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[ wash had gotten the sense that she was favoring one leg more than the other. he wasn't sure why, an injury at some point, maybe, but he doesn't hesitate to use any opening he can get. she buckles from it, and it's even more effective than he thought it'd be. something to ask about later, but right now in the moment, its just a weakness to be exploited.

she recovers smoothly, starting to push herself upright, but wash is already there. her momentum has been disrupted, and he intends to prevent her from getting it back -- that is how she would win, here, getting back into rhythm, forcing him to meet her where she can simply overpower him. he doesn't hesitate to go for her leg again, to try and sweep it out from under her. this is a spar between equals, and he's not about to go easy on her. if she's injured, then it's something she should be accounting for. all's fair.

he's going to try and keep her down, disrupting any attempt at recovery, and if he sees an opportunity for it he'll grapple her down in an attempt to pin her. there's a good chance she could overpower him if she manages to regain enough ground, but he's gotten so much better at reading how she moves in a short amount of time. ]

[ She should've put more time into figuring out how to compensate for that damn knee injury after Trilla got her on the ground with it without even aiming for a weakness—she should've, but she didn't. Maybe because everything with North had been so messy at the time and then he was gone, and focusing on the knee would've made her think about things she didn't want to think about or— something. That's her excuse.

But excuses don't matter in the middle of a fight, and Wash is back on her before she can even really finish the thought, or react. She knows, now, to compensate for the leg, to try and stop him getting at it, and it works at first. She doesn't get her momentum back but she blocks and dodges and tries to get past his defences to land a blow, disrupt his own kind of momentum so she can get her rhythm back, but fuck if he isn't reading her like a book.

It's inevitable that the leg gives out again. It was already throbbing from the first strike, twisted or jarred or whatever the impact did, and the next time he goes for it he bowls her legs out from under her. She could recover, even gets her good leg half back under her, but if he goes for the grapple—

Well, she'll decide that she's at least taking him down with her, not letting him merely follow her down and follow through. She'll grab at his shirt to try and drag him down in a much less controlled way, or at the very least give her purchase to try and throw him off once her back hits the floor. ]

[ wash knows he can't beat her if he lets her pull him into a full grapple, not if he lets it last too long, not if he doesn't immediately pin her within the first moments. if they'd gone into this armed, wash would've more definitively tried to end it by now, a knife to her throat or otherwise -- but like this. inevitably he's going to have go in for a grapple, and it's either he manages to end that cleanly or she's likely going to end up throwing him off completely.

he goes for it. the next time he manages to get at that leg, he follows her down. the aim is to try and get her on her front, pin her down, grab an arm or something and just get to the point where he can use as much of his own weight and as much as he can to keep her in place. but of course she doesn't make it easy, and he's dragged down -- there's not enough room for him to maneuver out of the way no matter how well he reads it.

wash does his best to keep control the whole time. south is stronger, could absolutely overpower him, but he's holding his own as much as he can as he does his best to pin her fully -- but if south is able to hold him off for long enough, she'll probably start getting the upper hand, instead. ]

[ It’s not exactly as quick and direct as she prefers to be, but if nothing else grappling like this lets her use her full strength to her advantage—if she can keep him from getting any limbs immobilised or getting her onto her front for long enough, then maybe she can turn this around.

There’s certainly no grace to it, but grace has never been South’s thing anyway. Some moves she’d try in a real fight, a fight where the limits on playing dirty are higher, she’d probably headbutt him—break his nose or something, that’s usually pretty damn distracting. But that’s too much damage for a spar like this and so instead she just has to try and use all her weight, all her strength, to get him on his back.

And she has to time it right. Push when his weight is the most unevenly distributed and— there, she picks a moment and shoves, throws her weight into rolling them over. The risk is almost overdoing it, putting enough momentum into it that he could flip them right back by keeping it going, and then she’s close to fucked.

