#i still think this is largely tucker being the driving force and simmons is like ��uhm? okayy?” but also?? leader tucker?? being competent

[grif-hawaiian-rolls]

"Hey baby, bet I could help you with your daddy issues!"

~

"Pft- five," Simmons snorted, leaning on Tucker's shoulders. "Out of ten." "Aw c'mon, really?" He groaned. "Why'd that one get such a low score?" "It just- it sounded more creepy than flirty?" "I think that's just the Donut-effect kicking in, man," "Yeah, well, try again then because no one can undo the Donut effect," "Tell me about it. Okay, okay... hey baby-"

[secretlystephaniebrown]

Back to Prison: 4/5

Summary: The Tartarus makes good things hard to hang onto. So when a couple of mercenaries offer Wash his freedom, he can’t help but think it’s worth whatever price they might ask. Even if it brings him into direct conflict with the Reds and Blues once again.

Mercenary Wash AU.

I LIVE! Sorry for the long-ass delay between chapters, I got swept up in NaNoWriMo, which ended up being my longest fic project to date. Whoops. Anyways, we're back, with another Tucker chapter, LET'S GET GOING!

Thanks as always to @jomeimei421, who inspired the fic, and @sroloc--elbisivni for betaing.

Warnings for: Discussions of injury and torture, injury, and alcohol use.

Also on Ao3

Tucker makes it out of the base with some new scars and a broken wrist to show for it. But he has his sword and his armor, and after he collapses into Caboose’s arms and after Doc tapes his wrist and then Grey re-tapes it because Doc did it wrong and after he’s told Carolina and Kimball and Doyle about the cave-in and Felix using Donut’s voice and the torture, he goes and lies down in his bunk.

Because he also has a secret.

He knows who let him escape.

And he has no idea what to do with that information.

Carolina comes to check on him pretty soon after his initial debrief with the generals, a bottle of wine tucked under her arm.

“Are you okay?” She asks. There’s something in her face that he can’t place. Guilt, maybe? She looks tired, as tired as Tucker feels. The dark circles under her eyes have blossomed and darkened, but they’re still not as large or as dark as the one’s under Washington’s—Tucker cuts off that train of thought. Her hair is damp, as if she’s come straight for the shower, and she’s not wearing any of her armor at all, instead looking oddly shrunken in just a black tank top and a pair of Grifball sweats. She’s still taller than him, but that’s beside the point.

He stares at her, trying to figure out what this is, why she’s here.

She shifts, clearly uncomfortable as he is. “Look, I—”

“Epsilon hacked Dr. Grey’s records of my injuries, didn’t he?” Tucker asks, finally putting it all together. He’d asked Grey not to tell the others, mostly because he didn’t want Caboose to be upset, but he should have realized that Church was a sneaky bastard, and Carolina apparently comes by it honestly.

“Yes.”

“Where’d you get that wine?”

“Donut.”

“Come on in, I guess.”

The two of them pile into Tucker’s bunk, and Carolina produces two plastic cups.

Back with the New Republic, Tucker had bunked with Caboose, not wanting to let the other blue out of his sight. Carolina had been gone, and from the ominous comments that Felix was making, she was being hunted by the fucking Feds, and he hadn’t wanted to even risk it.

Now, of course, there’s more room. Caboose bunks with Smith now, and Tucker bunks alone, because his other option is Palomo, and that’s not happening. It’s lonely, sometimes, but at least Tucker doesn’t have to listen to Caboose sleep talk.

(Not that he ever misses that. Not at all.)

“You ever been tortured before?” Carolina asks, tentative as removes the screw top of the bottle.

“Yeah, we’re totally not doing this,” Tucker says, grabbing the cup she holds out to him, staring at the contents.  

“Tucker—” There’s a warning in her voice, but it’s one that’s gentle. The kind she does when she’s trying to stop him from hurting himself during training, rather than her shouts of rage when he hits on her or when he steals her hair dye to prank Simmons.

“Washington let me go,” Tucker says before downing his entire glass in one go.

Carolina stands frozen, staring right at him, mouth agape, Church hovering over her shoulder. If he wasn’t wearing armor, Tucker would put money down that Church is making the exact same expression.

“What?” The two of them scream together.

It’s times like this that really prove that they’re siblings.

