[ 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. ]
[ 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.
[ 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.
Better. Yeah. [ she scrubs a hand over her face, breathes ] S'all about being better.
[ That was always what everyone on the rig, that Wash included, pushed her towards. Just doing better. That Wash once called her on refusing to even try to change because— "You think you're going to fuck up if you try to be something else, so you don't even try at all."
He wasn't wrong. It still took her another month and finding out about the experiment the Project did on her and North to start beginning to try. To hear all this from Wash is about the least surprising part of this interaction because she knows a little of how hard he had to push to get to where he is, because really the fact that Wash got as far as he has eventually became proof that she wouldn't be wasting her time trying. Even for all that they're different.
He wasn't the reason she finally tried to change, but he was certainly one of the catalysts in getting her there. So as strange as it is to be here, having this conversation, she's glad they can be. He's not that Wash, but there's still that common ground. ]
...started trying to be better for North, y'know. He was the first one I promised I'd try to do better with.
But this North— last time we talked, really talked, he said he barely fuckin' recognised me and he sounded— like he didn't like it? Or couldn't... believe it, maybe. 'cause it wasn't him that got through to me, 'cause he wasn't there.
Can't even blame him, considering how fuckin' long I spent lying to him about the Recovery thing. But that stung.
[ Dramatic sigh, a vague grabby hand. ]
Ugh, where's that alcohol you had? Swear I won't get ugly drunk.
[ wash has to reach a little for it, but not that far. he plops back down against the wall, giving her a bit of a look as he hands the bottle over. ]
Please don't.
[ he means it nicely, though. enough of a playful lilt to his voice, even through the drawl. after she takes it from him he leans back, lifting a hand to knead at his temples, just thinking through what she's saying. wanting to be better for north, talking about this one, and. he gets what she's talking about, but it's still a bit to wrap his head around, since he hasn't experienced anything like that. someday he'll ask her more about these other versions of him, but he really prefers not to think about it too much, right now. ]
He's only human, I guess. [ finally, after a long pause. ] Probably would've been nice if he found it in him to be happier for you.
[ he leans forward, propping his elbows up on his knees as he turns to look at her again. ]
You said you started trying to be better for him, though. How about now?
[ She flashes him a crooked grin, if only for a second; she was absolutely never a scout. She opens the bottle and takes a swig, wipes her mouth after she lowers it again.
It sure would've been nice, and maybe he'd have gotten there but she'll never know, now, she supposes. She's not sure if it'd be kinder to herself to tell herself they'd have figured it out, or to tell herself that it'd have all gone the way it did on the rig. Ended in them not even talking at all, in North unable to even look at her if he couldn't find it in him to forgive her. Which he never would, she was sure. ]
Now... guess it's for other you poor assholes who gotta put up with me. [ there's a wry little note to it ] And— y'know, for myself, I guess. I don't... I don't want to fuck my whole entire fuckin' life up over and over, y'know? Getting too old for that shit. Me in my twenties had far too much fuckin' energy doing that shit over and over.
[ She says that like it's a joke and it kind of is—it's not like she actually stopped once she turned thirty, all her worst actions came after—but she has had a bad habit of burning everything to the ground around her for one reason or another. Because she thought it was coming anyway, because something got too serious and she got scared, so on and so on.
Now she's thirty-three, older than her brother will ever be thanks to her own actions, both older and younger than she should be because of her own actions, and... she's tired. She's tired of everything going to hell. She can't control the world around her, but she can control herself. Mostly. ]
Just -- maybe try to make that second part the first thing. [ a sigh, rubbing a hand through his hair as he leans back against the wall again. ] Sometimes you do the right thing, or -- some right things, anyway. For the wrong reasons.
[ though to be fair to wash, those wrong reasons were the main thing that kept him going for a long time. bone-deep anger, a bitterness in him that would never die out, spiteful and hateful and boiling into nothing less than the unfettered pursuit of any kind of vengeance, any kind of justice. he did it for vengeance, for his friends -- not often for himself. and even if he's reached a better place, now, after all these years, it's still something he struggles with. ]
Not that wanting to spare your friends the trouble is a bad reason, exactly. But other people -- can change. Can let you down. Won't always be what you need them to be. Or maybe they'll won't be there, anymore, through no fault of their own.
[ north. carolina. anyone else. ]
Changing for your own sake has got to be a good enough reason, in itself.
[ he blames himself for so much he knows isn't really his fault. finds it difficult to motivate himself for his own sake, finds it dedicate himself to others, instead. but he knows its not -- the best way to handle it. not really. ]
Yeah. Yeah, you're not wrong. But fuck it's hard. Easier to like— tell myself other people deserve better from me than I deserve better from me? Y'know?
[ She gets the sense he might sort of get that, or something similar. She's not at a place where she can admit that maybe she kind of hates herself, where she can uncover that deep pool of self-loathing that's been filling itself up ever since the day she let North die and shot Wash in the back but has only gotten deeper since she stopped putting up a mask of not caring about what she did wrong.
