churbooseanon

The second of the giveaway fics. Let’s just say there was a LOT of travel time so I had a chance to write a lot more than I was intending too. neophytedoodlez asked me for South/CT, with CT finding South after South recovers Delta. This… is what that turned into.

Undertow

If South had learned anything in the last several years, it had to be that the idea of a ‘status quo’ was a faulty one. Hell, not over the last years. Over her life. From the word go the life she had shared with her twin had been chaotic. Always changing, always moving. With her and Nic dragged along like grains of sediment in a fast moving river. No, rapids water, not just a river. Complex currents, beautiful foam that underlined the force, and eddies that sometimes warned of powerful undertows waiting in your lungs. If you were lucky you made it through. Of course some lucky people were the ones who died quickly and didn’t have to worry about the slow panic of water.

She’s seen too many caught up in the water. Some, like, Connie according to records Theta had stolen had gone quick. Smashed and battered against rocks. There were little mercies like that. Others, like her twin, that wasn’t so easy, so quick. Not a massive struggle either. Wash had said that, she could see from the blood. Maine had torn him apart to get at Theta. Theta…

A slow drowning, Delta suggested in her head, and South sighed in response. Here, then, the worst truth. The limb fallen across the water, at just the right level to knock even an experienced rafter from their place. Dump them into the churning white mass of death below.

I heard that, Delta observed, his voice an annoyed buzz in the back of her head.

You were meant to, she shot back, just as annoyed at his voice.

Having an AI was not all PFL had built it up to be. Another being so intimately aware of all you were, all you had done, all you were capable of wasn’t a walk in the park. Especially when that voice, that being, that existence, that rode around in your head and used your mind for processing power seethed with hatred for you. No, that wasn’t the right word for it. Delta, South had come to realize, couldn’t seethe. Sure, he could do a lot he wasn’t supposed to be capable of. Delta could lie. Delta could love. Delta could hate.

He had lied for Wash, and South, and Command had known he could.

He had loved York with all his essence. Just as Delta knew all of South, she knew enough of his through the same integration that she knew what Tex had offered and Delta had decided. If dying to spare someone as much pain as possible wasn’t love, South didn’t know what was.

He hated her with a low, cold edge to it. No moment of her life passed since her sacrifice of Wash that she hadn’t felt it. Yes, she could also sense his understanding, his appreciation for survival. His fear and longing regarding the one who pursued them. But his hate for her was always there, a cold pit in her stomach. A new white, frothing warning sign of danger below the waves.

South knew about lying, lived it really. She understood how it helped you get by. She was quite familiar with love and lost, and part of her, the part that grieved for Connie and her brother, pitied him. And yes, she knew hate. Hates that burned. Hates that chilled. Hates to seethe and boil until they overflowed from her into violent rages she couldn’t justify.

More than anything South knew how frivolous such hate was. It kept you moving, yes, but it left you hollow inside. Left you close to death yourself.

But you can’t stop moving, Delta added, and if South bothered to care she would have nodded in agreement.

Of course not. She wasn’t willing to die. More than that, North would think she had an obligation to protect Delta as long as humanly possible. Of course he wouldn’t want her to die for it, which was another point of contention with Delta. He apparently liked to believe she would survive destroying his unit. He pointedly seemed to ignore the fact that she had seen what had been done to North for merely delaying the acquisition of Theta. She’d seen the wreck of his head, just like Wash. Destroying Delta would be her own undoing, of that she had no doubt.

It was like she could feel the pull of the water around her, dragging her down with the promise of final, sweet release. If only it could be that simple.

Connecticut would not desire that for you. Nor would North.

As always south bristled at Delta’s transparent attempt to manipulate her. Clumsy wasn’t strong enough to describe it. No, his intention was plain as the nose on her face.

“No,” she agreed out loud, savoring the bite in her own voice. “She wouldn’t. But she would have handed you over to some higher power in a heartbeat.”

If an AI could scoff, that would be what Delta was doing in her head. As it was he got a vague sense of disapproval before a small, green, armor-clad hologram manifested over her shoulder.

“Agent Connecticut was a traitor to the program, and to yourself. And from the data that Agent North Dakota learned from Theta’s probing, it seems she wouldn’t have cared to wait for you anyway.”

Once she might have found a strange how scathing such softly delivered words could be. Now she was long since used to how Delta could get. Did get. Was. Smith forgave him, though. As much as he pissed her off, she got it. She knew loss. They’d both lost everything, and found themselves left with only each other, hardly a good hand to be dealt.

“You know,” South couldn’t help but laugh, “it defeats your point to tell me she’ll want me to survive and then turn around and suggest she didn’t care for me.”

This left the AI silent for a while and inside South had to grin at the minor victory. And yes, minor it was. None of it helped the current situation. A situation that, frankly, could use Delta’s help.

She stood at the top of a cliff, looking down toward a city. While South wouldn’t say the place was directly below her, it was a near thing. Down there she could win some minor refuge for a time, or so Delta’s calculations suggested. So far as either of them could tell, the being chasing them, the meta, didn’t like cities. On the other hand, time in a city would make them more obvious to their PFL pursuers. There was no real win in this situation, just hope for a few more days. Delta had advised against the city, though, and had tried to route them around it. Like South would fall for that.

She wanted a shower, she wanted real food, and needed to refresh her supplies. More than either of those she wanted to sleep in a real bed and hear real people talking. So they’d agreed to settle. He would give her three days and monitor PFL channels. If the project got close, they ran. At the end of those days she left. But Delta had stipulated she get there herself, a demand that now made sense.

