lifeaftr | November catchall

Entry tags:

November catchall

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!)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ 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?

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.

[ 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. ]

[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.

[ 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. ]

[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.]

[ 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?

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.

[ 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.

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.]

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.

[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.]

[ 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?

[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.

[ She knows who the Alpha is, of course. She'd known before any of the rest of them. But even so, even with all of her research and all of her knowledge, what he's saying makes no sense. ]

How...

[ She furrows her brow, and God help her, Wash, she's trying to understand, trying to find a way to believe him. Because it's not that she wants to treat him with kid gloves, or think that he's crazy again, or make him (understandably) frustrated and angry. She doesn't want any of that.

But. ]

How did a sim soldier get their hands on the Alpha?

They relocated him. They manufactured a stalemate in an outpost so far removed from everything that no one would think to look for him there.

[He said this all to a man who refused to accept his identity until it stared him dead in the face in the form of the pieces of his own fractured, digital soul. When the Meta put a bullet in Wash's chest and it was only the grace of the haloed static fuzz of white and cobalt that gave him enough time to pull the goddamn trigger on all of them.]

He didn't know who he was. But neither did anyone else. Florida was supposed to be his handler, but...it went off the rails.

[ Sorry, Wash, she's still not getting it. CT just stares, shocked and horrified. ]

They gave the Alpha to Florida?

[ "Off the rails" is right. She doesn't even want to think about how badly that particular implantation must have backfired. ]

[Now it's his turn to give C.T. the Blood Gulch Chronicles: Abridged Edition, and he has no idea where to start. He wasn't there for any of it, and what's more - ]

[It's unreal. She calls him Alpha without a second thought, when she once laid into him for referring to him as the same. It doesn't occur to her not to.]

It didn't last long. Florida died, the deployment order got fucked, and Wyoming almost ended up killing everyone.

[ Why would it? The Alpha is just a program to her, something that's brought nothing but pain and anguish to all of them. They'd all have been better off if he - it - had never been created.

He's not her friend. Not someone she misses and cares about and wants so fiercely to protect against everything that's been done to him. ]

Wyoming?

[ Another betrayal. Another Freelancer turning on their own. Not that she can talk. ]

I thought - I thought you said Maine was the one who -

Look, it got - complicated. Gamma was there, Tex got involved, and...I wasn't around for any of it. The bottom line is that Wyoming is dead, Texas is dead, Maine is dead, and Church - the Alpha - he's dead too.

[So there, right? Problem fucking solved. No need to worry about the dead and buried, except that they can still materialize here postmortem. Evidence, case, and point, right in front of him.]

They're all gone. And you weren't happy to learn that what happened to Church was on me.

[ How could everything have turned into such a mess? Just the words Texas is dead sound...wrong. She'd known that much, Wash had given her the body count a long time ago, but still, she can't reconcile the Project's number one freelancer, top of the board, her friend, with...that. With just being gone.

She tilts her head, as if trying to recall something dancing at the edge of her memory, something she can't quite pin down. Because she does remember Wash telling her...something like this. Something about bringing down the Project. About a necessary sacrifice. And she remembers being angry at him, being shocked and upset and grieving, but for the life of her she can't remember why. ]

I don't...understand.

[ She frowns, brow furrowing. Trying to remember. Why would she care? Tex had been her friend, but Tex had been special. Different. ]

He was just an AI.

[He was just an A.I.]

[In his mind's eye, he can hear the sound of pixel-static ghosting into nothingness with the broken-glass implosion of one fragment deconstructing himself utterly, pulling himself into pieces the way that the Alpha fought tooth and nail to prevent. The lightning crackle of an electromagnetic pulse, scourging Command clean of every inch of tech. Like it or not, there's no escaping it. Whether it's by someone else's hand or his own, Church is doomed, always, to end up giving himself to other people.]

[By design, he can't allow himself to get attached to them, when they come, because they always end up going too soon. He's too busy ensuring that Caboose doesn't come to pieces, and that Tucker doesn't verbally eviscerate someone else in the throes of his own grief.]

He was your friend.

[ She just looks at him, for a long, long moment, trying to imagine any scenario in which that could possibly be the case.

It's not just that the Alpha is an AI. It's that he's the Alpha. He's Leonard Church. He's - essentially, at his core - the same man who had pushed and manipulated them all for so long. Who had put his agents into danger and pitted them against each other and, ultimately, decided that they were all expendable.

He was her friend?

CT shakes her head, leaning back against Amitusha and rubbing her eyes. Suddenly, she's exhausted. ]

Sure, Wash.

Whatever you say.

[That spikes it all over again, barbs curling up against his heart. She shuts down, and he doesn't know what to say other than to press the point, explain a scenario he wasn't there for and justify a friendship that he never actually witnessed.]

[He gets up. There's no going back to sleep after this.]

Forget it.

[ Well, it's not like she'd thought that would go over well. She scowls, raking a hand through her hair in frustration and sitting up as Wash peels himself out of bed. ]

Where are you going?

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