Ch.1
Felix awoke to throbbing agony. It wasn't like the pain of a broken bone, or the ache of bruises. It was bone-deep. He tasted blood on his lips and wondered, for a grim moment, if he was bleeding out and was just too numb to realize it.
Trying to move proved his fears were unfounded.
Pain shot up his spine like a bolt of lightning. He jerked where he lay and the crumple of leaves and undergrowth told him where he was – the jungle floor. If he strained past the red veil of pain, then he could hear jungle birds crooning.
He stopped trying to move. Felix concentrated on breathing instead. He focused on cataloguing his surroundings with sound and smell. He tried to reign the pain in long enough to understand why he was here, and why Locus wasn't.
Locus.
Thinking about him sent a fresh wave of pain, but it wasn't physical this time. It was a bitter, angry pain, contaminated by betrayed trust. Felix pushed himself into the rage and let it give him the motivation to sit up.
It felt as if someone had lit a fire under him. It felt like being stabbed. It was having his arms broken, over and over again, but Felix spitefully ignored the agonized protests of his body. He sat up, breathing hard.
Locus, he thought. Locus. Locus. Every iteration of his name made a new thought surface.
"I'm doing this for me." "No more killing." "I'm done."
"Y-You… fucking… motherfucker," Felix hissed to himself. He coughed after he spoke, and his chest flared with white-hot pain. He couldn't tell what from. A broken rib? A collapsed lung? He would have prodded his chest to see, but his arms felt like inert sacks of meat.
Felix cracked open his eyes after intense effort. It hurt – his eyelashes felt glued together. The light was blinding and he had to close them immediately. White sunbursts lingered behind his eyelids.
He slowly reached up, feeling as if his bones were grinding into dust, but his hands met his helmet visor. He scrabbled at the pressure seals around his neck until he could pull the helmet off. The scrubbed recycled air of the helmet was replaced by humidity.
Felix picked at his eyes until he unstuck whatever was on them. The second time he opened them, he looked down, away from the light, and saw the tiny flakes of blood on his fingertips. Blood - it must've flowed down from an injury and dried around his eyes.
Getting his eyes accustomed to the light took longer than he liked. But Felix was patient. He observed himself instead. His armor was in one piece, which was probably the only reason he survived that fall in the first place. He also noticed that he was in a ring of light.
Neck straining, he looked up.
The foliage had a neat hole punched through it, letting the light in undisturbed. It took effort to remember that he was the reason for it.
He didn't know how long he sat there for. It could have been hours. It could have been minutes. His mind drifted in a fog of pain and rattled memories. But Felix knew he had to move if he wanted to survive. Giving up now, here, after going through so much… was unacceptable.
Locus would get what was coming to him eventually. But not yet. Right now, Felix needed a doctor. He reached for his helmet to put it back on.
Finding a doctor was easier said than done. He had to be able to move first.
His current catalogue of injuries was growing longer by the second. He had at least two cracked ribs. His left wrist was broken. His left ankle was sprained. At least two fingers were broken, and that was an optimistic estimate. His entire body probably looked like Picasso's blue period, and he was pretty sure he was concussed.
The first time Felix tried to stand, he damn near fell over and expired on the way. The second time around, he had the sense to lean against a tree.
The possibility of death was close, but Felix refused to entertain it. He wouldn't survive a fall from that high just to die like a chump here. He had too much left to do. He had an ex-partner to find and kill.
Thinking about killing Locus gave him something else to concentrate on. Felix stumbled forward, imagining Locus and his stupid face, imagining his knife stabbed through his traitorous throat. Other people focused on family and friends to survive the impossible.
Felix? He focused on revenge.
He pushed tree-to-tree, pausing every few steps to catch his breath, and made steady progress from the clearing. In between thoughts of murdering Locus, he devised a plan.
One. He needed to find a doctor. Two. He needed to find shelter and food. Three. He needed to resupply. Four. He needed to get off this stupid fucking planet. Five. He needed to kill Locus and piss on his corpse.
It was an indeterminable amount of time later that Felix realized he had no fucking clue where he was going. He had been so focused on moving, that he'd forgotten about where.
Fucking idiot.
It took him a few more minutes to realize that his HUD wasn't working. There were no compass directions, no scans of the terrain, not even the time. He reached up and slapped at it, ignoring the flare of pain that resulted each time.
Static fuzzed across his eyes. "Work, dammit," Felix muttered, hitting his helmet again to jar the circuits inside into place. More static fizzled until, at last, the soft orange of his HUD settled into place.
He found his coordinates then turned off his satellite triangulation. He didn't need any chucklefucks to get clever and locate him in the process. Then he scrolled through his registry for logs of the refugee camps that were scattered all over Chorus. Neither Fed nor Republic, they were as neutral as anyone could be in this planet-sized conflict.
If there was anyone who could help him, they would be in one of those camps.
The amount of time it took to determine the best camp was longer than he would have liked. Felix's vision kept swimming. Coordinate numbers threatened to slip out of his brain like water from a sieve. He forgot what he was doing two times before he managed to hold onto his train of thought.
Camp 10-B, read his HUD. It was approximately five kilometers south-west of his current position and sizeable enough to host a population of three thousand people.
Five kilometers. On a normal day, that would be just under half of his usual patrol circuit. Now, it felt like the other side of the planet.
Felix leaned against his tree, whole body aching. He licked his lips and one of the cracks finally split open. Fresh blood trickled into his mouth.
God, he was hungry. And thirsty. He wanted to lay down and go to sleep, possibly forever.
Felix closed his eyes. He conjured up images of the Feds, the rebels, the fucking sims, the Freelancers, but they couldn't kindle the right anger for him. They might have been the ones to blow him off the damn tower, but they weren't the ones who let it happen.
A different face swam into his mind's eye. It was Locus. He was without his helmet for once, and had on his usual expression of stunted emotional constipation. Felix thought about his dumb fucking scar, his stupid fucking hair. He thought about the sound of his breathing when he was lining up a shot. He thought about everything that made Locus Locus, and he felt the rage inside him erupt like a volcano.
Fuck Locus. Felix wasn't going to die here. He was going to crawl out of this shitty jungle and get healed. He was going to beat the odds. He was going to survive.
And then he was going to kill that son of a bitch.
The sun had nearly set by the time Felix crawled to Camp 10-B. He navigated by the dying ray's meager illumination until the evening lights of the camp switched on. Then he used the yellow lights to guide him onward.
The closer he got to the camp, the further it seemed. The last couple hundred meters felt longer than the entire journey combined, and Felix was almost certain that if he collapsed there, he would damn well die. There were no trees to lean on this close to the camp, so he was reduced to crawling like a beggar. His concussion actually helped with this. His pride felt too distant to be concerned over when his head felt like it was full of cotton.
Felix reached the outskirts of the camp after an eternity of crawling. He found the nearest light source and collapsed under it, too weak to continue. Hopefully, someone would find him and prove that this planet actually had useful people on it.
He lay there, concentrating on breathing. His head swam more until Felix wasn't sure of anything anymore. He felt something tapping near his head, but he couldn't tell what it was.
He blacked out to the feeling of someone rolling him over.