“I mean,” Tucker grabs the bottle and pours himself more. “I told him I should’ve killed him and then he came back and like, I thought he was gonna kill me, so I pretended to be asleep cuz he seems like the kind of guy who wants to watch the life go out of you if he’s killing you to make a point, y’know?” He takes another, desperate gulp, remembering the soft sound of Washington’s armored feet padding across the floor of the operating theater. “And then instead, he uncuffs me and slams the door as if he’s trying to wake me up. I thought it was like, a trap or something, but he didn’t ambush me when I was running.”

And then Tucker had grabbed his sword and ran and ran and ran, until he’d managed to get out of the base, stealing a mongoose and driving, until he’d managed to practically crash into a search party, lead by Jensen.

It was supposed to be a search party, not a rescue party, because they’d all thought he was already dead.

Carolina and Caboose hadn’t believed it, according to Kimball. The Reds hadn’t either.

It’s nice to be believed in, Tucker supposes. Even though he knows they’d eventually have tried to mount a rescue mission, which would have brought his friends right into the enemy’s reach.

“He let you go,” Carolina says softly. The expression on her face is half wonder, half hope.  

“Yeah.”

The moment fades, and her gaze refocuses on him, intense and intelligent. “You didn’t mention this to Kimball and Doyle.”

“Because I don’t know what it means!” Tucker yells, throwing his hands into the air. His injuries protest the movement, but he refuses to let it show, caught up as he is in his own confusion. “I don’t get why he did it! I literally told the guy I should have murdered him and instead he lets me go?”

He had been an inch from death; handcuffed and injured and unable to defend himself, and instead of taking the easiest shot in the world, Washington had let him go.

What is Tucker supposed to think about this? What is he supposed to do?

Carolina runs her fingers through her ponytail absently, staring off into space. A wrinkle appears between her eyebrows, as she tilts her head to one side. “You’ve talked to him a few times, right?” She sounds far away as she says it.

Tucker shifts, not sure what she means by that. Yeah, he’s talked to the guy, but usually to tell him how much he fucking sucks and how much Tucker wants him to die. It’s not like it’s the kind of speech that changes anything. Certainly not something that should make a guy decide that he’s going to let an enemy go. “Yeah.”

Her mouth parts for a moment, thoughtful, then quirks up into a smile. “Huh.” Tucker has no idea what she’s thinking, and he’s not sure he wants to know.

Tucker slumps down against the wall. He stares at the bottle for a moment, then decides that he was just tortured, so he’s earned it, and takes a swig directly from the bottle. It’s not the best wine that Donut’s ever managed to procure, but it’s also a hell of a lot better than the bathtub gin that Volleyball brews in an abandoned warehouse that serves as most of the United Armies of Chorus’s liquor supply. He swallows, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, and then looks back at Carolina, who’s watching him with those bright green eyes of hers. “I mean, he also was the reason I got captured by Felix so it’s not like I owe him or anything.”

He stares down at his arms, where the bandages cover the thin, but deep cuts left behind by Felix. Grey had told him in her scarily chipper way, that they had been done just so, to stop Tucker from bleeding out entirely, but still to cause blood loss and pain.

Carolina is serious again. “You’re right. You don’t.” She nudges him, more gently than she usually does. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she adds.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same woman who had once held a gun to the back of his head and tried to order him to follow her into battle. The woman who Caboose had been forced to disarm to stop her from doing something that all of them might regret.

But Caboose had disarmed her, and then they had gone after her, because, despite everything, she was one of them, whether she knew it or not. She and Church were theirs. And Tucker and Caboose had reached down and pulled Carolina onto her feet, and then, maybe Carolina figured that out herself.

Somewhere, somehow, along the way, the two of them had become friends.

Neither of them have a lot of those.

Tucker tries to laugh, but it gets caught in his throat and comes out as more of a sob, than anything else. “Yeah,” he finally says, the words choked. “Me too.”

Carolina sits next to him, and, hesitating, puts an arm around his shoulders. She’s warm and her arms are corded with muscle and she smells of detergent and wine and the fancy shampoo Donut buys her to help her preserve the dye in her hair, and it’s great.

