RvB: Not mine. If it was, I would've used the Reds a whole lot more and Kimball a whole lot less. She was okay, she just wasn't one of my boys (or one of the girls that counts as one of my boys).

Takes place somewhere near the end of the Chorus saga, after they meet Santa Claus. I'm pretending there was a time-gap in which the Feds and Rebels ran missions, explored more of the temples, and had one-off fights with Charon, before it ramped up to the final battle.

Eventually circles the drain into fanfic melodrama, but at its heart a team-fic about a bunch of guys who have almost certainly failed every sensitivity course in the known universe. Rated for language.

CHAPTER 1

Grif knew something was wrong the moment he woke up.

First off, he wasn't in the apartment. The room was, however, reminiscent of the hospital over on Kingston Ave, the one designed for the rich tourists that came through Oahu and ended up retiring here, except that it was utilitarian; no pictures of Hawaiian sunsets or hula girls performing on the beach. Second, he recognized none of the people in the room. If this was a hospital that wasn't surprising – he didn't know anyone who worked in the medical field, so it would be weirder if he did recognize them – but there were a handful of brightly colored space marines lounging around, clearly not doctors, and didn't that sort of thing just scream trouble. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

"Explain this to me again," a woman in teal armor said, tone tight.

"Well," a maroon colored soldier answered, voice strained and clearly pretending not to be, "it was Grif's turn."

"Pardon?" she said, in a voice that meant he'd better start clarifying. Yes, thought Grif, please do. No one had noticed that he'd woken up yet, but he openly watched the exchange rather than pretending he was still asleep. As much fun as that sounded, it wouldn't help him figure out what was going on.

"Uh," the maroon soldier went on, voice squeaking up half a pitch. The three other occupants of the room – aquamarine, pink, and blue, respectively – watched the interrogation with interest. "Well, it goes me and then Grif and then Grif and then Donut and then Grif and then me and then Grif and then Grif and then Grif and then Donut and then Grif. Since Grif tried out that last chamber we found, it was pretty clearly his turn."

The teal soldier was silent for a moment. "Okay, first off, I don't even want to know how you define 'taking turns'—" ("It makes sense when you realize that, besides every other turn," the pink soldier chimed in, "Grif also gets every second, third, fifth, and eighth turns.") "—but why would you test out alien technology – without studying it, as far as I can tell – by putting one of your own guys in it?"

The armor should have made it hard to read a person's body language, but Grif could actually see the maroon soldier swallow before answering. "Because Sarge tells us to?"

"Sarge," the woman retorted, "is currently being chewed out by Kimball. Why are you that stupid?"

"It was the temple of healing!" the maroon soldier answered, tone somehow both guilty and defensive. "This one actually sounded really safe!"

"Yeah, nice," another voice broke in. As it did, a small figure of a soldier popped into existence on the teal lady's shoulder. Okay, what? "I can see why your team dynamics are so healthy."

"Oh hello," the blue soldier said suddenly, cutting off what promised to be an entertaining, if uninformative, argument. "Did Santa heal you?"

Grif realized, a second before everyone else did, that the blue soldier was talking to him. Before he could answer (answer him how, he wasn't sure; he didn't know anyone named Santa, unless you counted Santa Claus, and he seriously doubted that's who the guy meant), the maroon soldier somehow jumped into the space right next to his bed and the rest of the group shifted so that he was suddenly the center of attention in a very sloppy circle.

Well this didn't seem promising.

"Hello," he said.

"How are you feeling?" the maroon soldier demanded. He seemed weirdly interested in the answer.

"Great," Grif answered, realizing the moment he said it that it was true. He actually did feel great. It was a little hot in the room, but he liked the fact that they weren't blasting the air conditioning on full. You don't like it hot, then stop moving to fucking Hawaii and complaining about the weather. "Should I be feeling differently?"

Instead of answering, the maroon soldier turned what had to be a triumphant look on the teal lady, who had moved up next to the other side of Grif's bed.

"You've been out for almost three hours," she said. "Dr. Grey couldn't figure out why."

"But clearly," the maroon soldier added before anyone else could say anything, "it was all a part of the healing thing. Totally normal. And now you feel great. So it was perfectly natural."

"Right," Grif said, staring at the little hologram soldier, still hanging out on a spot right above the woman's shoulder.

"Take a picture," it said. "What, do I have something on my nose?"

When he didn't answer (which was fine, the blue soldier answered for him with a shocked but somehow ecstatic, "I just realized you don't actually have a nose!"), the aquamarine guy asked, "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," he said, not sure what they wanted from him. "Thanks," he added, thinking maybe politeness would help.

The maroon soldier sat down on the edge of the bed, and put a hand on his arm. "Grif?"

"Yeah," Grif repeated, shrugging out of his creepily gentle grip, and then figured screw it, better go for it. "Just one question: who the fuck are you?"

There was silence for a moment, and then the hologram swore.

"Well shit," the aquamarine soldier agreed, and the teal lady, ignoring the fact that the maroon soldier had frozen and the blue one was patting the pink one on the shoulder (who's "you mean you don't remember me?" sounded both offended and plaintive), said, "I hate working with you people."

"Don't mind me," Grif said, "I'll just check myself out and go home."

And somehow it didn't surprise him when they wouldn't let him.

AN: Grif has long been my favorite character. In an attempt to explain why, I accidentally wrote 13,000 words of a still longer story. I'm only about half done, having written the beginning and the end with the middle guts of the narrative still only notes and curse words. I don't actually swear in my everyday life – or even in my writing, usually – but it's hard to capture the cadence of the way the reds and blues speak without it. I just sort of went for it, trusting to the fact that my mother will never know.