's no longer working just to get the roof patched up and the floor resembling, well, a floor. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to do. Today, she's hanging around the cottage that she shares with Carolina and Wash, opening the windows, occasionally sweeping out dust, and going in and out of the door, occasionally picking a few wildflowers in the grass outside to take back inside.

God help you, Freelancers, your roommate's being domestic.

(Feel free to use the prompt or your own, or hit me up for a closed starter!)

Comments

[counterblows]

Better than waking me up by grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming.

[He says it dryly, but there's a vague sort of...fondness, maybe, is the best word for it. The transitional period that came with moving into the Blue Base had been a saga unto itself, and Tucker's complaints that Wash was just way too goddamn loud initially had the Reds more than a little mystified.]

[He was a loud sleeper. Now, he's less of a loud one, but no less of a volatile one.]

Thanks. I think.

[tuskenlancer]

I was gonna do that, but I thought Carolina might kill me.

[ She gives him a crooked smile, scooting back to lean against the wall and get comfortable. ]

If you don't want her waking you up, though...I can teach her not to. Or just close my door or something.

[counterblows]

No, it's...it's fine.

[There are worse ways to be woken up. As he, uh, knows from experience. There have been bruises, and bitter stories, and worse, and it's just plain better not to go there.]

I'd rather be awake at that point. It's...better.

[tuskenlancer]

Okay. Good.

[ Just so long as she and her cat aren't intruding where they're not wanted. She's silent for a moment, then glances up at Wash, Amitusha still pressed firmly against his side. ]

Do you wanna talk about it?

[counterblows]

[He probably...should, huh. That's the one thing the flowers were pretty insistent on teaching all of them. Now that there's no penalty for hiding it, that just makes him want to swallow it down and ignore it even more.]

[He swallows, forces a vague roll of one shoulder.]

It's the...same stuff as always. Some nights are worse.

[tuskenlancer]

[ Luckily, Wash's life isn't literally hinging on his ability to open up about his feelings right now. CT isn't surprised that he doesn't immediately start going into detail.

But at least he doesn't immediately shut her out, either. She draws her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her ankles and resting her chin on her knees to look at him. ]

Epsilon?

[counterblows]

Sometimes.

[It'd be nice if it was that easy. It's been years, Agent; why aren't you over it?]

Usually. Sometimes it's...what came after. Recovery One. [Setting charges into the bodies of old friends. Putting rounds into innocent sim troopers because they happened to get in his way.]

[Locus. Carolina. Maine. Church.]

[And Epsilon. Always, always - Epsilon.]

[tuskenlancer]

Yeah.

[ He'd told her a little about what happened after she'd died. The broad strokes. The Project brought down, the agents dead...and his own future. Recovery One. Tracking down the last of the Freelancers, the few who had managed to escape. No - hunting them down. ]

Why did you...

[ Maybe it's a bad time to ask this, or just a bad idea to ever ask it at all. But she's always wondered, and there has to be a reason. Maybe Wash talking about it will help. ]

Why did you...do it?

Why did you help them?

[ Them. He knows who she means. ]

[counterblows]

You remember my file, don't you?

[He remembers Cecil Kyle, and Freelancer remembers him just as well. They knew that was one of his traits, in his history. They knew it was a risk going in.]

[Can't help but wonder if that was...intentional. It's impossible to know, at this point. Everyone who might have once told him is dead. It's probably better like that.]

My mom used to say I had a long memory. Could hold a grudge like no one else she knew.

[tuskenlancer]

[ CT squirms a little. Wash had never seemed angry or embarrased that she'd hacked in and read his personnel file, as she'd read every file she could possibly get into on the MoI. She knows he understands why she'd done it, of course, but it's still a little weird, sometimes, knowing everything about him without him ever having to explain.

That includes his entire history, including Cecil Kyle. The court-martial. Freelancer, and the Director, swooping in and saving his skin and his career.

He's given us everything.

She shivers, but nods in acknowledgement. ]

[counterblows]

I couldn't just...blow in, guns blazing. I'm not Tex.

So I played the game the way you did.

[He watched, and waited, and reaped whatever information he could from the sidelines. He handled bodies of dead friends and put bullets where he was instructed to and took calls and hunted for the hollowed-out husk of a dead friend in the in-between.]

And I waited for the right moment.

[tuskenlancer]

[ He's not Tex, no, but he's not CT either, with her careful plotting and plans, watching and listening and gathering every scrap of intel she could before acting. Or at least, that's not how CT had ever seen him. She squints, trying to reconcile this new version of Wash with the one she'd always known. ]

The right moment to do what?

[counterblows]

To burn it all down.

[Not that it'd really worked out that way. He walked into Freelancer Command with three things that needed doing, and ultimately accomplished none of them: expose Freelancer, take down the Meta, and die with his name clear.]

[He'd conscripted the worst possible band of idiots to do so. It was for the best that he failed.]

To make them pay for what they did. To you, to Maine, to Carolina, to the Twins, to Church - to everyone.

[tuskenlancer]

[ She opens her mouth, closes it. It's not her place to judge. To object. But you killed South - It hadn't been that simple. She knows that South had changed - or maybe she hadn't changed in the end, not all that much. But she'd brought it on herself. And how many people had CT herself killed, under orders from the Director? How many people had all of them killed?