She’s not sure she could jump to her feet fast enough even given an opening, now; not from her back, she’d have to roll, push herself up from her front, and that’d be a hell of an opening for Wash, instead. ]

[ it's an opening, and wash will take it. learning to survive around people who are much, much stronger than him 101: using their sheer momentum against them. it's still difficult, her weight and her strength just bowling him over, it's enough to wind him slightly when he's rolled over. but he doesn't let her stop that roll with him on his back. it keeps going, rolling them over yet again.

this time when south starts to land on the ground, he again tries to pin her. he's trying to force her down on her front, attempting to lock down at least one of her arms, he drives his knee against her injured leg just for the advantage he knows that will give him. not the most honorable, but a vulnerability is a vulnerability. if this were a real fight he'd be doing quite a lot worse, but now the aim of the game is just to try and immobilize her enough that she's forced to yield and tap out.

if he can manage it. he's putting all of his strength and focus into this, entirely aware that if south manages to get him off again, everything will swing right back in her favor. ]

[ He gets his knee against her leg and she hisses—it doesn't hurt that bad but it does hurt, and the thing is South would do exactly the same if the circumstances were flipped, so there's nothing to hold against him. He gets his knee against hers and her arm twisted up against her back and her own size works against her, this time, because her own weight is hard to push out from under his. Ah, goddammit.

Oh, she certainly tries, because South doesn't give up easy— but nope, not happening, he's got her. Close fucking thing, in the end, but he's got her. ]

Ugh— alright, alright, you win.

[ It's not real annoyance, just— South being South, and she taps out with her other hand. ]

Told you you could kick my ass.

[ once south actually taps out, he relaxes -- and there's a distinct change, that focus in his expression giving away to more visible fatigue. he closes his eyes briefly on an exhale, tension ebbing out of his muscles, and he moves back, shifting his weight back onto his shins. ]

It wasn't exactly as one-sided as ass-kicking would imply. [ close fought, hard won. a few more slips and south could've easily had it, and decisively, too. instead of pushing himself up to his feet, he opts to move next to her instead, offering an arm to pull her upright, there's a bit of a grin drawn across his lips -- satisfaction from a solid fight. ] You nearly had me, a couple times.

[ he has gotten a lot better over the years, though with her experience with his alternate self on the rig, south no doubt had a sense of that already. south's improved since what he last remembers, too. it wasn't that often he got to see her fight alone, but that was always a weak point for her. not quite the case anymore. ]

[ She rolls over and takes the arm to get upright, rolling her eyes at the look on his face but honestly no less close to grinning herself. That was a damn good fight, it’s always nice when you don’t have to hold back too much. The rush of adrenaline always helps to make her feel a little more alive. ]

Nearly. You still got my ass on the floor, twice; that’s close enough to an ass-kicking.

[ She stretches out that dodgy leg and rubs at the joint with one hand. It’ll be fine, she knows what stretches and so on helps with it when it’s stiff, but it’s definitely still throbbing right now. ]

[ he won't deny that he's pleased with himself. south could've kicked his ass several times over back in the day, any of them could. he knows he's gotten better, but carolina still beat his ass regularly. unreachable as always. it's nice to have a different measure of how far he's come.

he pushes himself up, just enough to grab that bottle of alcohol he brought with him. not that he would encourage drinking after a spar, hydration and all that, but there's a lot of exceptions here, and he settles in next to her again, watching as she kneads at that leg. ]

You could still get the better of me. [ he gestures with a nod toward her leg. ] Bad leg, huh?

[ She snorts and gives him a lighthearted ‘no shit’ look. ]

Like you didn’t notice. Yeah, uh— knee’s all kinds of fucked. I mean, it’s not like it’s fuckin’ unusable, y’know, most of the time I hardly think about it, but…

[ She trails off, gazing off away from Wash with her expression going a little distant as she thinks about if she wants to explain where the injury comes from. As she thinks back to the day it happened. It was a shitty fucking day for everyone, the break-out, break-in, whatever you wanna call it. The day Tex, York and North acted on what CT started.

