#things gonna get mildly fukt

[raggedyhive]

Before

Now that the prequel is finished, I’m actually going to acknowledge its existence through Tumblr in a li’l masterpost. Chapter summaries here differ from the fic.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23759617/chapters/57067543

Chapter One: Grif - Thunder burned across him, arced up his body in a single, rapid movement.

For a second, everything felt like it was crushing him, the weight of gravity carrying against him in the voices of those around him, in his own voice yelling in his sister’s defense.

Chapter Two: Kai - On instinct, she threw out her arms, palms parallel to her body. Her neck drew back, hair flying behind her like a halo.

The milliseconds stretched.

She could feel every muscle working, feel her heart rest from one pump to the next.Flames burned within her. The ash from her lungs ignited. Electricity zapped across her veins, and she felt alive, and--

And the blasts exploded from her palms.All she saw was light -- a pure, radiant white engulfing the whole of her vision.

Then, she heard it. The tumultuous BOOM! deafened her, shattering everything around her. It was an atom bomb, an epicenter, everything so wrong and right in one moment.

Chapter Three: Bullshot - He needed to talk to someone, someone who didn't look at him and automatically saw a villain. Someone who could be stable when he wasn’t.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“The hell does--”

“Please,” he added.

His leg pulled out slightly. Bullshot suspected she’d planted her feet against the building. “Carolina.”

“Carolina. Let me go, or I’ll kill you just like I killed Mayer.”

Chapter Four: Sarge - This was going better than Sarge would’ve ever thought possible.

He couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You’ll be able to survive anything, woncha Lopez?”

Lopez idly drummed his fingers on his other arm. The motion was smooth, humanoid. “... Déjame adivinar: tienes TEPT y estás tratando de ignorar tu traumática historia de fondo al crearme, algo que no se puede matar, como si eso compensara toda la muerte que has visto en tu vida demasiado larga.” [Let me guess: you have PTSD and are trying to ignore your traumatic backstory by creating me, a thing that can't be killed, as though that would make up for all the death you've seen in your too-long life.]

That was quite a bit of content there! Poor thing must not have realized Sarge didn't understand him. Still, he may as well reward the effort. “Nicely put, Lopez!”

“¿Dónde está la autodestrucción?” [Where is self-destruct?]

Chapter Five: Richard - He locked Mike’s armor.

Then he pooled toward the mainframe, more careless than before.

He slipped into it entirely, grasped at everything, hurled it into himself. The data swam around him, too much too fast to make sense at the moment, but it was all coming for him.

He created a direct line to his father’s own system. Just in case.

This was ugly. It was messy.

Too much too fast. He was panicking. He wasn’t supposed to panic. This was easy for him why was he panicking what the hell was going on--

Names and faces ran past him. Mission reports, private documents, numbers and orders and lists and--

His body was struggling to keep up.

Richard tried to pull back, but the floodgates were open.

Chapter Six: Tucker - “Two percent.”

Pop!

He blinked. Huh. It went through. That was… really unexpected. But seeing as his odds were so low--

Pure energy thrummed through him in a beat, emerging around the entirety of his body as though it had been waiting. Tucker was buzzing, everything feeling like static and out of reach.

It occurred to him that he was probably in shock.

“What the fuck?” he said, but it came out twisted and warped, sounding more like the faint, high-pitched buzz that idled behind old televisions.

He looked at his hand.

It.

Was not.

A hand.

Chapter Seven: Alpha - He wasn’t annoyed at the interruption, exactly. Vaguely exasperated, perhaps; but he could understand on a technical level what was happening to Alpha. It made logical sense, such as logic as applied to emotion could make sense, which was a tenuous matter but nonetheless predictable. “You know this already, Alpha. You are the current host alter. An unusual manifestation for a host, but you will do quite fine, I am sure.” Best not to be specific with this alter. “Would you like to remember any events leading to now?”

Alpha was finally settling down in the recesses of their brain, now taken to prodding cautiously at Delta’s thoughts. He allowed this. Why do I have the feeling that has a price?

No longer yelling. That was an improvement. “It does. I can predict the consequences, but I don’t house our all of the memories either. I can share my findings, if you’d like.”

Findings from what? Your, like, ten seconds of existence?

Delta hummed. “It has been much longer than that.”

Chapter Eight: Michael - Marie’s seven-year-old frame was riding on Michael’s shoulders. She kept pulling his hair in the directions she wanted him to go. It was fun. She was laughing. He was laughing.

He always let his sisters win. Michael never captured the flag, but he did get captured a lot. This made his sisters happy, and they’d smile and giggle and crawl over him in triumph. This made him happy, too.

They stayed outdoors most of the time. Michael made sure of this. Going inside was dangerous, so when the respective flags were collected, he was the one to bring them in for a wash that wouldn’t quite rid the muddy stains.

Order of reading these chapters isn’t technically important, but I put them in the way I believe makes the most sense (though they’re largely independent from one another at this point). This fic does contain death and graphic depictions of violence. It is preceding a much, much larger fic that will eventually emphasize these details even further, so please be careful.