A/N: And so it continues on for our dear Wash. Thanks for all the kind words, they are appreciated. Forgive the hokey 22nd century war science. Enjoy.
Consciousness is a strange and somewhat mysterious thing for her – and not especially in a good way. It comes and goes like never-ending waves moving through the ocean. Up and down. In and out. Ad nauseam ad infinitum.
When she surfaces, she does so inhaling greedy gulps of oxygen, and then almost immediately, she slides back underneath. In the few precious seconds she has available to her, she tries to lift her head up (not exactly knowing why just that she must), but even the effort of trying to do something so seemingly simple is enough to force her back beneath.
She hears a voice speaking to her from somewhere above her – it's distorted and grotesque, almost frightening (a strange thing indeed because even though she has no true sense of self right now, she seems to know and understand that she is not one to scare easily). She forces open her eyes in order to try to see who is speaking to her, and that too, is enough to throw her back in darkness.
She feels what she thinks is a hand touching her, but she doesn't know which part of her. Her cheek maybe? Her forehead? The contact is cool, and should be comforting, but it's far from it really. She vaguely feels like her skin is crawling.
And then again, there's darkness.
He exits the tent, his expression furious. Her consciousness had been fleeting, lasting last than five minutes and even that time had been fractured and broken, punctuated by several failed attempts on her part to either open her eyes or sit up. She hadn't managed a single word.
Annoying, but something he knows how to correct.
"Sir?" he hears from his side. He turns and sees the scientist that he'd assigned to watch over Lieutenant Washington standing with the Phoenix soldier known as Hooper. In the absence (likely death) of Weaver, Hooper is now in charge of the team – at least from a military POV. Frankly, Lucas could give a damn. He has no real use for these people now, would be just as glad if they'd find their way to the bottom of a ravine somewhere. Or into the jaws of a dinosaur. The only reason that he'd returned to them at all had been to get medical care.
And to get to her.
It had been upon his orders that Lieutenant Washington had been removed from Terra Nova. His initial plan had been to relocate her to an outpost, figure out what to do with her from there. At the time he'd made the decision, he'd assumed that he'd be engaged in guerrilla type warfare with his father for months.
He hadn't figured on losing Terra Nova just hours after shooting the lieutenant in the head. Still, his foresight had been fortuitous as far as he's concerned. Now he intends to gain from it. Assuming these damn soldiers don't get in the way.
Turns out Soldiers of Fortune can be just as damned annoying as ones who claim to have morals and codes of honor like his father and Washington.
"What?" Lucas demands stepping towards the men.
"Why'd you kill the woman?" Hooper demands, his eyes sliding over to where Mira's body lies, now under a dark tarp. He knows that when her people finally show up (they've been off scouting the edges of the Badlands – anxious to do just about anything besides sit around and wait) that there will be hell to pay.
"She was disloyal."
"What the hell are you talking about? She did everything she was told to do. Even after finding out her way home got scotched by your old man."
"I showed her the lieutenant and she wasn't on-board," Lucas answers, annoyance in his tone.
"I'm not on-board, Lucas. None of us are. We're no longer your men. You're not paying us, and your vendetta isn't ours."
"If you have something to say, say it."
"Fine. Kill the woman."
"No."
"Why not? You already tried to."
"That was all theatre. For my fathers' sake." It's a lie, of course, but Hooper doesn't need to know that.
Hooper grunts in disgust.
"Lucas," the scientist interjects. "She needs medical assistance. Assistance that no one in this camp including myself knows how to give her. She has massive swelling and bleeding in the brain. Left untreated, she's going to die."
"Well then I guess we'll have to treat her with what we have here."
"You're not hearing me, sir. We don't have anything here. I can read a scanner and I know a bit more than basic first aide, but this isn't my field. I'm not a medic."
"And we're not holding prisoners. Especially not ones that have to be carried around and fed by tube." Hooper tells him. "So you make your choice; kill the bitch or we're leaving you behind with her when we break camp in the morning."
For a moment, Lucas considers letting the rage surging through him out. It'd be so easy to bring Hooper and the scientist down. But then what? There are soldiers everywhere, all of them armed. Even he knows he can't take everyone.
And he has no intention of dying.
Not before he finishes dealing with his father.