It’s been years, now, even for her; a couple on the run, another since she got yanked from their home universe. It should feel more distant than it does, but sometimes that day still feels like a fresh barb in her mind, despite everything that’s changed, despite the things she knows now, despite the fact she did much worse than North did before she finally got better. She sighs, and rolls up the leg of her sweats to show the gnarly scarring around the joint. ]

North shot me, the day everything went to hell. Right through the fuckin’ knee. Didn’t shatter my damn kneecap, luckily, but…

[ he noticed, but he doesn't know what its from, okay. he does want to know.

wash starts to say something to that effect, but -- south's gaze trails off, and a certain quiet comes into her eyes, and he knows not to. he just watches her, ready to offer that she doesn't need to talk about it if she doesn't want to, but then she's showing him the scar, and ah. he doesn't wince at the sign of it, but a grimness settles on his expression, and he looks back up at her when she starts talking again.

ah. north. and -- that day. the break-in. everything wash knows about the break in is in second-hand stories, flashes and impressions that are vividly remembered but just flashes, in the end. the alarms blaring, the sounds of distant gunfire, yelling, people rushing up and down the halls. he wanted to do something, wanted to at least get up and see, but. he had other things to worry about, at the time, his vision swimming in front of him, realities bleeding into each other before his very eyes. ]

Still. That's a pretty bad shot. Would've fucked you up for a while.

[ and it was from north. he can put together some of what happened there, though the gap between then and finding north dead so long after is a little stranger. he doesn't want to ask about it, though south can talk more if she wants, or just change tracks if she wants. ]

Sure did. [ she rolls the material back down, brings her other knee up to prop her chin on ] We were on the run, y’know, so it’s not like we could go to a fuckin’— med centre or something. Did it allll ourselves.

[ Even though he was the one that shot her, he fussed over her like he always did; his overprotectiveness was always annoying, but she’d never seen so clear a demonstration of the hypocrisy in it as she did then. The way he took care of her. The way he helped her do their shitty, makeshift attempt at physio to get her back to as close to full strength as possible. (“Fuck, North, that fucking hurts—” “I know, I know. But we have to do this or you’ll never get full a full range of motion back in this leg.” Yeah, and whose fucking fault was that?)

It helped, she supposes. She’d be worse off without that help. But she wouldn’t have needed that help at all if he hadn’t shot her, but is she even allowed to feel angry about that when later on she basically killed him? North deflected her anger with exactly that reasoning, not long before he vanished. ]

He always said he thought it was his only option. To get me to go with him. Might be right. I was trying to blow Texas up with a missile pod, but he didn’t— he didn’t even try to explain. Just put up his shield and— I dunno.

[ Uggggh. Talking is weird. And yet it all spills out anyway. ]

[ wash is a good listener, to his credit. he just watches her, attentive, quiet, lets her say as much as she wants. he doesn't know what exactly went down, but he can make some educated guesses around what he's hearing, based on what he saw. south going after tex, and her brother stepping in. no talking, just gunfire. maybe he did see it as the best way -- if he's honest, south never struck wash as someone who might want to listen to reason when she's angry, when she's driven -- but still. that'll have some effects that aren't physical.

though maybe he shouldn't be thinking that much about north shooting his own sister, given that wash himself kind of did a lot worse than "intentionally injure for the sake of incapacitating". ]

Missile pod probably wasn't enough, was it? [ wryly, quietly. ] None of us were ever that great at communicating, I guess.

[ some better than others, but that doesn't say that much. he was never that close to north or south in freelancer, not enough to ever see any cracks in their relationship, save what he might have heard from connie or the others. but he was a lot more naive back then, in general. ]

I just got bits and pieces what went down, all through various filters. I figured -- hoped, maybe -- that you two had made it out together somewhere.

She dodged every goddamn missile. [ a shake of her head and a quiet snort ] How the fuck any of us didn’t realise what was really going on with her sooner…

[ Hell, she didn’t know what Texas was until the rig. North never told her the whole story whilst they were on the run. ]

And, well, you weren’t wrong, s’just that he had to carry me out and didn’t exactly ask if I wanted to go with him.