“Oh you fuckwit,” she growled, earning a trill of pleasure.

God she wanted to kill him.

* * * * * *

Truth be told, the woman looked more like and awed country girl on her first trip to the city than a former soldier who had once sought to bring down a corrupt secret military project using a little too much technological know-how and not enough research into the man she had intended to turn to. How, in the end, was she supposed to know that Malcolm Hargrove, the assistant Chairman of the Oversight Committee was also the true CEO of Charon Industries, one of the leading weapon manufacturers in the human systems?

There was something to be said about strange bedfellows. More to doing your fucking homework.

Rebecca 'Constance’ Ferrera knew a bit about both of those things. Too bad she hadn’t learned the lessons until it was too late. Until she was laying in an escape pod, bleeding from two hatchet wounds, being stripped of her PFL armor, down to her undergarments as even her undersuit was taken from her. When she thought too hard about it now she could still feel blood spilling warm from her body, her breath rasping, as he looked down on her in pity.

“Sorry, Connie. It’s just the way the game’s played,” Martin, the 'Leader’ of the 'Insurrectionist’ soldiers had told her as he cleaned and stowed the gear. Almost as an afterthought he had taken her datapad and tossed the pod’s medkit at her. “No hard feelings.”

When she looked back, she wondered at those words, those actions. Here she’d thought she’d been playing him with words of love and promises of lives together. Look where it had gotten her. A woman standing behind a cheap motel counter, wearing a pixie cut, a fake smile, and a name tag that read Jessica. The same face, worn in a new way, protecting her from the specters of her past.

It wasn’t like she could go back. She was a traitor in the eyes of some of the UNSC, dead in others, and a rather successful tool in still others. Not that she could be a good tool anymore. The shoulder had never healed well, and on cold or damp days it could get hard to lift her arm above her waist. So here she sat, living the name and life of an alias she could care less about. One she had never been meant to touch. Here she sat behind a counter and whiled away the days in hopes that no one would find her, wishing she’d tried to stop it from inside by going to Tex or Carolina or…

Maybe it was the name, half-formed in her mind that conjured the being. A being that should be dead, or a part of their continuing lies. Of course she’d never cared about the things the project had told her, right? Except Connie knew she was deluding herself. South had cared more than almost anyone about the leader board, about the AIs, about proving herself. She would be seen as a traitor forever. Longer even. And almost especially by the woman before her. So Connie lowered her head, pitched her voice toward high and cheerful, and greeted the woman before her in fatigues.

God South’s muscles actually bulged with strain from presumably carrying her armor in that huge sack over her shoulder. Presumed armor because Connie could see glimpses of the long sleeves of her undersuit peeking past South’s cuffs. Such lack of care for her hiding, and yet an effort. Connie couldn’t help the hope in her heart that South had gotten away as well.

What worried her was the clear fatigue on her former lover’s face and the lack of her most common companion. Where was…?

“Look up,” South demanded across the counter from Connie. Her tone was the same sort of brisk challenge that Connie had always loved in it, a tone that had made her smile when turned on others, and had warmed Connie when given to her.

Now, all these years later she found herself tired. South wouldn’t know her, and wouldn’t care if she did. So why struggle? What was the worst that could happen?

She met the ice of South’s pale blue eyes as confidently, as defiantly, as she could manage. There wasn’t the immediate flicker of recognition that Connie had expected, but rather a long, appraising look. One almost calculating in nature, as if South sought something she couldn’t find, or had found something unexpected.

Actually the latter even made sense.

“You’re dead,” South observed dryly, and yet with a look so significant that it was like there was a whole other dialog Connie wasn’t privy to going on.

“You’re PFL,” Connie countered just as matter of factually.

“I got better,” South answered after a long moment, something like amusement coloring her voice. “Happens sometimes.”

“To a woman like you?”

The look on South’s face said it all. Her sudden certainly, her joy, and a pain all mixed into one. “Yeah, to a woman like me. Helps when you have a magical little fucking fairy on your shoulder to judge your every move.”

That… was a weird thing to say. It felt like how York had talked about his AI, back in the beginning. Not how South would refer to…

“Where’s North?” Connie asked at last, afraid she already knew the answer.

South didn’t even have to open her mouth for Connie to know her guess was right. And South didn’t bother to say it out loud anyway. Her body screamed it loudly enough, in the sag of her shoulders and the twist of her lips and the way she looked away. So Connie did the only thing she could.

For one minute, two, nearly three South stared at the old-fashioned key Connie had placed on the counter between them. At last the larger woman picked it up, frowning more than before.

“What do I owe you?”

“Your story,” Connie offered with a sad smile. “As much as you can spare of it.”

“It’s a long tale, and I’m not exactly in the free and clear right now, Connie.”

The statement earned a shrug. “I’ll worry about making sure I’m there to hear it all. After you sleep. Don’t mind how messy the room is, by the way. I don’t clean my own enough.”

There, a smile. A brief one, but a smile.

“And if my tale is too much?”

The pain in the absolute matter of fact statement made Connie’s heart skip a beat. What could have happened to so deeply wound South, beyond losing her twin? Too much, Connie feared. Never had she known the other woman to be so pensive. Hell, given how well this was going, she should have found South leaping over the counter to hug her for the chance happening of their meeting. Then again, Connie had abandoned her, like so many before.

Oh well, she would find out soon enough, for South was taking the key and walking away toward Connie’s room. Soon they could figure each other out, and maybe their plans.

Good thing she didn’t know she’d be planning for three.