A/N: This is a Katarina/Ashe Project AU written for my friend Vijuani. He let me kill him a bunch of times in Dark Souls 3 so I could farm vertebrae shackles to get every achievement and in return he asked for a fic. This is that fic.
This is a oneshot. The intention was for it to read a bit more like the first chapter of a longer fic though because I really wanted to establish the Project AU as something that felt far larger than what I have the time to write right now. I'm not sure if I executed that intent properly though.
Thank you to CrimsonNoble and Balabalabagan for helping me edit this.
Ignition
[11-11-3099, 16:51]
Ashe's apartment always smells like roses. She keeps a large vase of them on a low table in the entry hall. Brilliant crimson in a sea of white and black and silver, inside the apartment, outside the apartment, across the city.
Everything is cold steel and hot power and the world is one unbounded metropolis that doesn't know the meaning of sleep.
Color hasn't been in fashion for a quarter century at least.
Ashe says that the roses remind her of Katarina's hair. Katarina rewards her with a humorless laugh as she plucks a rose from the vase. She crushes the bloom in her armor-plated hand. She drops the bruised petals to the floor and smiles a not-smile. "Not anymore," she says.
Ashe kneels down on the spotless white floor and collects the fallen petals one by one. Unlike Katarina, she's passing for a biologic. Her chassis is stowed. And why not? It's her house. Her sanctuary. When she's collected the last petal, when she has them all cupped in a slim hand, she looks up at Katarina. Her blue eyes seem to bore a hole straight through Katarina's niobium-alloy heart.
"You didn't have to do that," Ashe says flatly.
Katarina shifts, moving her weight from one hip to the other. She mutters something about not having to to be there at all and hopes Ashe doesn't hear (she does). Katarina feels bad - maybe - but she'll make it up to Ashe later.
Later comes quickly, but not too quickly.
Spread out beautifully under Katarina, Ashe forgives her.
That's how they work, Ashe and her, her and Ashe.
When all's said and done, leaning against the viewplate in Ashe's bedroom, staring out over the endless light of the city, Katarina decides forgiveness doesn't really matter.
Her bare shoulder is cold where it rests against the steel frame of the viewplate.
She thinks maybe it was different before she joined the Guard, but she can't quite recall. She lost a few things when she switched from biologic to more efficient chipset memory banks. Nothing important though.
The lights of the city shine steady, going dark only when a hover-vehicle passes by, briefly obscuring some glowing billboard, some always-on office light. The sky above is a dark grey, industrial glow reflecting off the underside of perpetual cloud cover.
Katarina breathes deep, smells roses, and thinks of flowers.
Flowers - real, live, biologic flowers - flowers are a sign of wealth and power. No one but the highest houses of the aristocracy can afford them.
The Du Couteau house smells of lilies.
Katarina's mother loved lilies, white ones, and after she'd died Katarina's father kept their home filled with them until he disappeared a year and a half ago.
Katarina and her siblings haven't kept the tradition.
Flowers mean a gardener and no one enters their house except them now.
Their house still smells of lilies though.
A year and a half - some things don't fade.
Some things do.
Ashe had never mentioned Katarina's hair before and, Katarina is sure, she won't do it again.
It's for the best. You shouldn't mention things that aren't. Katarina's hair hasn't been red since she joined the Guard. She'd hardly thought about it at the time. A bit of pigment for a military class system upgrade and a link to the Program L.I.S.S. server. Sometimes sacrifices had to be made, but the color of her hair didn't even rate the word.
Sacrifice.
What an odd concept.
Sacrifice was oil leaking, coolant venting, blood dripping from ripped open biologic flesh. Sacrifice was years on end drilling every combat protocol to perfection and then continuing to train because Marcus Du Couteau would accept no less from his eldest daughter. Sacrifice was staying in the Guard as her family fell apart around her. Sacrifice was…
"I'll be leaving soon," Ashe says.
Katarina looks away from the viewplate.
Ashe is lying on her stomach on the bed, head turned towards Katarina. The dark blue silk sheets match her eyes.
Despite the red roses in the hall, blue is Ashe's favorite color. It suits her.
Katarina's eyes lazily roam Ashe's body, writing the memory of smooth pale skin and gentle curves.
"Where are you going?" Katarina asks.