…probably would’ve gone with him anyway, that’s what fuckin’ gets me. The whole time we were on the run, I kept telling myself I could leave. Fuck off into the night whilst he was asleep. Get away, away from the Project, away from him.

[ She sighs. Her voice gets quieter. ]

But I could never do it.

[ Ducky called the twins codependent. York on the rig pointed out how they’d spent the whole lives together and didn’t know how to be without the other. Neither were wrong. Her whole life was shaped by being a twin, being one of a set. It was always Andrew and Anja, then North and South. She could never leave him behind, not until... ]

S’all pretty fuckin’ cheap to say, I know. Considering— y’know.

[ how didn't they realize, indeed. a secret buried deep and yet present in everything the moment you know what to look for, winding throughout every thing about the project and everything that they were put through. thank god for connie. the information would've come out eventually in other ways ( like wash himself, given how much of it was involuntarily shoved into his mind and memory ), but. it does occur to him that south might not know as much about the nature of what went down as he does, depending on what she's learned over the years, but -- they can talk about that later, maybe. right now , this is more pressing.

her voice kind of trails off, and wash just offers a quiet nod. considering, yeah. the way he found them. south alive and maybe not-quite-well but north definitively not, and -- everything that happened after. he closes his eyes for a moment. ]

How much did you want to get away from him?

[ gentle, prompting. he isn't talking about his death at all, just about what she'd referred to earlier -- wanting to get away, telling herself she would, but. ]

…more than anything.

[ She loves her brother, and losing him again hurts like nothing else will ever truly hurt. She’d do anything, now, to have him back, but back then… it was more complicated. ]

I— [ she groans, rubs her face ] I wanted to be free of him for years. It was always the twins, I was always just his sister. I hated that. I never hated him, but I hated— how people saw us.

[ She’d never have been able to articulate this a few months ago. The time on the rig let her figure all this out, conversations with North, York, Brand. Experiences, like the sitcom land making her ‘character’ an only child and how wrong that felt. ]

But I could never… I could never do it. He never let me, at first; he followed me into the damn military, he followed me into the helljumpers, and I was— used to it. Used to having him there, cleaning up my messes, being someone I could always fuckin’ rely on even though he was a pain in the ass.

Project just… made it all worse. On purpose. [ she sneers, sounding truly disgusted ] Stupid experiment. Stupid AI bullshit.

[ always the twins. wash himself was hardly an exception to that, after all. even after asking, and even given everything else they've already said, it's still a surprise to him to hear all of this come tumbling out -- stranger still to remember that he's asking because he wants to hear it, to help however he can, even if the only way is just to listen. they've made pretty good progress, apparently. carolina would be proud, if she was still around. maybe.

north was always -- caring. protective. that was the thing everyone knew about him, that was the reason why he was assigned his ai. he could see that, south enlisting to get away from him only for him to inevitably follow her even into the ODSTs.

he shifts slightly where he's sat next to her. ]

Fuck the project.

[ that sure is something they can all agree on no matter what. even saying it so casually, there's a certain level of vitriol and venom in his tone just under the surface that's unmistakable. and it ebbs from him just as quickly, nudging her lightly with his elbow. ]

Could never do what, though? [ he shifts again, scooting back a little bit so he can lean his back against the nearby concrete wall, tipping his head back against it. ] Could never make yourself leave, or -- could never find independence outside of him?

'Cause I'd say you're doing alright for yourself, in the latter.

Yeah. Fuck the Project.

[ The little nudge seems to both surprise her and not, a flash of tensing muscles before she just relaxes. She’s always been the kind to nudge, kick, punch, sling arms around friends, or she used to be. It takes longer, these days. ]

Both, I guess. I dunno. I— fuck, I don’t feel like I’m doing alright. Barely feel like a fucking— [ she sighs, rests her head on her knee with her gaze off to the side ] Barely feel like a person sometimes.

[ She feels like a shadow that somehow got left behind when the person casting it left. She feels like a hollow shell, empty because she built who she is around not being like her brother and doesn’t know how to define herself independent of that. Three decades where who you were was dependent on being who people didn’t want her to be.