She can't hate herself, she's gotten through life by aggressively putting herself first, with self-confidence and a 'fuck you, I don't care what you think' attitude—how can both those things exist in one person? Can they? Do they? ]
But I do— I do want to. I don't want to be that person. Fuck, I don't want to be that bitch that you shot, even though I know she was me. I'm not her anymore, it's...
[ She makes a vague noise and takes another swig. ]
Fuckin' universe hopping bullshit, man. Talk about a mindfuck.
[ wash has reached a level of stability, but that doesn't really mean he's been cured of anything. just that he's found ways to manage, to more or less be okay with where he's at. he's not a great person. better, but not great. he's done things that are terrible and would probably still do more, in the right circumstances. he's still more than a little fucked up, or maybe extremely fucked up, in more ways than one, and he doesn't really have the most healthy ways of dealing with it. what he's learned, mostly, is self-awareness, understanding where his problems are and how he's dealing with them, whether it's good or not. and he is very aware that he very often utterly loathes himself.
he might be able to hear some of that in her. but it's not for him to prod at, not unless she decides to push at it herself. he watches as she takes another swig, quiet. ]
I've done some pretty fucked up shit, too, you know.
[ no idea if she'd have ever learned about any of that from his other self. ]
I don't know if I'm not that person anymore. It's a little hard to find closure over something if you did if you can't -- own it.
[ a half-shrug, leaning back. ]
That's just me, though. We actually are different people. Maybe I'd think differently if I did a bit more universe-hopping, like you did.
Yeah, I know. Not— y'know, details, outside of the whole shooting me in the face and blowing me up thing, but...
[ Bits and pieces. Things about how he was terrorising the simulation troopers before they apparently adopted him. It's not like she ever got the full story, but parts of it came up, especially as that Wash's head was still in that era of his life for a while for complicated reasons she still doesn't fully understand. ]
That's the thing, y'know. I did all that shit, I lived all that, I own that now. I was a fucking monster the way I acted, but— I got yanked before I died, y'know. I'm not the woman who took that bullet. The me that took that bullet would never have done half the things I've done since, y'know? She wouldn't have changed for fuckin' anyone.
[ Not that she had the chance, but she didn't have that chance precisely because she wouldn't have ever taken it. She just kept barrelling ahead until she made whatever dumb choice lead her to be in front of Wash that day. ]
Don't even know what to do with that, half the time. Not like I didn't deserve that bullet. Not like I don't, 'cause I still did that stuff, I still let my brother die and shot you in the back and all that other shit.
M'just... trying not to be someone who'd do it again. [ then firmer ] I'm not someone who'd do it again.
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[ 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. ]
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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?
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[ 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…
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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. ]
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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. ]
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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.
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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.
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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. ]
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…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.
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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.
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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. ]
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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. ]
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…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. ]
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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. ]
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[ 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.
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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. ]
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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. ]
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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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Better. Yeah. [ she scrubs a hand over her face, breathes ] S'all about being better.
[ That was always what everyone on the rig, that Wash included, pushed her towards. Just doing better. That Wash once called her on refusing to even try to change because— "You think you're going to fuck up if you try to be something else, so you don't even try at all."
He wasn't wrong. It still took her another month and finding out about the experiment the Project did on her and North to start beginning to try. To hear all this from Wash is about the least surprising part of this interaction because she knows a little of how hard he had to push to get to where he is, because really the fact that Wash got as far as he has eventually became proof that she wouldn't be wasting her time trying. Even for all that they're different.
He wasn't the reason she finally tried to change, but he was certainly one of the catalysts in getting her there. So as strange as it is to be here, having this conversation, she's glad they can be. He's not that Wash, but there's still that common ground. ]
...started trying to be better for North, y'know. He was the first one I promised I'd try to do better with.
But this North— last time we talked, really talked, he said he barely fuckin' recognised me and he sounded— like he didn't like it? Or couldn't... believe it, maybe. 'cause it wasn't him that got through to me, 'cause he wasn't there.
Can't even blame him, considering how fuckin' long I spent lying to him about the Recovery thing. But that stung.
[ Dramatic sigh, a vague grabby hand. ]
Ugh, where's that alcohol you had? Swear I won't get ugly drunk.
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Please don't.
[ he means it nicely, though. enough of a playful lilt to his voice, even through the drawl. after she takes it from him he leans back, lifting a hand to knead at his temples, just thinking through what she's saying. wanting to be better for north, talking about this one, and. he gets what she's talking about, but it's still a bit to wrap his head around, since he hasn't experienced anything like that. someday he'll ask her more about these other versions of him, but he really prefers not to think about it too much, right now. ]
He's only human, I guess. [ finally, after a long pause. ] Probably would've been nice if he found it in him to be happier for you.
[ he leans forward, propping his elbows up on his knees as he turns to look at her again. ]
You said you started trying to be better for him, though. How about now?
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Scout's honour.