Too tired to even make a joke, let alone flirt, Tucker sets the bottle down between his knees, leans against her, closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

“I’m sorry Epsilon. The Meta captured her in the memory unit.”

The first time Tucker ever sees Washington, it’s in in the snow.

He seems almost… normal, in that moment. The fighting between him and Tex and the Meta was done, Tex was already gone (Tucker would never get to say goodbye).

“She’ll be trapped in there.”

He and Epsilon were… something. Some sort of truce. Didn’t Epsilon hate that guy? Tucker thought someone had mentioned something about Epsilon shooting a laser at him, just like he’d done at fucking CT.  

“If I let her out… you have to come with me.”

A truce that involved Wash trying to fucking blackmail Church into coming with him to get Tex out of the fucking thing that he’d built, apparently. Tucker decided, right there on the spot, that he hated that guy.  

“Caboose, Tucker. Get in the base. See if you can find some tools.”

How had he even known his name? Then, there had been no time to dwell on it, because at the end of the day, even after she’d fucking kicked their asses and even after she’d ditched them and even after everything…

Tex was still his friend.

Fighting the Meta is brutal and terrifying… bullets flying and all sorts of bullshit. Tucker stabs him in the chest. Sarge charges him with a shotgun.

And by the time the dust settles…

Church is gone.

And Tucker’s standing over the unconscious form of the guy responsible for it, sprawled out and bleeding on the snow.

Tucker stares down at him, nothing but disgust rolling in his stomach.

This guy shot Donut, and now Tex and Church are gone. Both Churches, even.

Because of what? Tucker doesn’t even know. Something about prison.

He nearly grabs Doc by the wrist, nearly tells Doc to fucking let the guy die, but he doesn’t, because he just realized Church fucking didn’t even say goodbye… again, and Caboose is calling Church’s name, softer and softer each time, and it’s nearly too much for Tucker to bear.

Caboose finally wanders over, sniffing. He brightens up though, when he sees Wash.

“Wash! You’re alive!”

And something about Caboose sounding so fucking happy to see this guy, when he can’t even stand Tucker half the time, even though it’s this guy’s fucking fault that Caboose’s best friend is dead…

Caboose kneels over the guy, sprawled out like a broken fucking rag doll as he is on the ice. “Tucker! He’s alive! Can we keep him?”

Tucker fucking can’t believe Caboose, sometimes.

“Leave him! Caboose, get away from that guy! He killed Church, remember?”

It stops Caboose in his tracks.

Blood spreads through the snow all around Washington, smearing it pink in places. Pink, like Donut, who’s dead because of him. The rest of it is just… red.

“No, Church is… he’s just not here right now,” Caboose says, slowly, looking over his shoulder at that fucking memory unit. “And Washington can be our new friend while we wait for him!”

“Fine, he killed Alpha! And Donut!” Tucker yells, and he can feel dampness stinging at his eyes and his throat closing up, because his best friend is gone, and never coming back, and Tucker never got to say goodbye, and it’s all too much. “And Epsilon and Tex are gone now, and it’s his fault, Caboose! He’s fucking dangerous and he doesn’t care about us and… just…” His shoulders slump. “Caboose…” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s just go home.”

Caboose stares at Washington for a while.

The noise of a pelican fills the air, and Tucker looks up. All that noise, and explosions, have apparently given them an audience, and Tucker has even less desire to help Washington now. He has no idea how they’re going to get out of this, and he doesn’t have time to deal with anything else right now, let alone a fucking murderer.

(Donut hadn’t even done anything to this guy. Donut had been with him, in the desert, away from all of this fucking Freelancer bullshit.)

“Okay Tucker,” Caboose says, and Tucker sighs with relief because, for once, Caboose is actually listening to him.

And so they walk away, and they leave Washington behind in the snow.

Caboose comes to visit after Carolina leaves the next morning. If Tucker had more energy, he might have made a walk-of-fame joke (walks-of-shame aren’t Carolina’s style, and Tucker’s not about to shame anybody for having even hypothetical sex, especially not hypothetical sex with him), but because he was drinking, he hadn’t taken the painkillers that Dr. Grey had given him, so he hurts way too much to come up with a good punchline, let alone handle the retribution that she’d deal out for it.