God, she never even told North this. She told the York on the rig about how she didn’t know who she was on her own, but never her brother himself. This feels— weird, though it’s not entirely a bad weird. ]

[ wash notes that tension -- he won't take it personally. honestly, he'd probably react the same way if south had nudged him a little without him being prepared for it first. he just -- isn't sure what to do here, in multiple ways. over the years he's learned, by necessity, to be kind of a care taker, to be good at helping people through stuff and talking things out, but this is south, and that makes it stranger for many, many reasons.

he knows how important it is to listen, at least. especially with that sigh, the tone of her voice, and those specific words: barely feeling like a person. that's not something said lightly, and just from everything about her body language and her voice, he knows how much of a weight that has to be. he's quiet, for a few moments. ]

I remember how you used to fight. They always drilled you together, too, but whenever I saw you on your own -- I know that was always a thing for you. Got used to relying on always having someone there. [ a slight shrug. ] I didn't get any of that, from our spar just now.

[ it feels a little strange trying to give her assurances when he feels like he still doesn't know her all that well at all. it'd be easy to give empty platitudes, but wash doesn't want to do that, and that's one concrete observation he can give. another silence, this one a little longer, he stays leaned back against the wall, watching her. ]

I know it's really not the same, but. I think I can relate.

[ it's an offer, gentle, subtle. she's sharing a lot and talking about herself and how she feels and he can tell it's -- more than she would normally say. if she wants to go on talking, he'll keep listening and hearing her out, but if she wants to take that offer, wash can just talk about himself for a bit, instead. ]

…thanks. Worked on that with Brand—that friend I mentioned. Pushed me until I started adjusting. Guess that’s something.

[ Not a lot, but she appreciates what he’s trying to do. It did take a long time, a lot of sparring sessions, but that was how she and Brand spent most of their time together. Sparring. He understood what it was like to have someone that you spent your whole life with, how messy emotions around that could be. He had a lot less conflicting feelings about it, he had no urge to run, but it still let him understand.

She feels heavy, and when she lifts her head again she looks at him sidelong. ]

…‘cause of the whole— [ she nods vaguely at his head, she’s not sure if that’s more or less tactful than saying Epsilon outright ] —thing? Or—?

[ She’ll take the breather. This is all so— tricky, really. ]

[ he appreciates the attempt. it's not like saying the name sets him off or anything, but its clearly something he avoids talking about for the most part, and -- his turn to feel a little strange, now. he only ever really talked about this to carolina in small pieces, and -- no one else. york would've tried, and wash would've always dodged around it. north actually tried, and wash still refused to talk about it even with north having seen quite a bit with his own eyes thanks to walking right into a dream.

maybe the difference is that this isn't about someone who wants to talk about it to help him, or anything. this is more about helping south, and even then -- that's not completely right. it's trying to make a connection, he guesses. either way its not people trying to help him, and that seems to matter a lot. go figure.

he nods. ] -- Epsilon. Yeah.

[ there is a distinct shift in his tone, subtle as it might be, a little more empty, a little more detached. for as practiced as he is, he still finds it safer to just try and keep more distance if he ever has to talk about it directly. ]

World of difference between an unstable AI fragment being shoved into your brain and having a brother, I know, but. [ a half-shrug. ] I spent a lot of time -- figuring out which things weren't me. Trying to find myself again, in all the mess.

[ he tips his head back against the wall again, lifting his gaze up towards the sky. it's darker out, now. ]

I don't know if I ever found it, honestly.

[ it took -- emptying himself out. hollowing himself completely. trying to build himself up from nothing again, trying to make sure it was the right things he was sliding into place and not something bleeding through . . . it was hard. still is. and while it's very, very different from anything south's been through, he still does kind of know what it's like to define himself wholly around what he isn't, and to struggle with feeling like himself at all. ]

[ It’s one of the things she never really got near, with the Wash on the rig. When he talked about things that had fucked him up, it was usually about the ways she’d fucked him up—not exactly surprising, that was rather more the point at the time. Drilling it into her head how fucked up everything she did was. Making her face it. ]

…fuck, they tore us all to fucking pieces.

