lifeaftr | home sweet home? (closed)

Entry tags:

home sweet home? (closed)

Who: Leonard Church and Agents Washington, Texas, and Maine
What: Meetings, reunions, and definitely no awkwardness.
When: shortly after the April intro log
Where: Islet #4, Cottage #3
Warnings: canon typical language

[ What's better than a group of space marines with lots of interpersonal baggage? Plucking them all from different points in time, then shoving them in the same house and seeing what happens.

MINGLE POST. Make your own top-levels, tag around, go nuts. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What the fuck does THAT mean?!

[It explodes out, but in an instant, it's like he tries to suck it back in. A hand to his faceplate like he's going to pinch his nose he doesn't have.] NO, no, wait, hold on, this is... [He'd been in there, after all.] I'd hope Freelancer didn't recruit all sociopaths. You mean this is...before. Before he became the fucking Meta. He used to be like a normal person? Or, I mean, normal as far as Freelancer baseline goes.

No. It doesn't only recruit - what do you think?

[He's barely grinding that out through gritted teeth.]

Yes. Before he became the Meta. He wasn't always...look, yes, you're right. Before then, he was one of us. He was my friend.

I'm gonna assume that's a rhetorical question, because you really won't like my answer otherwise.

...So like should I still hide or...?

No. No, you don't have to hide or anything. Just...don't freak out if you see him. He knows that...he knows part of your situation. Not all of it. I wasn't sure how to tell him all of it. Just enough so that you guys wouldn't think you were trying to kill each other if you met.

[This new "telling people things" shtick is hard man.]

How sure are you that he doesn't want to kill us and rip out the armor mods and electronic bits? Other than you being alive and not dead. Because I almost put a rocket through his skull and he definitely shot you.

Because I talked to him. He has no idea. Church, he's from before any of that even happened.

[Wash doesn't quite mean to sound as desperate as he does when he says it.]

[Or as pleading.]

[There is definitely a part of Church that wants to say no. To spite Wash, to not let him have his fucking way for once. (The last time he told Wash no, the agent gave an impassioned persuasive speech that poked at all of his insecurities.)]

...What caused it.

[It's a question, just not inflected like one. Mostly because it's at least half rhetorical. He's pretty sure he knows what caused it--who caused it like a halo of flame burning away the man-who-was-Maine. He hadn't met Sigma until that moment, but given the evidence of being on fire...]

Are any of them here?

No.

[What caused it. A simple question, and...of course Church would have a little more than inkling. It wasn't the Alpha did it; it was one of the splits parts of who he used to be.]

The fragment that Maine...it wasn't supposed to be his. But he got an injury, so Carolina gave up her A.I. so he could communicate.

Sigma.

...Fuck, you mean if things had been different, Carolina would've gone Meta? [He only vaguely knows the Freelancers. Ostensibly it's because Tex told him about some of them and he may have run into some before they all fucked off and he got assigned to Sidewinder.

That's obviously not the case. The fact that he has some of the vague details right--like York and Carolina being partners (in a sense)--is perhaps a little alarming.]

Sigma sure didn't do any fucking communicating when the Meta was running around killing people. It was all grr, growl, and then getting shot in the face and getting cars thrown at you.

Yeah. If things'd gone a little different.

[Really, that was the crux of it. A few variables shifted one way, and Wash would've been allotted Iota instead of Epsilon. He would've gotten the Alpha's happiness instead of the memories of the torture that stripped him to pieces.]

Sigma was...he was your creativity and your ambition. When you put a fragment like that in charge of communicating and nothing else - the kind of task you'd relegate to a Dumb A.I. - well, he's gonna get bored.

By the end, I'm not sure there was a Sigma anymore. They were all just...one entity. The Meta.

Alpha's. He was Alpha's creativity and ambition.

[He's not too keen on dealing with the whole Being The Alpha thing right at this very moment thanks. Some other time. Later. When he's less stressed and actually wants to talk about it.]