They might be friends, but Carolina has a very low tolerance for pick-up lines. At least it’s all in good fun these days, rather than the time when she’d tried to shoot him. Although that might have been for eavesdropping and startling her as much as for the line.

So instead of seeing if he could finally phase Carolina, or even get up in search of breakfast, Tucker just lies down on his bed, staring at the stitches on his arm, and tries really hard not to feel sick.

Because Felix would have killed him, there’s no doubt in Tucker’s mind about that. He’d whispered it in Tucker’s ear as he’d pressed the flat of the knife against his face, already covered in blood. Promises of how long it’d take, of what it’d feel like, of how he was going to send his body back to Caboose and Kimball and even Junior in pieces.

“I think I’ll shoot you in the spine. Can’t even run as I start to cut you up. Wouldn’t that be fun? Of course, if I don’t do it right, you could die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

His friends hadn’t known where he was. He’d been given up for dead by all official channels, even if Caboose and Carolina and Sarge and Grif and Simmons and Donut and Doc and—well, okay, Lopez might have given him up as dead, but honestly Tucker wouldn’t know one way or another, cuz he’d slept through high school Spanish—hadn’t believed it. There was no way they would have gotten there in time, and he would have died there, in that operating theater…

But Washington had decided to save him, for a reason that Tucker can’t even begin to understand.

“Tucker?” Caboose says, very quietly.

“Hey Caboose,” Tucker says, trying to keep his voice cheerful. Caboose knows that Tucker’s hurt, obviously, but that doesn’t mean Tucker has to remind him of it.

Caboose looks at him, very solemn and weirdly quiet.

“Tucker, you have been very stupid,” Caboose announces.

“Hey!” Tucker says. “It’s not my fault I was tortured!”

“Noooo,” Caboose says, drawing out the word, like Tucker’s missing something very obvious. “But you have been telling Principal Kimball not to let me go on missions with you!”

Maybe it’s because of Caboose’s insistence on referring to Kimball as “principal,” but the only word that springs into Tucker’s mind in this moment is tattle-tale.

“Caboose,” Tucker starts to protest, but it’s too late, Caboose takes off his helmet, and fuck, there are tears in his giant brown eyes and Tucker hates that, hates when Caboose cries, it’s not fair, they’re supposed to hate each other, that’s how it goes.

“Caboose! I just thought Washington might be there, and—” Tucker sighs. “You liked him.”

“Well, yes,” Caboose says, sitting down next to him. “But now he’s not being very nice, and he is hurting people and he’s friends with Felix and Locus and you know I think they’re very bad influences because I really thought we were going to be friends, but you know what sometimes people aren’t your friends and… and sometimes that’s okay.” He pats Tucker’s shoulder. “Tucker, sometimes you are very stupid.”

Tucker, still trying to follow Caboose’s sentence before that, blinks. “What did I do now?”

Caboose makes a scoffing sound. “Tucker. Tucker. Tucker. I’m supposed to make sure you don’t do stupid things. That is why we are a team! Blue team! Us and Church and Carolina and Tex but she’s gone now, and Grif’s sister, even though it is very rude of her not to be here right now. We are supposed to stick together. Because otherwise someone who is not me will get lost and I know Mom said we’re supposed to stay in one place when we get lost, but I think you did the right thing this time coming to find us.”

Tucker laughs, wincing as the motion of it pulls at the stitches in his side. “Okay, Caboose, I get it. No more leaving you behind.”

“Oh! Good. Because that was not fun.” Caboose pauses. “Felix is not very nice.”

“No. He’s not.”

Caboose stares at his hands. “Tucker… is it really my fault?”

“What?”

“Washington only shot Private Pastry because he went to prison and he says he only went to prison because I kept Church. And you only didn’t keep him because of that and then he went to jail again and then Felix and Locus let him out and now he’s hurting people again and—”

“Caboose!” Tucker is alarmed, because Caboose doesn’t even acknowledge things that are his fault, like Church’s death back in Blood Gulch or blowing things up, or… fucking anything. “Caboose, no. Washington did those things because he chose to, and it’s not our fucking fault.” Tucker banishes the sight of blood on the snow from behind his eyelids.

“It’s not.”

He’s not sure if he’s talking more to himself or to Caboose, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.

Tucker and Caboose had made their choices and made them a long time ago.

Washington had made his own.