"Away," Ashe replies. Her voice is partly muffled by how she's talking into a pillow. "I'll tell you if you say you'll come with me."
Katarina's systems flare to life, processing.
So this is it then.
It's arrived more suddenly and far sooner than she'd anticipated.
Her eyes no longer roam lazily. Instead, they dart about with purpose, writing every detail and flagging for later backup.
She forces her lips upwards into another not-smile. "I love mysteries," she says without any effort at sincerity.
"Is that so?" Ashe asks.
"It's so," Katarina replies.
Katarina says her goodbyes without words. She says them with her lips and her tongue and her everything and Ashe replies in kind.
And when Katarina leaves, when she's put her armor back on and when she stands by the door, she looks back at the cold apartment with its white and black and silver and the burst of red roses and the blue of Ashe's eyes and she writes it all so that she won't forget.
When Ashe's door hisses closed, Katarina reactivates her connection to the server.
She has nothing left to hide.
She heads out.
Katarina is two sectors over and halfway home and entirely lost in the sea of memory files she's written over years when her squad finds her.
All four of them have come.
Zed. Draven. Darius. The commander.
They fall in around her, Darius and Draven walking in front of her, the commander at her side, and Zed bringing up the rear. They're so coordinated that the clang of their magboots on the steel walkway rings as a single sound with each step.
The commander is an old hand, risen up through the ranks when the Guard was still in its infancy. Recruits of the Guard gossiped that the commander had stood against an entire army during the civil war and eliminated them all with a single swing of her massive green sword.
Server records indicate that it had, in fact, taken four thousand three hundred and fifty-two swings.
At the end of the war, the commander had formed her squad with Darius and together they'd handpicked Draven, Zed, and now Katarina to fill its ranks.
Draven is Darius' younger brother, but Katarina is hardly in a position to complain of nepotism.
The five of them have served together now for two and a half years.
In a way, Katarina might call her squad… friends. Her friends.
It's… nice. To know that they're… present.
"I'm sorry she's leaving," the commander says.
The commander says it flatly without venom, without malice, without any warning.
It's so innocuous that it takes Katarina a quarter second to realize that the commander, the squad, the server, L.I.S.S. - none of them should know.
"We're all sorry, Du Couteau," the commander says.
And then something cracks against the back of Katarina's head and the world goes out.
[ ]
[10-6-4000, 01:45]
There's a video that plays every time Katarina ignites. It's in first person. A memory file.
It's a memory of a woman. She's pale and her eyes are a striking blue and her hair is as white as Katarina's, as white as any member of the Guard's. She's lying stretched out on a bed, completely unabashed of her state of undress. And she's looking straight at Katarina. And she's smiling. And she's sad.
And Katarina is sad as well, in this memory file that doesn't have a place in her system.
The video shifts, the camera is moving towards the bed, towards the woman.
The audio is… the audio track is faulty. Damaged. The woman's mouth is moving but Katarina can't distinguish words.
In the video, a hand reaches out towards the woman. It's her hand, her actual, biologic hand.
How odd it is that she's not wearing armor.
How strange that she isn't wearing armor and that she is not afraid.
Ignition complete.
Katarina steps out of her docking station.
A process initiates.
Searching. Please wait. Searching.
"Du Couteau, system report?"
The Commander stands two point four meters in front of Katarina. Her green circuits glow brightly in the dark loading bay. She's charged, ready to deploy. Her sword, deactivated for the time being, sits holstered at her shoulder.
When she unholsters her sword – it's a thing to be experienced. It's emerald fire. It's strength – the sort of strength that the empire is founded on.
"All systems lit," Katarina replies mechanically. Her displays aren't malfunctioning. Her running lights are just as bright as the Commander's, though hers show pink at full charge. The Commander only asks as a formality. Though most system information is unrestricted, older units like the Commander tend to prefer personal confirmation.
When almost all other units use the server when they want to communicate, the Commander's verbal habit seems quaint.
But the team indulges her because she's the Commander.
Error. File not found. Reinitiate query?
Katarina closes the process with a thought. Most, but not all, system information is unrestricted. No reason for the Commander to know she wastes power searching for a missing memory file every time she ignites. It's not seemly.
Not that Katarina cares much for appearances. If she cared, well, then she wouldn't have followed her father into the Corps.