Does it really make a difference, if it was a teammate, rather than a faceless stranger?

Is Wash any more culpable than the rest of them, just because he'd participated a little longer?

No matter what the answers to those questions are, asking them won't help Wash now. They won't change anything. So she looks down, not quite able to look at him as she speaks. ]

It didn't work.

[ Not accusatory, just a fact. The next line in his story. She knows that much of it, at least. ]

[counterblows]

[Sometimes you forget, when your focus is as singleminded as that. What was acceptable as collateral, and what wasn't. Expose Freelancer. Kill the Meta. Die with his name clear. If everyone else got caught in the radius of the blast, if innocent sim soldiers had to pick up the pieces of his mistakes, if he went ahead and made everyone else accountable for his errors - what would it matter?]

[There's no guilt to a corpse.]

No. It didn't. I just thought it would work better if I tried to play a longer game.

[tuskenlancer]

[ CT nods, still not entirely understanding his reasoning. She'd been desperate to get out, held back only by her own fear that she hadn't done enough, hadn't gathered enough information, wasn't prepared. The longer she'd stayed after making the decision to leave, the harder it had been.

But Wash...Wash had stayed, knowing all the time that he didn't agree with what he was doing, planning his own rebellion all along without a single person to share it with. Without any support - and, she realizes with a sudden burst of clarity, any real expectation of escape.

CT had at least hoped she might make it out, start a new life beyond Project Freelancer. But Wash...

She knows him. She knows the Director. There's no way Wash would have even imagined turning on him so blatantly and living to tell the tale. Not without support. Not without the rest of the agents, the Project, his mission, to distract the Director, with all his focus turned to, if not salvaging the Project, than at least minimizing the fallout. Taking revenge on anyone left alive who had tried to sabotage it. ]

How did you get out?

[ How are you alive. ]

[counterblows]

[It's tactics, plain and simple. He was collateral. He was always going to be collateral. You don't work for as long as you do under Project Freelancer and expect to come out the other end alive. If you expect to come out the other end at all.]

Dumb luck and a group of the worst soldiers I've ever encountered - who were just stupid enough to be trusted.

[And just stupid enough to trust him, after all he'd done.]

They faked my death for me instead of leaving me to the UNSC. [And they were in no way obligated. In fact, he wouldn't have blamed them for doing exactly the opposite.]

[But they didn't.]

[tuskenlancer]

[ CT, who had once yelled at Wash for letting one of those terrible soldiers die to bring down the organization that had killed her, now just furrows her brow in confusion.

What soldiers would possibly side with a rebel Freelancer against the UNSC? ]

What soldiers?

[counterblows]

Sim troopers, if you can believe it.

[It's for the best that Church isn't here. Or...maybe. The disparity between the reactions is a violence unto itself, a knife to the guts. Two sides of the same tale, and this one is going exponentially better, but not by much. It'd be difficult to make it any worse than their first meeting.]

You don't remember them, do you.

[It isn't a question.]

Church.

[tuskenlancer]

[ She just stares at him blankly for a moment.

Then she snorts, turning away with a scowl of annoyance. There are some things you don't joke about. ]

Real funny, Wash.

[counterblows]

It's not a joke.

[He shuts his eyes. Presses the heels of his palms up against them until the pressure erupts a peppering of stars over his vision.]

You knew one of them. Leonard Church. [Or at least - that's what he preferred. It seems cruel, somehow, to use the title of "Alpha" when he didn't prefer it, even if no one here remembers it.]

[tuskenlancer]

Wash...

[ And now her voice is quiet and gentle. Sorrowful. Because it's clear that he's not joking, and that can only mean one thing.

She'd thought he was getting better. At least a little bit. ]

...You're confused.

[counterblows]

[Anger is a live snake coiling up in his guts. Sure. Okay, Agent. Why don't we all take a step back, and think about this a little more rationally? It's every dismissal he's ever gotten. It's why she walked off that cliff - because you lost it, Washington, because you went goddamned fucking crazy and she knew that and you couldn't convince her that you weren't just losing it all over again.]

[His tone is icier than he means for it to be.]

I'm not the one who's missing my memories. [Missing memories has never been his issue. He's always had too many for one brain.]

[tuskenlancer]

[ She recoils a little bit at that, equal parts surprise and hurt. She hadn't meant to poke at a sore spot, even if maybe she should have known better. But he's seriously talking about Leonard Church helping him take down Project Freelancer. What's she supposed to think?

And it doesn't help that he's been so reluctant to help her fill in the blanks of all these oh so important memories she's supposedly lost. So yeah, she's snapping a little when she responds. ]

Then remind me, Wash.

How exactly did Leonard Church help save you from the wrath of the UNSC?

[counterblows]

[It bubbles up behind clenched teeth, tarring his molars, singeing his gums. He bites the words out sharply, because - because it picks at something in the core of him, that insinuation that you're just confused. Speak slow. Speak to him carefully, like he's a fucking child. Speak to him like he's about to snap, any minute.]

[She died because she didn't want to believe that what she was seeing was false. Because she was so certain that what he was seeing was.]

The Alpha. The A.I. that he twisted and tortured and fragmented. That Leonard Church.