Just outside of one of the garages, a group of soldiers stood around. From afar, they were a blur of different colors: teal, grey, blue, red, maroon, pink and orange.
Additionally, there were two other figures in tan and violet armor on the opposite side of the colorful blur. These two were currently being scrutinized by the larger group.
Unlike normally when excited chatter would fill the air around said group, they were all silent at this time—shocked as all fuck.
A smoking bullet hole was in the wall between the violet and green armored figure's head.
The guy beside him, the tan and white armored man called York, was the first one able to find the ability to speak again.
"It looks like someone's pretty pissed at you." He regarded the bullet hole thoroughly before sending a pointed look to the violet armored figure standing beside him.
North, the man in violet armor with green trim, glared back at him from out of the corner of his eyes.
"What gave it away? The bullet hole?" he asked, "Besides, who says the bullet was for me? Were you always the playboy of the team?"
York grinned at that.
"Firstly, I think it was more the silence giving it away, accompanied by the bird's chirping. Secondly, the bullet hole is closer to your head than mine. And besides, Carolina is my one and only. I wouldn't dare fuck around with other girls than her." As he spoke, York pointed to the hole to show clearly what he meant about the closer proximity of the bullet to North's head than his own.
North didn't really listen to York's rambling anyways, already mentally tracing back where the bullet had come from to search for any indication of a sniper being on the hunt.
When the line of fire ended on the roof of a building, he suspected the sniper had been there but he couldn't see anyone now.
Either the sniper was already long gone or they were so good at hiding that they could lie in front of his eyes and North wouldn't be able to see them.
He too had managed to hide so well on more than one occasion that nobody could find him even if they were almost stepping on him.
What drew him back was someone sighing heavily.
Looking around to the large group standing there, he could see a familiar figure shaking his head with another heavy sigh.
"What's up, rookie?" the tan armored figure asked in a casual tone that made the grey and yellow armored soldier he was addressing just then shoot him an angry glare.
"Mac again?" the teal figure next to Wash was the one who asked the question. It was pretty clear that the guy standing there only had the teal armor in common with Carolina. Aside from that, he was the complete opposite of the former teal leader of the Freelancers.
Wash nodded, "Yeah, another survival trip. Although she just came back from another one."
The guy standing next to Wash, North remembered his name being Tucker, scoffed, "Just let her be. I think it's better to wait until she's back."
Wash nodded in agreement to that, both men preferring not to say anything about the second part of the message they had all just received aside from the obvious.
"I'm going to rip off the balls of whoever is telling North who I am and roast them over a fire."
Sure, Wash knew that only he and Tucker knew rudimentary things about her past so far. Sure, everyone knew her other nickname Ala. But given the fact that lots of girls here on Chorus had the name Alaena as that seemed to be an incredibly preferred name for girls for the parents here, she had decided to take up the second nickname of Mac.
All of the various Alaenas were called Ala anyway, so another Ala thrown into the mix would make the whole thing way too difficult.
During their time here on Chorus, every one of the crew started calling her by her second nickname. This had become something of a habit and nobody really thought about using her first nickname anymore given the problem that you would have ten girls responding to Ala instead of only one.
"Who's Mac?" York asked then, immediately adding afterwards, "Is she hot?"
That, of course, caused North to groan and rub one of his hands over the visor of his helmet.
Since this was a warzone, they all preferred leaving their helmets on outside of safe places to make sure that they weren't shot.
"Hell yeah, that girl's fucking hot. Just watch out to make sure you don't burn your fingers when trying to get too close to her."
The grin in Tucker's voice was obvious. For the first time in his life, York was momentarily speechless and just gaped at the teal armored soldier.
North chuckled beside him, "Looks like you got some competition there, huh, York?"
It took another two or three seconds before York obviously started grinning. North and Wash both knew him well enough to know he when he was doing so, "Sounds like a challenge. I'm in."
This time both North and Wash groaned and shook their heads. This was going to be a horrible experience considering that the two wannabe womanizers were setting up a challenge with one another.
Speaking of challenges and Mac though, either he or Tucker would have to go check on her.
To be honest, it was an extreme shock for Wash to see York and North come back when the Reds and Blues were sent out to investigate a crashed ship.