"What's the emergency deployment?" The question comes from Zed. The third member of their formerly five-unit elite squad. Now they're down to three. None of the replacements have panned out. Parts are replaceable. Units aren't.
Deployment without Darius and Draven to watch her back is difficult.
Katarina queries the time.
10-6-4000. 01:45.
Middle of the night. They're on duty this cycle, but it's not their shift. Must be something big. An emergency code. But. It's always something big if the L.I.S.S. decides to deploy their squad.
"Sector 564. Tagging," the Commander says.
There's disdain in Zed's voice. Zed doesn't know how to speak any other way. Katarina doesn't write the memory. "Tagging isn't an emergency. Someone's always tagging."
The Commander turns toward the loading bay doors. Her magboots clang loudly on the steel grate floor. "Tagging isn't the emergency. Unity is. Move out."
[ignite]
The boom shakes the sector. Ekko's handiwork.
Ashe watches as the severed link cable comes crashing down.
It's enormous. Three meters in diameter, not counting the black insulation wrapping the whole thing. Stray power arcs out from the cut end, blazing white hot and disintegrating everything it touches. Even with Ashe's blue visor filtering it down to something manageable, it still leaves spots dancing across her vision. When the cable falls as far as it can, when it hangs limply down in the abyss between concrete highrises, only then does the circuit failsafe kick in and cut power.
The interstitial is starkly lit one moment, dark the next.
The cable is the last one. There's still signal – there's always signal in the air – but with no more link cables, the sector is off the grid. It's theirs. They've claimed it.
From up near the demolished cable anchors three buildings over, a grinning Ekko waves. His green glow leaves afterimages in the air. He's sure spunky. Ashe will give him that.
Ashe allows herself a smile and she waves back.
The kid did good.
She's still waving as the pink blur collides with Ekko – and then he's falling, like the link cable, down into the interstitial.
Everything slows.
The memory writes, flags, copies into backups, overwrites.
Ashe screams into the server.
As Ekko falls, he reaches for the trigger on his belt, the trigger that runs to the jury-rigged mechanism he keeps strapped to his back.
A green flash –
[ignite]
The boom shakes the sector.
Ashe watches as the severed link cable comes crashing down.
Ekko waves.
Ashe waves back.
A pink blur -
Ekko dodges. His voice comes in over the band, accompanied by a static buzz. "Hostiles on our six."
[ignite]
Fuck.
There's no way, no damn way, the terrorist unit should have been able to dodge.
Fuck.
Shit just got complicated.
He dodges, Katarina follows. The pink-tinged arc of her plasma blade extends as she routes more energy to it. They're outnumbered almost two to one. Taking her target out fast is worth increased drain. She should have been moving on four seconds ago.
The unit tries to parry her with a green plasma blade of his own, but Katarina already calculated for that. She cuts power just before the blades hit, then reactivates, effectively evading his parry. He should have known better. Must have defected before finishing training. She buries her weapon in his core. Green sparks mix with pink in a shower of dissipating energy.
Powerless, the deactivated unit drops down into the interstitial.
They're three kilometers from surface, network knows how high calculating for troughs. When the unit hits, there'll hardly be anything salvageable for the scrapers in the undercity.
Katarina message to the server consists of only two words.
Target eliminated.
Katarina doesn't get a chance to reassess the situation before a flagged message from the Commander hits the server. "Assistance required."
Katarina pulls the Commander's location stamp and then she's moving. The map of the sector she downloaded during transit is recent enough she can trust it. There might be a few anomalies caused by the tagging, but it takes major impact demolition, the kind that only comes from military grade artillery and similar class blasts, to seriously alter the cityscape.
The Commander is up, so up Katarina goes, scaling the wall of a block building, using ancient window gaps as hand and foot holds. Her HUD highlights weak points that can't take her weight and targets the bits of the wall that can. She hits the top in seconds.
A message pings. It's flagged from Zed. "Assistance required."
Katarina can already see the Commander. Switching to Zed's request now will get them all eliminated.
The Commander is fighting amidst a field of solar panels.
Mostly smashed solar panels, at this point. Minor property damage. The solar panels are old models in a 500 sector – their power output is negligible.
The Commander is an old model too, and she's engaged with what looks like a prototype of the new line. Their battle is a brilliant display of green and magenta, weapons moving faster than an unaugmented eye could track.
