Tucker stared into the void. The void stared into Tucker.

Tucker said, "Okay, seriously, what the fuck."

It wasn't that the area around him was dark, not exactly. He could see his armored hand stretched out in front of him, clear as day, but his sword didn't seem to be lighting anything up, wasn't casting any shadows. He wasn't standing on anything that he could feel beneath his feet, but he didn't especially feel like he was falling, either. He had a strange, distant awareness of imminent danger, the sort of nausea you get when walking too close to the edge of a sheer cliff.

"Alien bullshit," Tucker said, for the sake of saying something. His voice was ear-poppingly loud in his helmet, but at least it was better than his breathing, which was so obnoxiously noisy that his helmet was kinda starting to feel a little cramped. And seriously, at this point even he knew better than to yank off his helmet before figuring out if there was breathable air in this, y'know, whatever it was. Which, oh shit, he could totally find that out! He squinted at the atmospheric readouts from his armor's sensors, flashing at the corner of his HUD. They read, encouragingly, UNKNOWN. He prodded deeper into the scan results, which informed him that he was either standing in an Earthlike atmosphere, floating in absolute vacuum, or swimming in a sulfuric acid swamp.

"Okay. So the helmet stays on," Tucker said. He'd been kind of putting off moving because of the aforementioned vague terror of a sudden drop nearby, but at this point the prospect of killing boredom was winning out over self-preservation, which, ugh. Since when had he started actively fleeing boredom? Boredom was safe. Boredom was awesome. Boredom meant less in the way of dying horribly.

He took a step onto nothing, flailed his arms, and, well, balanced. On nothing. There was no resistance, no surface underneath him, but it didn't feel like he was floating either—he was pretty sure if he tried a front crawl he'd somehow manage to land flat on his face. So. No moving, maybe.

"Uh," he said. "Hello, aliens? Glowy… alien… things? Anyone there?" He wished, suddenly, that he'd bothered learning actual Sangheili at some point. Every time he tried imitating Junior on the rare occasions they managed to get an uplink going, the kid got embarrassed and begged him to cut it out, Dad, you're embarrassing me in front of my friends. So. Probably no easy way to communicate.

Time passed. Tucker broke his no-moving rule to swoosh his sword around a couple times, but the unending terror of the nameless void kinda put a damper on that.

A voice, somewhere nearby, said, -ucker! which was either a cut off version of his name or a totally uncalled-for insult. Either way, it sounded like a rescue. He straightened up, turning slowly to get a good look around at the void. It all looked pretty much the same. "Yeah, over here! I guess!"

The voice came through again, What in the world…

A blip. Carolina appeared next to him. She was standing upside-down, her feet planted on what would have been the ceiling if it hadn't been too busy messing around as endless void. "Well," she said. "This is weird."

"No kidding," said Tucker. "Also, now we're both stuck in here. I hate my life."

Carolina had, over the course of her many years in combat armor, developed a talent for smirking audibly. "Nah. I kept a foot in the door. Or, well, a hand." She leaned back a little to reveal that her hand was sparking and flashing and glowing and was also, very notably, invisible. "I just have to grab you and pull you back in."

"That's fucking weird," Tucker said, staring in fascination. "Does it hurt?"

She cocked her head to one side, like she hadn't really considered it. "Sorta tingles. C'mon, we going back or what?"

"I… wait, how do I know you're not some alien mind-fuck trick thing?"

"Tucker," Carolina said, warningly.

"Okay, you're you." Tucker glanced around. "Where the fuck are we, anyway?"

Carolina shrugged. Sparks flew with the motion. "You remember the temple?"

"Yeah, I remember the temple. That was like five minutes ago!"

"More like two days," Carolina said. "We've been looking for a way to get you out."

"Two days," Tucker said. His HUD was also flashing a great big UNKNOWN warning next to the system clock, but that was pretty much par for the course. "What the fuck. I think I suddenly really, really have to pee."

Ignoring his statement, Carolina said, "We were walking through the temple, and you activated that recording all about alien history."

"That was boring," Tucker said. "I went off to go play with my sword—"

"Bow-chicka bow-wow?" Carolina said.

Tucker stared in horror. "Okay, it's still fucking weird when you do that. That's my thing. Nobody else gets to have my thing."

"Well, now you're just making it too easy."

Tucker squinted at Carolina, which was kinda hard to do, since she was upside-down. Mostly he just glared at her feet. Honestly, though, he was kind of relieved to see the return of her lousy sense of humor. Things had been pretty fucked up after Church…

"Anyway," Carolina said, sounding way the fuck too pleased with herself, "you went off on your own and I think—this is Emily's theory too, by the way—that your sword activated an unexpected bubble in the narrative structure of the historical matrix. A sort of back-door for whoever was creating the whole holographic living-history exhibit."

It took Tucker a second to parse the sci-fi bullshit. "A bubble in the narrative."

"You might say you fell into a—"

"Don't say it."

"—plot hole."

They were both silent for a long moment, contemplating the void. Tucker said, "I'm pretty sure I don't just hate my life anymore. I'm willing to expand that sphere of hatred."

"I'm so glad," Carolina said, deadpan.

"So, wait," Tucker said. "You figured out how to come in after me?"

Another audible smirk. "I don't know if you've noticed this about me, Tucker, but I'm pretty good at rescues."

Tucker was looking at her hand. He knew he shouldn't ask, he knew they should just get a move-on, but… "How did you know that would work? The thing with the hand? How did you know I wasn't just vaporized on contact?"

"I didn't," Carolina said, evenly. "I volunteered to come in after you. Emily had theories, but we weren't really sure what would happen."

Tucker scratched at one of the greaves of his armor. "Not that I'm not grateful and shit but, you know. Why?"

Carolina shrugged. "I'm a show-off. It's fun to be a hero."

"Carolina."

A heavy sigh. "Look, Tucker, honestly? I've missed having a team to save. I've missed being able to do good things and show up in the nick of time to pull someone's ass out of the fire. It's kind of what I do, and I've gotten a little out of practice."

"Oh, please." Tucker snorted. "You've pulled our asses out of the fire more times than I can count. We always sort of stumble ass-first into danger. Hell, our asses are only still here because of you."

"I'm not sure what you're fishing for here, Tucker, but you sure are fixated on the word 'ass'."

"Hey, I'm being sincere here!" Tucker managed the miffed silence for about ten seconds before adding, "Although I do have a really great ass."

"So you've mentioned," Carolina said. "On many occasions."

"I mean, it's exceptional. Monuments have been built in its honor. So okay, maybe the aliens thought they were monuments to the greatness of our burgeoning alliance or whatever, but they're totally ass monuments."

"Okay," Carolina said, "I think we're done here. Ready to go?"

"Sure," said Tucker. "Hey, one question: how does this work, and how do I know we won't just get vaporized or die horribly on the way back?"

"That's two questions."

"Come on."

Carolina smirked, holding out her hand, sparking and fizzing with electricity. "Sometimes, Tucker, you just gotta have faith."

Tucker shifted his weight, looking up at the unending void. "You know, it's been kinda peaceful here, in a fucked-up sort of way."

"I don't mean to diminish whatever existential epiphanies you may have had, but that sounds pretty boring to me."

"Yeah," Tucker said. Fuck boring. "Me, too. Okay. So I just… grab your hand?"

Carolina waggled her fingers, or, well, whatever strange ghostly electric apparitions were passing for her fingers right now. "Yup."

"Okay," Tucker said again. "Faith. Right."

He took a breath, closed his eyes, and reached for her hand.