After air surveillance caught wind of a signal of an unknown aircraft which was obviously about to crash, Tucker, Donut, Simmons, and Grif had gone to investigate. They came back and immediately called for Wash, saying that the guys that had stumbled out of the crashed ship knew him.
He had been in a meeting with Kimball, Doyle, and Carolina but when Tucker came to get him, Kimball had said that he should go and check.
Well, he was pretty shocked to put it lightly when he saw North and York standing there with York already joking around with Tucker about chicks and stuff while North was standing beside the other guys with a relaxed but attentive posture all the same.
He was pretty sure he must have been standing there for more than five minutes, just gaping at his former team members that he had believed to be dead for years now.
It was Grif who pulled him out of the reverie he had been in for this entire time: "Do you really want to just stare at them all day long? They can still leave, y'know."
"No! I— Uh—" Wash stuttered and coughed to get his thoughts sorted out before saying something again, "It's just… unexpected."
"Well, we thought about the same when the guys here picked us up and told us they knew you and Carolina." North replied in a calm and friendly tone, the same way he would always talk with people.
"Tell me…" Wash grumbled, not really bothering to reply to North's comment and moving to stand with his people.
Not that he wasn't happy to see his two best friends of former days again, but he was skeptical. He had seen both of their bodies and knew they were dead. He would be convinced easier perhaps if he hadn't have seen the bodies earlier, but that was why he was so reluctant to believe his eyes now.
He had seen their bodies and he was skeptical about whether or not these guys really were his friends given that.
As if North was able to read his thoughts or somehow sensed his feelings – fucking empathy! – he then said, "We're real, Wash."
"But how? That's not even feasibly possible!" he exclaimed, feeling his anxiety and panic rising up in his chest as it usually did whenever he encountered something he was unused to or that was new.
"I am sure you know the movie Avatar by James Cameron already from years back and how the plot was already copied several times for other movies?" asked the violet armored man, getting Wash and the others to nod after a moment once they remembered the plot of the film.
"Well, let's say the set-up for that movie is about the same situation we had been in. It's an Avatar-like project we had going on with Tex when we were suspicious about what the Director was up to." North explained patiently with York nodding from time to time, "We cloned our bodies and transferred our minds into the cloned bodies shortly after York lost his eye. To make our plan plausible, we had to inflict the same wounds to our clones as we had. Which meant me getting shot and York losing said eye."
It took some moments before Wash seemed to realize what he was saying, "So you two were clones when you came back from our monthly planet leave?"
York nodded, "Exactly. It was one of the moons of Chorus where we hid a Pelican with our real bodies in cryo sleep and we returned after that."
"But you died years ago! Why did you decide to return now?" Simmons, the maroon armored figure, spoke up just then. He obviously knew one or two things about Project Freelancer considering that they had helped take down the project as far as they knew before their group had crash landed on Chorus.
North sighed at that, "I guess there was some flaw in our plan. The moon was more of a second guess we took. We actually wanted to put the pelican on the planet itself, Chorus, but when we noticed that there were people living on it, we decided to relocate the party to this moon there." North pointed up to the sky where the moon had just started rising towards the sun again.
A wry smile had appeared on his face that Wash could tell from the tone of his voice when he spoke next: "Anyway, we didn't account for the fact that the moon has a cycle of sixteen years, where ten of them are either in the shadow of the planet. The place where our plane was located was in the shadow and consequently away from the sun which is why we weren't able to wake up. We were missing the sun which would have provided the energy needed to make us wake up. The few solar beams the system managed to gather were enough to keep the system running together with a huge supra-battery. But the wake up process needed far more energy than that."
"So you didn't wake up because the moon was behind the planet and you now did it as the moon is close to the sun again?" Simmons seemed to be the smart-ass of the group, North suspected, but he didn't say anything about that as he was way more polite than York.
"Something along those lines." York confirmed beside North, adding, "Anyways, after the death of each of our clones, our minds returned over the connection chip in our neck besides the implants back to our real bodies, but we were sleeping away still. Which is why we were so extremely shocked when you told us the year and we realized that we had been out cold for ten fucking years." At this note, York's voice turned extremely serious. He seemed rather concerned by this information.