Were even the prototypes already defecting?
Katarina queries the server.
Project Fiora. F-98, Model S. Missing for three months.
No hesitation. Katarina charges across the field of solar panels immediately.
She sends to the server, routing for network. "Backup requested."
The Commander is an old model. Zed is an old model. Darius and Draven were old models. Compared to Fiora, Katarina is an old model too. Their squad hadn't succeeded because its units were individually powerful – though they were – the squad had succeeded because they worked well together. They were a team.
But no Darius to draw fire. No Draven with ranged support.
Katarina is crossing the distance fast, routing more and more power into her limbs, shutting down non-essential routines to muster every available resource.
The Commander is holding her ground.
And then she's not.
A high-pitched whine is all the warning that comes. No message from server.
Fiora activates shields and so does the Commander.
Even from her vantage, Katarina can see Fiora's shield is newer, stronger. The Commander has been draining hers for a while now and it flickers. It appears translucent, a thin green film compared to Fiora's opaque magenta.
The artillery shot is white fire.
Katarina screams, a name ripping out of her throat, lost in the deafening crash of impact.
The memory writes.
There's no green in the crater. Just debris burnt black.
Fiora's still there though. Fiora's magenta shield flickers, then drops, conserving energy during the respite.
Katarina's not close enough to see details, not even zoomed, but she swears Fiora smirks.
The memory writes, writes, writes again, saves copies in so many places only a full system wipe could ever erase them all. Katarina thinks she can smell circuits burning as the memory sears into her banks, flaking char on the board.
She'll have Fiora's head, processor and all, for that.
There's another high-pitched whine and this time there is a coordinate set on the server.
Katarina throws herself to the side.
The blast sends sharp pieces of broken solar panel flying, leaving deep scores in the matte paint of her chassis.
It's a near miss.
She's not built for extended engagement like Fiora is. Like the commander was. She has no shield gens. The shockwave from an artillery blast could cripple her systems, to say nothing of a direct hit. Even an antique system could accurately assign her a null if she stays on the roof.
The objectives cycle through her link, faster than a full biologic could dream to think.
Going for Fiora now, amidst the artillery fire, has odds below half a percent. It's a non-starter.
The commander is gone and there's no time to mourn.
That leaves Zed.
He still hasn't negatived his assistance request.
Guided by her HUD, Katarina weaves around bright, world-ending artillery blasts. There are so many new shots loading onto the server – in a matter of hours the entire sector will be rubble from the decrepit heights to the true slums kilometers below.
Get Zed, Katarina thinks. Get Zed and get out.
Zed's two buildings over.
Going at full tilt, Katarina hits the edge of the roof and she leaps.
Even – even in all the mess, all the chaos, all the – the commander is dead - Katarina still feels that tug of joy, that distant memory of the first time she jumped an interstitial. Fifteen meters across and three kilometers of abyss below. And just her. Just Katarina, flying above it all.
On the far side, Katarina hits the concrete roof and rolls. She's on her feet again in a quarter of a second and she's running again, already building speed for the next jump.
Behind her, another artillery shot hits connects with something structural and the building she's just left begins its slow descent down to the true ground.
Katarina hopes Fiora's not still there. She's got a debt to pay.
But for now, she has a directive.
She hits the next interstitial and jumps again, lands again, rolls again, sees another rooftop solar farm before her.
Zed is fighting a gold unit - gold system lights, gold paint on the chassis. The unit is as bright as old pictures of the sun from before the clouds came in and stayed. It's a tank class for sure, bulky and eye-catching, meant to draw fire.
Zed is fast, but the gold unit – Project Leona. C-32, Model A. Missing five years, Katarina's query supplies – Leona is stubborn. She's keeping him busy while another unit fires white-hot plasma lances down from a grey coolant tower atop this roof.
The unit is-
Unity.
The easy choice gets easier.
Katarina sprints towards the tower, already mapping hand and footholds for the climb. The tower has four main supports but around and between the supports is scaffolding, some of it likely structural to reinforce an aging piece of equipment. Unity is on the observation and maintenance platform that rings the coolant tank near the top.
Unity must see her streaking towards the perch because the terrorist commander refocuses fire on Katarina.
With no tank to keep Katarina pinned, dodging isn't hard though.
