Wash realized he was lonely after three days without Connie. The three days were filled with the messy work of running a scenario with sim troopers, removing any time he might have had for introspection. It caught him at unexpected moments, as he was running through the jungle or opening a comm channel back to the Mother of Invention. Once, suddenly, he considered that the feeling might be called loneliness. Before, he had ascribed it to some mercurial coldness between the target and the knife.
He had spent those three days surrounded by predictably hyperactive sim troopers, cutting through the distractions. After three days of letting people believe that when he said he was a freelancer he meant he didn't work on salary, he came back to the ship tired and muddy.
The salute-straight formality of the homecoming gave way to laughs and slapped backs when the Director and the Counselor turned away.
South was next to go on a training mission, and she waited with prickly excitement, bouncing on her toes. When North volunteered advice, she pretended that she hadn't heard him. It was easy with the Pelican coming in on the floor below them. Carolina watched each person in the group as if she were checking them off a list. Wash, present. South, present. York, present, sitting with his arms crossed over the horizontal bar of the railing and his armored legs hanging off the gantry.
There was always someone leaving for something.
White-armored ship's troopers ushered Wash away from the group. He followed without protesting, expecting to be led to the armor bay where he could, finally, stretch out in his own skin -
Instead, they lead him to a tiny room and Connie, who was sitting in front of a screen with a bronze light on her face. It took a moment for him to realize that they were staring at one another, she at his mask and he at her round cheeks turned bright in the computer light.
"Take your helmet off."
"Finally." He shook his head like a wet dog.
She reached long across the desk for the helmet and didn't quite get a grip on the edge the first time around. Instead, she looked him in the eyes and gave a small smile as she dug her fingers up under the neck seal again and easily placed the heavy mask next to the boxy computer. He watched her attach a delicate, transparent port to the hardened array at the back of the mask.
"How was work?" she asked.
"Busy," he replied, then grew disinterested in the joke. "They just throw so many soldiers at us and expect that to work. No strategy." He leaned his elbows on the table and laced his fingers together. She raised an eyebrow, looked at him over his knuckles, and pushed the helmet toward him with two fingers, pressuring his elbows to get him to move further from the equipment.
"You're getting good at headshots," she said.
"It's all paint."
"Still, 70 percent."
"You have percentages in there?"
(Wash, present. South, present. York, present.)
He craned to see Connie's expression when she didn't reply, but it was just blank, her lips set, bronze highlights picking out her eyes and her cheeks. "Percentages, recordings. We're monitoring everything. Without cameras in the training areas, your armor does it for you."
Her eyes flicked back and forth across the screen, and then she seemed satisfied with what she saw, or at least disinterested in the details of it. With an ungloved hand she unclipped the wires, drawing them out; when he reached out to retrieve the helmet she caught his right hand in hers, cupping the softness at the base of his thumb. She pushed his hand and the helmet both back to him, and he thought that meant that she had missed him too.
It did. She had felt the strange difference between the target and the knife.
Be patient, he thought to himself. The fact that he and Connie usually hesitated before showing affection in these early days was simply a sign that both understood they had to earn that affection first.
There had to be a purpose to that earning, Wash thought. Maybe there were layers of purpose and worthiness spiraling all the way down.
York, on a late night after Wash's dogged return to the Mother of Invention, disagreed.
"Time is going by so fast. It feels like yesterday we were just meeting each other, making up nicknames," Wash said into the common room first. Dim lights marked the entrances to crowded barracks. York was leaning back into the couch next to the coffee table, while Wash hoarded the only pillow between his back and the couch cushions.
"That was like...three days ago," York said.
"Weeks go so fast."
"Days go so slow," York drawled, and heaved his feet onto the table.
"You're right."
"It's an effect of our brains," York said, and looked at Wash quite seriously. Wash had never forgotten how smart York was, all the math and computer science a locksmith needed along with the balance and the ease, but he didn't often see it used. "We gauge time by what we look forward to, and what we've learned. Haven't learned anything in a while, haven't looked forward or dreaded the next deployment..." He shrugged with both shoulders and hands. "Time gets meaningless."
"I'm looking forward to all of us being together again," Wash said to the table, not thinking much about the words before aiming them, and York gave a lopsided smile.
"Yeah, man."
"Do you ever think you'll settle down?" Wash asked, firing again into the air over the coffee table.
"If Carolina wants to," York replied immediately. "What about you and Connie?"
"I'd like to, when we get out." Out of the service, out of the ship, out of deep space. "There's so much to do first. She's helping the Director run that system, I'm sharpshooting and running those simulation missions like everybody else."
"How was that mission?"
"Humid."
Their voices fell quietly into the room, absorbed by the metal and the insulation and the long night.
"Time is money," York said, grinning. "And we're not called freelancers for nothing."