And all of the choices have led them here, to Tucker covered in injuries, Caboose’s arms wrapped around his stomach, with the specter of Washington hanging over their heads.

In his nightmares, Washington doesn’t let him go.

The handcuffs come off, sure enough, but when Tucker stirs, when he moves too soon, Washington grabs him by the hair, bringing a knife to Tucker’s throat and cutting.

Or he does let him go, but he gives chase, through the strange and winding corridors of the base—far darker, and more twisting than the corridors had been in real life—and, just as Tucker throws open the impossibly heavy door to the base, as soon as he can see freedom and green grass and Caboose and Carolina in the distance, calling his name…

The bullet, in his dreams, goes through his spine, cutting his feet out from under him. In the nightmare, Tucker falls to the ground like a puppet released from its strings, pain shooting through his top half, while nothing but numbness fills his bottom half.

Washington shoots Tucker in the back, and he doesn’t even laugh, not like Felix would.

He just stares at Tucker, pale grey eyes surrounded by bruise like dark circles, scars stretched across his face. He doesn’t say a thing, sitting down on his haunches, tilting his head to one side as Tucker bleeds out.

Beneath Tucker, his blood stains the snow.

Tucker wakes up with his chest too tight to breathe, and he paces around the base, at least in part to prove to himself that he still can, until Palomo sees him and starts asking him questions. As Tucker hurries back towards his room and his bed to escape, he wonders if Palomo was doing that on purpose.

It’s only a week later, when Grey has finally taken out the last of his stitches and given him the all-clear, that Tucker goes out on another mission—this one with Sarge to take back a pirate base.

It goes smoothly, and there’s no sign of Washington or Felix or Locus, and it’s almost enough to help Tucker shake off the strange, foreboding feeling that’s started to settle into him every time he leaves Armonia.

Washington kept him alive for a reason, and Tucker is increasingly terrified of what that reason is.

It’s weird, that Tucker’s so scared of him, when he’s not the creepy, silent enigma of Locus, or the manic, vindictive cruelty of Felix. Wash somehow seems to straddle the line between the two mercenaries. More personal than Locus, more contained than Felix, and all the while with his eyes focused on Tucker, not because he’s interesting or pretty or irritating or whatever other form of bullshit that Felix is spouting off this week, but because of something that Tucker did.

Tucker pulled Caboose away from him, explicitly refused the Freelancer shelter and freedom when the guy felt that he was owed it, and for that, Washington wants him dead.

Except he doesn’t.

Except, he’d let Tucker go.

Tucker can’t stop rolling that fact around his head, hoping, somehow, that if he does it enough, the edges will wear away, and reveal some sort of fucking answer. It had worked with trying to figure out what was up with Church, had worked with the puzzle that was Red versus Blue…

But Washington… Tucker can’t seem to puzzle out Washington, no matter how hard he tries.

Tucker goes with Grey to the alien tower to investigate things, and decides to dick around with his sword for a bit to try to take his mind of Washington.

And then, because Tucker’s life is a fucking gigantic joke with him as the punchline, he accidentally summons the voice of alien Jesus (well okay, another alien Jesus, because to him, alien Jesus will always be Junior, and no, he wasn’t a fucking virgin, shut up Grif, that’s not the point), and they go off on another adventure to find some sort of fucking “true warrior” portal.

Tucker jumps in, because, fuck it. He’s got the sword, he’s a fucking war hero, why the hell not?

Caboose finally wanders over, sniffing. He brightens up though, when he sees Wash.

“Wash! You’re alive!”

… fuck, it’s kind of nice to see Caboose happy, for once.

Caboose kneels over the guy, sprawled out like a broken fucking rag doll as he is on the ice. “Tucker! He’s alive! Can we keep him?”

“Caboose…” Tucker groans.

“Can we keep him? Can we keep him?” Caboose is practically fucking bouncing as he kneels over Washington, getting in the way of Doc checking his pulse. And the guy had helped them fight the Meta…

“… fuck it. Anyone have any spray paint?”

No one’s ever accused Tucker of being smart, okay? And whatever, the guy’s half-dead. He might just keel over on his own, and at least Caboose will be happy.

They’re only just finished swapping the armors and getting Wash upright and instructing him on what to say, when the pelican arrives.