Katarina's sensors pick up the incoming projectiles with milliseconds to spare. Katarina drives off her left leg, sending herself careening right, where she tucks and rolls, broken glass from shattered panels flying up, bouncing off her chassis. In the space she just occupied, lances of brilliant blue energy scorch the building's roof.
When Katarina gets to the tower, she climbs fast. With the route mapped, she's on autopilot.
It gives her a chance to plan the engagement.
Unity is a blue unit – blue means Katarina's class or older. She might have some new mods but basic systems don't upgrade well.
A quick server file pull yields basically nothing Katarina didn't already know.
Unity is a blue ranged unit. A glass cannon if Katarina can get to her. Not particularly strong or fast. Her combat pattern is almost exclusively firing plasma bolts from the amped bow she carries. It's not good for close quarters.
At the far edge of the roof, an artillery blast disintegrates a massive chunk of steel and concrete. The coolant tower shakes, but not nearly enough to dislodge Katarina.
But the closeness of the artillery fire means Katarina needs to make this fast.
Katarina hits the tower deck, the platform that rings the coolant tank, in time to see Unity trying to scramble over the rail at the far end, trying to climb down the other way.
Katarina closes the distance in a quarter second.
In that quarter second, Unity pulls herself back up and plants, intending to stand her ground. She's a sitting duck going one on one with Katarina, but she's dead if she tries to fight out on the tower scaffolding.
Katarina holds a blade in each hand and she's on Unity in a biologic heartbeat.
Unity's not built for close range combat, but she acquits herself well enough.
Better than the green unit did.
But, then, Unity is older and has likely as many fights as Katarina under her belt. Unity finished her training before defecting to start the uprising.
Katarina's first several strikes are blocked by Unity's bow. She's using it like a powered staff and it holds up surprisingly well against Katarina's humming pink blades. She actually nearly catches Katarina's feet with a downward sweep after a parry – but Katarina's fast and agile and able to adapt on the fly. She jumps the strike and goes forward, getting through Unity's guard. It's too awkward a move to get a blade into position, so they go tumbling to the steel grate platform ground.
In the tumble, Unity lets go of her bow with one hand and gets that hand shoved under Katarina's visor.
Instinctively, Katarina slams her biologic eyes shut – they're flesh and blood not steel and carbon fiber.
But Unity doesn't go for the kill.
Instead, Unity rips Katarina's visor off, shattering it. Against her better judgement, Katarina opens her eyes. The sensory overload is immediate. Too many angles. Too many objects. Too much interference. Too much color. Too. Much.
Katarina slams her eyes shut again.
She's managed to get a blade to Unity's throat, she thinks, but being hit with so much data has lagged her processors. She presses down on her blade – better to finish the job and then sort herself out – but there are hands on Katarina's wrist, keeping her from making the elimination.
"Kat!"
Katarina's eyes fly open again.
She knows that voice.
But the only unit she sees is Unity, face masked behind a blue visor, both hands clamped around Katarina's wrist.
Oriented now, even with the data overload, Katarina could just shift her weight, push down, and that would be it.
Unity would be eliminated.
But she doesn't. Push. Down.
"Du Couteau!"
That voice - that voice Katarina also recognizes.
Zed grabs Katarina by the shoulder and pulls, throws her off the tower, then jumps after her. They land together on the roof below.
"I had her!" Katarina screams. She scrambles to her feet and rounds on Zed. She doesn't bother with the server. There's no sign of the gold unit, no sign of the other terrorists. "I had-
There's a high-pitched whine.
The artillery hits and the tower evaporates.
A/N Edit: Since this is a oneshot, I can't reply to guest reviews except through editing the chapter itself... This chapter is divided into two distinct time blocks, indicated by a date/time stamp at the beginning of each block. In keeping with the intent of building the idea and want of a far larger plot and setting in a restricted space, the two sections are actually set about a year apart. As this is apparently not immediately clear to all readers, I'd categorize it as an execution error on my part. Ti was flagged as an issue during the beta/edit process, but we thought it had been adequately addressed through use of timestamps. Interestingly, in typing up this explanation, it strikes me that a possible format for this fic would have been to have included a third section set even later that contained a clear ending to the arc... Like, just, only write the beginning, middle, and end of the story and cut out and leave to the imagination all development. Huh. Things to keep in mind for another story sometime, I guess, maybe.