"We're called that because..." Wash started, and then realized that he was being played from the light in York's eyes. "The mission was informative. The armor gives us mobility like I've never seen. Man, it gets uncomfortable, though."
York stretched his arms up. "It's a hard life, being an awesome space soldier."
"Yeah." Wash laughed.
When York settled, he had a distant look, as if there was something critical just past the coffee. "You've got me thinking about Carolina, though. What if we did settle down? Have little kids, mow the lawn when the war is over."
"Does she want kids?"
York ignored this. "I ought to talk to her about it. Tell her how magnificent she is. Carolina?"
She appeared in the doorway of her room, hair down. Wash, startled first by her sudden appearance and then by the reminder that Connie was presumably still sleeping in the room behind her, glanced at York.
"You've been there since I said it was a hard life," York said immediately.
"Close." Carolina walked around the couch to stand at York's right, on the opposite side from Wash.
"Are you always watching?" York asked amicably.
"Yes." She passed a hand over her face, catching up a clump of her hair. Wash thought she might tell them to go to bed, but instead she circled the couch and leaned on its arm at York's right side, close enough that Wash felt extraneous. Carolina examined York's face, and Wash looked away.
He heard the table creak and looked back to see that Carolina had sat down on it, eclipsing York's view of the coffee and facing both of them with a kind of hunched grace. "One day," she said, to both of them. "But not right now. What did you see down there, Wash?"
"It was just training. The courses were pre-made..."
"But you fought."
"I was supposed to."
"What did you learn?"
Oh, he thought. It was a trick question, but not the one he expected. Instead of asking whether he had been burdened by the mission, she wanted to see what he had gained that could help the team. I'm a bit tired, he thought. I wanted not to think about that at the moment.
He couldn't sustain that, though; duty pulled the words out of him. "Stealth is important. But so is just being frightening, in this armor. People see that ours is slightly different and they get...manic. Territorial."
Carolina smiled. "I don't know if that will help us much."
Wash sat back. "Sorry, I..."
She held up a hand. There were scars across the back of her arm, including the sunburst paleness of what looked like a bullet burn. "Keep working. Keep observing."
"I don't think we have much choice," York said, leaning back too, although he made it look like relaxation rather than a retreat.
"Connie and I are working on something," Carolina said. She turned the scarred hands palm-up on her knees, placating.
"Way to take the initiative!" York beamed.
Carolina did not respond then, simply sat and looked at the two men levelly. She looked straight at people, Wash thought. Not through them, like some people said, but straight at them.
"Why are you still awake?" Carolina asked. The words were directed at both of them, but when York looked up she stared down at him. Wash stood up, smoothed down the rumpled arm of the couch out of a sudden sense that he shouldn't be there.
York shrugged. Carolina turned her sharp gaze to Wash.
"Just catching up," he said, weakly. "After the training mission."
"I saw the numbers," she said. Later, Wash would think of moments like this as 'before' pictures, before Carolina became so tense as to bark more than she made small talk. She kept everyone within sight with such care that they began to feel she was puppeteering them, and then what?
Hindsight was both crystal clear and disgustingly muddy.
Now, though, with his fingers picking at the last rebellious fold of thin cloth on the couch, Agent Washington listened as Carolina continued to speak.
"You had it rough down there," she said.
"It's tough cavorting with the locals," York laughed, and Carolina swatted his shoulder.
"They're soldiers just like us. Be nice."
"Aw," York said, and Carolina shifted her leg to place her foot between both of his.
"And why are you still awake?" she asked again, staring more intently at York. She could have been trying to meet his eyes, but between her stature and the way she craned her neck it looked like she was glaring casually at his hairline.
"Time is money," York said.
Wash left after that, sputtering in the face of York's bantering military pleasantries, thinking about how time was money and all of them were freelance killers-in-training, and about how Connie hadn't looked at him the way Carolina looked at York. There was an element of possessiveness about York and Carolina's relationship sometimes, whereas when it erred, Wash and Connie's aired on the side of handling raw emotion with kid gloves -
It was the middle of the night and he was walking to his own room alone. No wonder everything seemed so pessimistic.
He thought that if he and Connie had a weakness in their relationship it was that they both thought to a damaging degree that love had to have been worth something beyond itself, to have some tangible result on the world. From this came the idea that it needed to be earned. To York and Carolina, love made other things worthwhile.
That was why, when CT left, Wash took long, wasteful showers for which Carolina criticized him until she saw the redness around his eyes, the lack of softness in his face. That was why, when Carolina was lost, York would have been almost as lost himself even if he hadn't turned the Mother of Invention's own guns on the ship.
That was why, when Wash and Connie had time for their reunion after he returned from the jungle designated for the sim trooper exercise, some of it felt not like love but a wrathful, reassertion of normalcy, desperate in the way it strove for mundanity and plainness. (There was love there too.)