“I gotta hand it to you. Killing one of these agents would be tough. But three? And this guy...” The guy stops and examines Epsilon’s robot body, wearing Washington’s armor. For a second, Tucker thinks the ruse is about to fall apart, but the guy just shrugs. “The Chairman will not be happy he's dead. I think he wanted to debrief him personally. Oh well.”

“Yeah...” Tucker says, doing his best to play it cool.

“Yeah, that's too bad,” Caboose adds, with that weirdly earnest way of his that makes Tucker wonder if he has, in fact, already forgotten that Wash isn’t actually dead.

“Well, be sure to let him know we're sorry.”

… okay, nobody had told Tucker that the Freelancer was a fucking little shit.

“Whatever. You're free to go. If we need you, we know where to find you.”

Dick.

“Why are you guys helping me?” Washington demands, just like he had earlier, when they’d been getting him onto his feet.

“You helped us, Wash. It only makes sense.” Okay Caboose. Sure.

“Yeah, plus we needed to even the teams. And I couldn't put up with Caboose constantly asking “Can we keep him? Can we keep him?”” Tucker says, more lightly than he feels. Oh, this is totally a terrible idea.

“… For whatever it's worth... Thanks.”

Tucker falls out of the portal after that, a strange feeling in his stomach.  

When Carolina asks him what he saw, he doesn’t tell her.

Caboose manages to figure things out, because of course he does, and he introduces them to a fucking alien A.I. named Santa, and they learn about a second key/sword and…

That’s when the pirates attack.

“Another key, huh?” The head pirate asks. She’s a woman, but Tucker doesn’t think he’s ever seen her before. “Ooh, Felix will like this. He’s not happy he let you get away, pretty.” She waves at Tucker, and he honestly doesn’t know how to deal with being flirted by a pirate who’s actively trying to kill him. “Well, okay, I’ll go let the boys know about this.”

She turns to one of the other pirates. “Shoot them as soon as that shield goes down! Felix wants the pretty one alive, but honestly… don’t bother. Locus will back me up on this.”

“Yes, Chrissie, ma’am.”

Chrissie, which is the worst fucking name ever for an evil pirate, and Tucker will go to his grave, possibly literally, because they might be about to die, thinking this.

“You really think four people are enough to stop us?” Carolina demands, her arms outstretched, holding up the shield.

“Eh, maybe not, but that little firebug of yours only can run that thing for so long,” Chrissie says with a shrug. “Have fun, kiddos!” She waves jauntily at them—or maybe the other pirates?—and then walks off. As she walks away, Tucker can hear her start to talk into her radio.

“Hey Wash, got some good news for you! Get Felix and Locus on the line, will you?”

There’s about another thirty seconds when Tucker thinks they’re about to die, but Grey and Freckles pull through…

And now, all they have to do, is fucking race Washington, Felix, and Locus, to a fucking mountain, and get the second key before they do.

Ah, fuckberries.

[renaroo]

The Search (1/16)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence - Alternate S15] The Reds and Blues saved Chorus, but it has been a year and they are still missing. A motley crew has been gathered with the common goal of finding the war heroes, though the road is more troubled than anyone seems to realize. 

A/N: I don’t know how many people remember, but a few years back while Season 13 was airing, I published my first longfic for the RvB fandom as the season aired, sort of a challenge to myself to make an alternate version of Season 13′s events to sort of see where things lined up. That fic was Divided and still to this day it’s one of my favorite fics I’ve written for the fandom. It’s also inspired me to attempt something similar for this season, though a bit shorter (and a few weeks off from keeping up with the season itself). I’m basically going to go another direction than S15 and hopefully you all will enjoy!

The Headline

It was the sort of culminating disaster that could not have been scripted. 

When the office door burst open, giving way to the proverbial army which had been sent after the Reds and Blues, somehow the ragtag team of former simulation troopers were ready. 

Between them and the Charon forces was a desk, a few novelty weapons they had gathered from Chairman Hargrove’s trophies, and a repurposed M374 Hephaestus Combat Armor. 

And, for a while, that seemed to be all they would need. 