Yes, it's a vendetta and even he knows that it's gone much too far. But stopping now would make it all pointless. He has so much blood on his hands, has done so many things that cross so many lines.
One way or another, he needs to see this through.
He's going to avenge his mother if it's the last thing he does.
"Fine," Lucas nods. "Leave us behind and do what you need to do."
Hooper blinks at that, hadn't expected it. He recovers quickly enough, though, seemingly actually (not surprisingly) a bit pleased. "We can only leave you limited supplies."
"All I need is the med tent she's in. You have no real use of it. Like you said, you don't have the ability to care for anyone suffering a long-term injury."
"Fine. You know this is madness, right?"
Lucas smiles at him almost sadly. "I do."
"We'll keep looking," Jim Shannon insists as he follows the Commander into his office. It's still quite the mess, but it slowly but surely is being put back together. Everything in Terra Nova is.
Almost everything.
There are still bodies missing. Twenty-two had been recovered from the mass grave, but that leaves almost a dozen souls unaccounted for.
Including Wash.
Taylor simply nods in response. He doesn't give voice to what he's thinking; they'll never find her body because the wildlife of the jungle already has.
"Commander, we will find her," Jim assures him, determination in his tone.
Taylor sighs. "Shannon, you know how many soldiers I've lost? Good men and women who died long before they should have?"
"Probably too many."
"Damn right too many. And you know how many of those too many I haven't been able to bring home?"
"I don't, sir."
"Also too many. But I've always tried because I have always believed that the family has the right to bury their dead. They have the right to have closure."
"We'll get that. Whatever it takes, sir," Jim answers. There's a kind of desperation in the younger man's blue-green eyes, like he needs to find the friend who'd laid down her life his family just as much as the Commander does. Truth is, he does.
"All right then, Shannon. Keep looking," Taylor finally says after a long moment of thought. "At least find her tags."
"I will."
There's a knock on the door-frame, which makes them both look up. They see Elizabeth Shannon standing in the doorway, a plexpad in her hands.
"Commander, I've finished the inventory," she states as she enters.
"And?"
"They took a large amount of painkillers, several field kits and some of the anti-toxins," Elizabeth states as she hands him the plexpad.
"Pretty standard," Taylor nods, placing the pad down on his desk. If he's completely honest with himself, he's not terribly interested in the minutia of the rebuilding – not yet at least. That time will come, but just…not yet.
"There's one more thing, and I have to admit, it puzzles me a bit. They took an entire box of Level One stimulants. I didn't even know we had them until we completed the inventory and they came up missing."
"Stims, huh?" Taylor muses, a hand sliding up to touch his beard. "I believe that batch came over with the 1st pilgrimage. After the rest of the team caught up with me, I mean. Level One stims are hardcore. They're what Wash and me were supposed to be using in the middle of the war. They kept you on your feet and semi-lucid even if your head had been half bashed in."
"Aren't those the ones that ended up causing some of the soldiers after the war to have complete psychotic breaks?" Elizabeth queries, frowning.
Jim nods his head. "I hunted down a few of them. Drugged out of their minds, unable to sleep, paranoid, the works."
"You probably ran into a few of the kids that got exposed to the stim cocktails. Late in the war, some of the brass realized that if you mixed of a few of the so-called flavors together, you could build yourself quite obedient soldier. Did what they were told to without question. Pretty awful to see in person."
"Sounds like," Elizabeth says, disgust clear in her tone.
"I wouldn't let the kids in my unit use them," Taylor states. "Always figured what's the point in fighting to live if you don't realize you've won because you've lost your damned mind in the process. When I found out some had been sent with us here, I locked them away. Haven't thought about them in years, to be honest."
"Why would the Phoenix soldiers take them?" Elizabeth asks.
"They're in the middle of a jungle they know nothing about, probably figure it'll give them an edge until they figure things out," Jim offers.
"I'd guess he's right," Taylor nods. "In any case, no real loss for us. Anything else missing, Doc?"
"No, sir."
"Good. Then if you two don't mind, I have a lot of paperwork to get to."
They both know he's lying; there's just a few slips of paper on his desk, most of it covered in doodles and a few numbers. There's likely nothing overly pressing, but that's not really the point of his request anyway. No, they both know what he actually wants right now is the quiet of his own thoughts and memories.