"Okay?" Wash muttered, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything, "And what about your AIs? I remember having wiped them out with the EMP together with the other Fragments." Wash asked, still feeling a bit confused by all the information he had just received and the given fact that his friends who he had believed to be dead had just popped up from nowhere.
Neither York nor North replied.
Instead there were two figures appearing on the shoulder of each of them. Beside North's head a purple little figure showed up, waving awkwardly with a "Hi," while a green figure appeared beside York's right side of his head.
"D, what have I told you about showing up on my right side?"
The figure flickered and appeared on York's left shoulder, although he was partially being hidden by his helmet, "I though it was more polite to show myself clearly and not to be hiding partially behind your head, Agent York. It's a logical thing to do."
"How about asking me to turn around?" the man asked a bit grumpily, turning around a bit so everyone could see the green figure.
"Hello, soldiers, I am the Artificial Intelligence Program Delta. I am pleased to meet you." Delta introduced himself to the assembled group.
Grif couldn't help but ask, "Does this guy always ramble like that?"
"Excuse me, but I do believe this is the polite way of talking."Delta replied, obviously confused by Grif's commentary.
York sighed and answered Grif's question in Delta's place, "Yeah, he does."
"You have my sympathy." Grif stated dryly, earning him a hit into his ribs by Simmons with his human elbow.
"What?" the Hawaiian asked with his lazy voice, not really caring about Simmons' hit.
"Some people at least have some manners…unlike you, fat-ass!" the redhead chided him.
"I have manners. I just don't fucking care to show them, nerd!" Grif shot back, staring right back into Simmons' visor.
"Are those two guys always like that?" North asked, a bit confused by the bickering starting to take place between them.
"You mean our old married couple?" Tucker asked jokingly.
This earned a combined shout from both Simmons and Grif of "We're not married!"
"Uh-huh, sure." Tucker replied, nonplussed by the shout he had just received.
"Anyway, back to topic." Wash then took over before everything got too out of hand, "How come your AIs are still here?"
"Those were copies we set up with D's help. But after they were ripped from our necks when our clones were dead, the copies of the AIs sent all the information they had gathered to their original AI. Which is why we know what happened until our deaths, but after that we do not have any clues." York explained, another stern expression crossing over his features and showing his struggle with the lack of ten years he now had to face.
North's face got rather stern at this remark as well, and he nodded when Simmons commented, "So a thorough copy, including every detail for a good cover-up."
York's seriousness that he had taken up when it came to the topic of the ten lost years, however, disappeared suddenly the moment he saw a teal armored figure escaping the building Wash had come from before, the well-known gait and posture giving away that this was the person he had been impatiently waiting for all this time.
"Carolina!" York called out, starting to run towards his former boss and love.
This caused the teal armored Freelancer to stop dead in her tracks and gape at the men standing there that she had long thought to be dead.
"God, I am so happy you're here too and well!" York had almost arrived at where she was standing.
Only five seconds later, the tan armored man was sprawled on the ground wheezing and desperately trying to get back air in his lungs.
Wash and the others stood there, frozen in shock, just as they had been minutes ago.
"Did Carolina seriously just hit York?" Grif asked incredulously, looking at the pair some feet away.
"Ouch, what the fuck, Carolina?" York asked, finally having gotten air back into his lungs after Carolina hit his solar plexus with deadly accuracy.
"What the fuck? I could ask you the same!" she exclaimed.
Wash and all the others blinking extremely surprised considering the fact that they never witnessed the usually so composed Freelancer freaking out, "You're showing up here after fucking years and acting like nothing happened?" she shouted before turning on her heel and leaving the place.
Nobody dared to follow her as nobody wanted to get shortened a head just then.
"You have the same big impact on her as always, York." North remarked dryly, watching York stand up again and breath in deeply.
It took only moments for the easy grin to return to the tan armored figure's lips, "Yeah, I know. I am pretty stunning, after all!"
North chuckled lowly, shaking his head and turning back to the guys still standing around him in stunned silence.
"So… how about you guys introduce yourselves now as you all know pretty much all there is to know about the two of us?" he suggested helpfully.