The first barrage of bullets from the Charon soldiers was reflected back on them by an overwhelmingly large dome shield manifested from the Hephaestus Armor. Though the power seemed to deplete itself quickly as once the bullets ricocheted back toward their sources, the shield was back down and left the Reds and Blues open to fire upon the next wave with their own signature weapons. 

Initially, the hail of bullets from the Reds and Blues were enough to force people back, but the moment that two soldiers broke through the line and tried to stake out the corners of the room, the Blue in the former Meta armor lunged forward at an inhuman speed. There was hacking and slashing of a plasma sword, which confirmed suspicions that it was Lavernius Tucker inside the suit.

Beforehand, the angle of the footage had made it slightly more difficult to confirm identities than she would have liked. 

Once the line was broken, there seemed to be some shouted order. Two Reds -- Dexter Grif and Richard Simmons -- ducked behind the table with the other Blue -- Michael Caboose. It cleared them out of the way of the former disgraced medical officer, Frank DuFresne, who fired a rocket launcher through the opened office door. 

The explosion was out of view of the camera, but the footage was enough to show a room-wide recoil and stumbling in response to it. 

The Red known as only Sarge in his files remained steadily standing in position, firing at nearly the same rate as the automatic weapon that Caboose was holding. An impressive feat lessened by the apparent range of the shotgun which seemed to only take affect when Charon soldiers closed in within five feet of the group. 

By that point Franklin Donut and the robotic AI construct known in files as “Lopez the Heavy” were quick to give cover fire for their commander until those who were behind the desk gathered themselves back up and set themselves up for further attack. 

What soldiers came into the room had to first get past Tucker, who was moving with undocumented prowess. It was difficult to say how much of it was the armor maintaining the work for him and how much of it had to do with natural progress that was still difficult to assess considering the information barrier that still existed between Chorus and the rest of the governed UNSC space.

By the third round, the footage was damaged, a skip in the recording. It was difficult to assume what happened between frames -- one moment Tucker was still at the front of the line, the next he had fallen back and was removing an enhancement from his suit to give to Donut who had fallen between frames. 

At one point, Caboose was at the lead, his automatic weapon firing incessantly. 

They all fell back again between frames, most huddled behind the desk used for cover fire. 

Once the ship began crashing, the footage was upside down -- or rather, everyone else was, dodging out of the way of the office furniture and entangled bodies of the soldiers they had taken out as much as they were the incoming attacks. 

Half the screen was no longer recording, a crack in the security lens most likely. It was difficult to tell if the Reds and Blues who were not on screen were somehow either in the unrecorded range or had begun moving out of the office holding space between frames. 

The recordings from that point forward were stripped bear and it was difficult to see any change, even fast forwarded hours. Until Chorusian soldiers marched in, former Freelancer Agents Carolina and Washington at the head. 

With full armors on, it was difficult to read their reactions to the gruesome scene. Without sound it was even harder to tell if they were seeing any of the Reds or Blues in the part of the camera range that was no longer being recorded. 

By the time the recording ended, she had less answers than she had started with. 

“Damn,” she muttered, reaching for her coffee again only to find the mug empty. Dylan Andrews leaned back in her office chair and looked around the darkened office space, annoyance ticking up. “Are there any interns in here? I need coffee and...”

Her voice carried quite a bit -- a bit of a curse if one were to ask those closest to her -- but it apparently reached no one’s ears. 

She was alone in the office at two in the morning. Again. 

With a long sigh, she got to her feet and removed the drive from her personal computer, closing everything out. She turned and walked toward the door to head to the closet she called an apartment. 

Andrews was an award winning journalist, and she could almost taste when she was on the trail of something real. And that was why she had followed the ever evolving story behind the ominous Project Freelancer and its titular war heroes, the Reds and the Blues of Blood Gulch Canyon Outposts Alpha and Outpost One. 

She was on a trail, but there was no denying that Dylan didn’t have any idea where it’d take her. 

Or, perhaps more importantly, who it would end up pissing off. 

By the time she finished taking the monorail to her side of town and began fishing for the keys to her apartment, she was already thinking of who of her contacts would give her the most likely in for an interview with the UNSC Chairman himself.

After all, since the embarrassment he had suffered across the cosmos thanks to the Reds and Blues’ delivered message, he had been nigh impossible to contact. And the UNSC was notorious for not taking reporters’ questions. 