[ She flashes him a crooked grin, if only for a second; she was absolutely never a scout. She opens the bottle and takes a swig, wipes her mouth after she lowers it again.
It sure would've been nice, and maybe he'd have gotten there but she'll never know, now, she supposes. She's not sure if it'd be kinder to herself to tell herself they'd have figured it out, or to tell herself that it'd have all gone the way it did on the rig. Ended in them not even talking at all, in North unable to even look at her if he couldn't find it in him to forgive her. Which he never would, she was sure. ]
Now... guess it's for other you poor assholes who gotta put up with me. [ there's a wry little note to it ] And— y'know, for myself, I guess. I don't... I don't want to fuck my whole entire fuckin' life up over and over, y'know? Getting too old for that shit. Me in my twenties had far too much fuckin' energy doing that shit over and over.
[ She says that like it's a joke and it kind of is—it's not like she actually stopped once she turned thirty, all her worst actions came after—but she has had a bad habit of burning everything to the ground around her for one reason or another. Because she thought it was coming anyway, because something got too serious and she got scared, so on and so on.
Now she's thirty-three, older than her brother will ever be thanks to her own actions, both older and younger than she should be because of her own actions, and... she's tired. She's tired of everything going to hell. She can't control the world around her, but she can control herself. Mostly. ]
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Just -- maybe try to make that second part the first thing. [ a sigh, rubbing a hand through his hair as he leans back against the wall again. ] Sometimes you do the right thing, or -- some right things, anyway. For the wrong reasons.
[ though to be fair to wash, those wrong reasons were the main thing that kept him going for a long time. bone-deep anger, a bitterness in him that would never die out, spiteful and hateful and boiling into nothing less than the unfettered pursuit of any kind of vengeance, any kind of justice. he did it for vengeance, for his friends -- not often for himself. and even if he's reached a better place, now, after all these years, it's still something he struggles with. ]
Not that wanting to spare your friends the trouble is a bad reason, exactly. But other people -- can change. Can let you down. Won't always be what you need them to be. Or maybe they'll won't be there, anymore, through no fault of their own.
[ north. carolina. anyone else. ]
Changing for your own sake has got to be a good enough reason, in itself.
[ he blames himself for so much he knows isn't really his fault. finds it difficult to motivate himself for his own sake, finds it dedicate himself to others, instead. but he knows its not -- the best way to handle it. not really. ]
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Yeah. Yeah, you're not wrong. But fuck it's hard. Easier to like— tell myself other people deserve better from me than I deserve better from me? Y'know?
[ She gets the sense he might sort of get that, or something similar. She's not at a place where she can admit that maybe she kind of hates herself, where she can uncover that deep pool of self-loathing that's been filling itself up ever since the day she let North die and shot Wash in the back but has only gotten deeper since she stopped putting up a mask of not caring about what she did wrong.
She can't hate herself, she's gotten through life by aggressively putting herself first, with self-confidence and a 'fuck you, I don't care what you think' attitude—how can both those things exist in one person? Can they? Do they? ]
But I do— I do want to. I don't want to be that person. Fuck, I don't want to be that bitch that you shot, even though I know she was me. I'm not her anymore, it's...
[ She makes a vague noise and takes another swig. ]
Fuckin' universe hopping bullshit, man. Talk about a mindfuck.
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he might be able to hear some of that in her. but it's not for him to prod at, not unless she decides to push at it herself. he watches as she takes another swig, quiet. ]
I've done some pretty fucked up shit, too, you know.
[ no idea if she'd have ever learned about any of that from his other self. ]
I don't know if I'm not that person anymore. It's a little hard to find closure over something if you did if you can't -- own it.
[ a half-shrug, leaning back. ]
That's just me, though. We actually are different people. Maybe I'd think differently if I did a bit more universe-hopping, like you did.
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Yeah, I know. Not— y'know, details, outside of the whole shooting me in the face and blowing me up thing, but...
[ Bits and pieces. Things about how he was terrorising the simulation troopers before they apparently adopted him. It's not like she ever got the full story, but parts of it came up, especially as that Wash's head was still in that era of his life for a while for complicated reasons she still doesn't fully understand. ]
That's the thing, y'know. I did all that shit, I lived all that, I own that now. I was a fucking monster the way I acted, but— I got yanked before I died, y'know. I'm not the woman who took that bullet. The me that took that bullet would never have done half the things I've done since, y'know? She wouldn't have changed for fuckin' anyone.
[ Not that she had the chance, but she didn't have that chance precisely because she wouldn't have ever taken it. She just kept barrelling ahead until she made whatever dumb choice lead her to be in front of Wash that day. ]
Don't even know what to do with that, half the time. Not like I didn't deserve that bullet. Not like I don't, 'cause I still did that stuff, I still let my brother die and shot you in the back and all that other shit.
M'just... trying not to be someone who'd do it again. [ then firmer ] I'm not someone who'd do it again.
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not me saying i wanted to finish this cleanly and then PROMPTLY FORGETTING
Relatable