[ The Project and their damn experiments. Psychological, AI based, they all fucked bits of them up. Broke them. Were any of them still who they were when they signed up, by the end? No. Probably not. But some of them sure got hit more literally than others, more violently. What happened to Wash was certainly on that end of the damn scale. ]

World of fuckin’ difference, yeah. Far fuckin’ worse, for one, but—

[ Another sigh. She shuffles so she can sit against the wall too, lets her raised leg fall to lay flat. ]

Yeah. Yeah it—

…I don’t think I know who I am, anymore. Don’t know if I ever fuckin’ will. [ she snorts, with empty amusement ] What a pair of fuckin’ wrecks.

[ this wash, at least, has had no real reason or need to confront this south with the worst parts of herself. if things somehow did go that way again, he would, but for now he's more than content just leaving that in the past. what she did was fucking awful, but it's not like wash hasn't done awful things either, not all of which south knows about. none of them were great people, to have ended up where they did.

he makes an amused sound, at her answer. just as hollow, but there is a genuine wry humor there. he hasn't gotten this far without learning to see some of the dark humor in the tragedy of everything that happened to him, to all of them. ]

I think in order to get this far, I kind of had to accept that being a wreck is just -- part of it. Always gonna be.

[ he isn't ever going to not be a fuckup, not be a mess, not be irreversibly damaged by everything he's been through. that's just the way it is. he can't really get past it. it's just kind of part of who he is, now. and any sense of who he is, even something like that, is worth holding onto. ]

It's just being a fucked up mess isn't the only thing. [ a pause. ] That's the idea, anyway. Can't say I'm good at it.

[ wash is still, fundamentally, mostly a fucked up washed up space marine. but he's learned he can also be other things. a mentor, a teacher. a very put-upon babysitter. he never stops being a damaged mess, never stops being a risk to the people around him because of it, but. there's other things. ]

Not sure I’m there yet. The— not the only thing… thing.

[ The bad things she’s done often feel like all she really is, anymore. It should get easier, with less people around who know, but somehow it gets harder. She’ll never know if her brother would have one day forgiven her and— she feels like if she doesn’t hold onto those things, then it’s the same as ignoring them outright, pretending they didn’t happen, acting like she did nothing wrong. But she did everything wrong, and she knows that, and so she makes herself hold onto it.

That it might just be killing her a little more every day— well, doesn’t she deserve that? Ugggh. Emotions are stupid. ]

I can pretend, y’know. I can act— normal. Better. But I still don’t…

[ She gestures vaguely. There’s one or two people here who maybe genuinely care about her, and she can’t comprehend why. ]

[ he watches her for a moment, quiet, considering. it's a strange thing -- he's trying to be conscious of the fact that, for all the familiarity between them, he doesn't really know her. not like her brother did, not like her friends on the rig. she's changed a lot in the time she's been there. she doesn't know him either, really. he's basically a different person from who she remembers back in the project. he doesn't want to be too presumptuous, to pretend he knows her better than he does. he doesn't want to tell her anything like yes, you are there, because how could he really know?

but there is a familiarity, a connection, they aren't complete strangers. and there is enough there that talking like this feels -- different, but not terrible. he's not forcing himself through it. ]

Takes time. [ is all he offers, still staring up at the darkening sky overhead. ] And you know what?

[ a pause. and he turns just enough to look at her. ]

I don't know if I'm there, either. Sometimes just feels like all I did was get -- better and better at playing pretend. You know?

[ he is a stunningly good liar and actor, whether or not south has had the pleasure of seeing it. it turns out that when he had that much truth shoved into his mind but had to act completely ignorant of it, those skills come about by necessity. sometimes he thinks he's lying to himself, too. another beat, and he looks back at the sky. ]

But wherever I am now, it's -- different. It's better.

[ and that has to be enough. ]

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