He was definitely...fiery. Just...man, that was definitely concerning fire. Him, and O'Malley, and Gary, and Tex, and Delta. And uh...the purple one, Theta. The--the--why do I want to call them twins? Blue and yellow. Eta and Iota. Iota and Eta? All hanging out in the Meta's head. It wasn't...pretty.

What was up with the fire?

[Wash doesn't correct him. If Church needs distance from that part of himself...well, who's Wash to push that? Only when he's gearing up for a suicide mission, apparently.]

Eta and Iota. They were separated around the same time, both implanted in Carolina. They were always together.

[South's A.I., and Wash's, in another timeline, maybe.]

I don't think anyone thought he was capable of it. Of any of it. Of turning someone into the Meta. If we did, I don't think anyone would've let someone who looked like a man on fire in another person's head for too long.

Everyone had different colors, and only two of them decided to took like anyone out of armor, and one of them was a joke-telling prick, and one of them decided he wanted to look like he was on fire.

But, I mean, putting fragmented crazy pieces of a fractured psyche into people who, let's be honest, were probably already some form of unstable to begin with, that apparently was something the Director thought was okay.

By that point, I don't know if he even cared about what happened to any of us anymore. I think we were just...distractions. Little side experiments he could run while he waited for what he really wanted to become possible.

[Allison was his priority, from the very beginning. He just got worse at hiding it the more things progressed.]

If I ask what that is, how much am I gonna wanna punch out a wall?

I think you know what that is.

He just wanted to bring her back. In whatever...form he could.

Bring who back? What, Tex? What's he want with a part of my--why's he so gung-ho about a part of the Alpha's brain? No, you know what, I don't care about those details right now, because we're talking about the Met--about Maine.

Not Tex. The woman she's based off of.

Allison.

["Her name was Allison."]

Because if the Alpha was made from a copy of the Director's brain, what does that make Tex, to him?

...

What?

If you didn't keep running from this, maybe it would make more sense.

[That's - that's not fair. He knows it's not the second he says it. He knows it's not because he got the Alpha's memories, and those left the A.I. himself unable to comprehend what had been done to him.]

She was someone in his life, Church. Someone he loved and lost, and he never stopped trying to bring her back.

Wash--[He can't help the small way he gets louder, like if he could talk over Wash, it'll be okay. If he can talk louder than his own thoughts. Right now it's stuck on a loop of made from a copy of the Director's brain, and god damn it, he's already had enough fucking bombshells from Wash already, hasn't he?] What the hell are you saying? [They were talking about Maine. How did they bumble into this again?]

Do you want me to explain it or not, Church? You said you didn't care, but do you?

[How far back does he need to step? You're not talking to Epsilon. You're talking to an amnestic husk of traumatized A.I. that used to be the Alpha, that has none of those memories, that only has phantom memories of what was done to him, or did you forget?]

The Director. The Director of Project Freelancer? His name was Dr. Leonard Church.

[There are several ways to react to this, few of which are pleasant. It feels like static turned up in his mind, and for a few long moments, he doesn't even see Wash. He's somewhere else entirely. He wants to yell, take Wash by the shoulders and shake him, or punch his stupid lights out. How much worse can this get? Why does it always seem to be able to get worse?

The static doesn't clear completely, but how he reacts is intimately familiar to Wash, and probably the best option right now. He scoffs.]

Bullshit.

[But he feels like he's saying it from far away.]

A.I. don't come from nothing, Church. Smart A.I. are made from human neural patterns.

[And which human would the Director most trust, in terms of judgment? Which human would the Director want in his corner?]

[The only one he ever wants.]

All AI are based on a human mind. Yeah. I heard you the first time. What you didn't say was that the Director, what, copied his own brain so he could run things from two locations? Nobody would've let him do that. What the fuck, man. You think I'm gonna believe that? That I'm him?

What the fuck.

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