A/N: Cross posting from Ao3 is always fun, especially when I hit my Angst War archives! Prompt is from RenaRoo.
York goes off the cliff, and he screams as Maine rips Delta from his head.
In the back of his head he hears Goodbye, York.
And then he falls.
The snow is cold and his armor locks, and he lies there for what feels like years, waiting for someone to come for him.
No one does.
His mind is too quiet, where Delta should be, but Delta's gone.
It feels like a lifetime before he manages to get to his feet and get moving again.
He runs, and he hides, and he lives.
He makes a list, one day, of everyone who's still alive, but he doesn't know who to trust. At the end of the day, none of them came, and Delta might be gone, but his influence is still there, and logically, the last time he saw Carolina she had nearly killed him, and he'd betrayed her, and then she hadn't come.
So he doesn't look.
Instead he takes his armor to pieces and hides them under his bed and sleeps with a gun by his side and the healing unit beneath the floorboards, and dreams of happier days on a ship, at war.
He gets a job, and tries to be normal. He fakes his papers and doesn't pick locks. He's KIA, according to all the paperwork, and no one's looking for him.
He lets it be, even though he wants to scream sometimes, but he lives.
He listens to Freelancer encrypted channels in his spare time, and one day he hears Agent Washington making an official confirmation.
"This is Recovery None, reporting that Agent Carolina has been killed in action. Non-related to the Meta, AI logs confirm Agent Wyoming as cause of death." York hates how Wash's voice sounds now—cool and clipped, like he's reporting roadkill instead of the death of someone he cared about deeply.
York hasn't hated himself this much in his life. He goes to the place where he traces the signal to, and he leaves the lighter there for her.
"Guess we're both ghosts now," he says to the scorch marks on steel that are the only hint that a body in aqua armor once was lying there. He stays on that planet—he can't make himself leave, and he gets another apartment and another job and he keeps living, because he doesn't know what else to do.
He wonders, if Delta was here, what he would think of the life York lives now. Safe, secure, healthy. No one's shot at him in a while, and people have even stopped making comments about the eye.
He probably should be happy. Instead, he just feels useless and wasted. All that time, all the effort, all that training. He betrayed Carolina, he betrayed Freelancer, and all it got him was a head that was too-empty and nightmares of snowbanks.
And then Freelancer goes down.
It takes him too long to put his armor back together, longer to install the healing unit, and longer still to find a slip space capable ship willing to take him to the place called Valhalla.
He reads all the reports, and listens on official channels for Freelancer that are nothing but static, and he pieces together enough to know that Agent Washington has joined the others in the world of the dead.
York's the last one, and he's dead too. He laughs until his ribs hurt, and then he punches the wall.
The Director is missing, and there's a thought. He remembers family photos, pinned to the underside of a bottom bunk, safely hidden. Carolina showed them to him only once. Identical pairs of green eyes staring back at him.
He'll go after him, he thinks. Bring him to justice, make him pay for everything, for all of the ghosts that haunt him.
Once he learns the truth.
He has plans, he has speeches prepared—he's not sure what he'll have to say to these Reds ad Blues, but they all go out the window when he steps out of the warthog he requisitioned and looks right down the barrel of a gun to see Wash.
"Who the hell are you?" He sounds angry, and it takes York a moment to realize why.
York's not the only one who's looking at a ghost.
"I should ask you the same question. I'm pretty sure I have a copy of your death certificate," York says, before relenting. "I survived the fall. The Meta got Delta, but I lived." Casually, he moves out of the warthog.
"What are you doing here?" Wash demands.
York tilts his head. "I had a few questions for the Reds and Blues. I'm going for the Director, thought they might know something."
"The Director?"
He thinks about green eyes and red hair. "He needs to pay, Wash," he says.
Wash's eyes look haunted. "Yes," he says quietly. "He does. I'll go get the others."
They go for Epsilon, who seems shocked to see him alive, but agrees to help.
"Dude, why do you care so much about this guy?" The one called Tucker asks him one night. "What did he do to you?"
York thinks about the twins at each other's throats, about Tex, about Carolina's loaded pauses as she tries to describe her childhood. He thinks about Delta and Theta and all the others, screaming Allison. He thinks about lighters and fights with live ammunition and about Wash's screams. He thinks about a cliff and hours trapped by his own armor, of Sigma's flames as he pushes out Maine and ushers in Meta.
He thinks about a future that he once talked about, drunk and lying on her bunk, her hair soft beneath his fingers and her smile gentle.
He taps his blind eye instead of saying any of that. "Oh you know," he says, keeping his voice light. "An eye for an eye and all that."
Tucker laughs, but none of them trust him. Oh sure, they like him—he jokes and he charms and he keeps things light and he tells them stories about Wash, but they don't trust him. They've known too many Freelancers.
Except Epsilon, who doesn't seem to trust him or like him, and it takes York ages to realize it's because of Texas. He refuses to implant in York when Wash suggests it. And that's fine with York—looking at Epsilon makes him think of Delta, and York can't imagine how much worse it would be to actually have Epsilon in his head.
Epsilon plays him the logs one day—how he got them, York can't comprehend, but Carolina is there, her helmet off, Eta and Iota whispering to her, like tiny ghosts.
"He really is dead," Carolina whispers.
"You don't know that," Iota whispers. "He could come back!"
"No," Carolina says, standing upright. "I can't keep chasing ghosts. I need to keep going." She clenches her fists. "Eta, do you have that approximate location on Agent Texas?"
"I thought you didn't like Texas," Eta says quietly.
"I didn't. But I'm done waiting. And she might know what's next." She signs off.
York didn't think he could hate himself more. He'd doubted her, he hadn't been sure if he could trust her, if her loyalties still lay with the Director—with her father—over him, but she'd been looking.
"You made your choice," he reminds himself, and he keeps going, because the very least he owes her is vengeance.
He and Epsilon go after the Director alone, because the others say it isn't their fight. And maybe it isn't—Wash has the memories, but he's better now, healing. York has never healed. York has let the wounds fester, and now they're all being ripped open again, and all he wants is vengeance, because it's the first time he's felt alive ever since the cliff.
Epsilon feels like fire in his brain. He surges through neural pathways that Delta once inhabited, and everything about this is sick and wrong and they both know it, but they stick with it, because the need for vengeance hums in both of them, and they make their way through the base, towards the Director.
The others follow them anyways, because they do that. York watches them fight side by side, and he fights with them, and for a moment, he feels like he's come home to something.
The Director doesn't seem to be surprised that York is alive, and he doesn't even flinch when York raises the pistol towards his head.
"She was my greatest creation," the Director says, like it makes things better, and York shoots him.
"She wasn't yours. She made herself," he tells the corpse, and leaves.