Such things had not stopped her before. And Dylan was certain that she would find a way in when she put her key in the lock of her door and found that it lacked that satisfying click she was so used to by that point. 

“The hell?” she muttered to herself, going back through her day and wondering if it was possible that, for the first time since college, she actually forgot to lock her own door. But as she double guessed herself, swinging her door open to a disheveled apartment answered that question for her. 

“Who the fuck would break into my apartment?” she asked out loud, cautiously entering and turning the light on. 

Her gaze immediately shifted toward her kitchenette since the only plausible explanation she could think of was that some sap came to take what ramen was left in the package. But her food was not touched. 

Just everything else. 

When she walked in a little further, hand going to her pocket to pick up her phone, her heart all but leaped into her throat as something cold pressed against the back of her neck and gave a notable click.

“Please put down your phone, Miss Andrews. On the ground,” a commanding voice said lowly. 

Dylan could hear the door close behind them. She slowly complied, picking her phone out of her pocket and letting it drop to the ground. 

“You know my name, so I’m going to suppose that I’ve written about you,” she said with more confidence than she probably had to spare. 

“Quite a few articles, actually,” a second voice chimed in. “And we believe you’re working on another one right now from the sounds of it.”

Suddenly, together, the two voices clicked. Suddenly it all made perfect sense. 

Almost.

"Your Agent Washington and Agent Carolina,” Dylan announced her epiphany. 

“I prefer when people say that in alphabetical order,” Carolina sighed, though she did not let up on how hard she was pressing the gun to Dylan’s neck. “Wash, check to see if it’s on her.”

“Got it,” Washington responded before walking around to Dylan’s front, letting her see him for the first time. He was in full armor, which surely meant they both were. Which was far from inconspicuous and made Dylan wonder how they were getting around the city so easily without being spotted. 

“If you told me what you’re looking for, I could help you,” she attempted to make peace only to have Washington’s pat down stop at her pants pockets where he stopped and pulled out the drive. “Hey--”

“Is this the unedited footage?” Washington demanded, holding it in Andrews’ face for emphasis. 

“That is my personal property--” Dylan attempted to argue. 

“Miss Andrews, you are not in a position to risk not answering our questions,” Carolina said harshly. “Have you or anyone else edited the footage on that drive?”

“No,” she finally answered. “I just finished watching it myself. It’s damaged from the point that the ship wrecked forward but it’s unedited.”

“Damaged?” Washington asked, hand lowering. “How damaged? Can you see how they left the ship?”

“How who left the ship?” Dylan asked. “The Reds and Blues? No. You can’t see how--”

Carolina’s gun left Dylan’s skin and there was a fierce growl before she kicked over the only chair in the apartment. Dylan blinked slowly as her one comfortable piece of furniture was wrecked. “Goddammit!” the Freelancer screamed.

Washington was watching Carolina before he brought his gaze back toward Dylan and, apologetically, shrugged toward her. “Sorry about the chair... and the house...”

“So it’s true,” Dylan said, ignoring her personal property damage. “The two of you are searching for the Reds and Blues... Chorus isn’t hiding them from the UNSC. They’ve disappeared.”

“That’s none of your business,” Washington assured her. 

“You must be joking,” Dylan laughed, getting even the angered Carolina’s attention. “I’m a reporter. Everything is my business. And if Chorus is being unfairly portrayed by the media on my watch, I need to correct it.”

Washington tilted his head. “Is that supposed to endear you to us, Ma’am?”

“We’re not exactly the most trusting people, and reporters don’t exactly earn a reputation of being trustworthy in our situation,” Carolina added, nearing Dylan with an intimidating square to her shoulders. 

“It’s supposed to open an opportunity for you,” Dylan proposed. “The fact is, you might be soldiers, but you’re not storytellers. And you’re going to need someone to tell this story loud and clear and with a reputation that the public can depend on to deliver it to them. The political climate since you ousted Hargrove has been... hostile and toxic. And the public’s curiosity about the Reds and Blues are at an all time high as we near the anniversary of their disappearance.” She looked between the two of them. “Besides, you can’t possibly think you can search the entire galaxy with just the two of you.”

The two Freelancers looked at each other and then back to Dylan.

“Who said it was just the two of us?” Carolina asked cockily.