"Yes, sir," Jim answers immediately, reaching out to take Elizabeth's hand.
"Find her, Shannon."
"I will." And with that, the couple exits together.
Once they're gone and he's once again alone, Taylor leans back in his chair, flinching ever so slightly as the wound on his side whistles at him. It's been well taken care of, stitched and sealed by expert hands, and yet he'd be lying if he didn't admit that it feels like it's been fixed up all wrong.
Not the way Wash would do it.
Which is absurd really because she almost never fixes him up once he's back in Colony. She leaves that to the actual doctors. It's usually only when they're OTG that she falls back into old ways. Or at least had.
Had.
He needs to start thinking about her in the past tense.
After all, it's not like she's going to just walk through the doors any minute now with some kind of status update.
No, she's gone and she's not coming back.
He runs his fingers through his hair. It's long and needs to be clipped, but he has no real care to find the barber. His beard needs trimming, and he'll get around to it eventually he's sure.
Eventually, the man he is and has always been will force him to stay in control. To be the calm and collected leader that Terra Nova needs.
But it's only been a few days.
And she still hasn't been found.
He hopes people understand that he needs just a few days.
And he needs her home.
True to their word, the Phoenix guys move out just before dawn. They leave him with almost everything that is in the med-tent as well as a case of canned food. It won't last him long, but he doesn't need it to. He knows how to hunt. He knows how to live out here far better than they do.
He'll survive even while they're dwindling down and dying off.
He knows that he, too, needs to get moving. He doesn't want to be an easy target when Carter and his people finally return to discover that their leader was murdered. While Lucas is afraid of almost no one, he hasn't time to deal with the stupidity that comes with the Sixers.
There's so many other things to think about.
He steps into the med tent, and crosses over to where Wash is lying – appearing to be once again in a light coma. He examines the tubes going into her – fluids and sustenance. There's only enough of these things for another few days.
Not that he'll need it.
It's time for the lieutenant to wake up and hold her own.
He steps away from her, makes his way over to a box against the wall. It's metal and secured with three locks, but they're simple and he's inside within moments.
The first thing he sees wrapped around several red, yellow, green and blue syringes is a thin black strip of tape which cries out in large white block letters: LEVEL ONE STIMULANTS. ONLY TO BE USED WITH PROPER MEDICAL SUPERVISION. PLEASE NOTE THAT EXTREME PERSONALITY ALTERING SIDE EFFECTS ARE TYPICAL AND TO BE EXPECTED.
He lifts up one of the yellows – supposedly the most mild of the family. These things are almost disgustingly simple to administer – made so that even the stupidest soldier (or even one suffering a normally debilitating head injury like Wash is) can get themselves moving in the middle of a warzone.
He steps over to Wash, lifts her left arm, finds a vein and slams the syringe into it. The liquid that drips into her veins is small – just a drop or two – but it hits her system almost immediately, forcibly pulling her out of the light coma she's in. It's no wonder, he muses, that the entire medical association had denounced these things as a monstrosity of science.
Her eyes rip open, wide and panicked. The heart monitors register the way her blood pressure is quickly rising. All of these would be terrifying signs normally, but when these stimulants are involved, they're just business as usual.
"Lieutenant," Lucas says with a small grin.
"Lucas," she gasps out, her voice cracking badly. She winces against the lights within the tent, her eyes unable to seal out the brightness. She's quite suddenly hyper aware and hyper sensitive.
Which intrigues the hell out of him.
"Right here," he says, then reaches out and touches her arm. He's not surprised – though fascinated – when she shivers violently in reaction. He thinks that every hair on her arms is standing up, every part of her humming with an energy that probably hurts in an almost unbearable way. He figures that she's likely never felt so unnaturally alive in all her life.
Unless she's taken this thing before, which at some point or another – even if not with his father – she probably has. The reading he's done on the war suggests that almost every soldier who'd participated had been exposed to at least one or two stims during their time. Some had quite willingly become addicted.
Probably not her, though.
No, not his father's favorite soldier. His dad would never have allowed that.
"What did you give me?" she demands, more emotion than is normal from her spitting out in her tone. She's struggling like crazy to control all the feelings and energy that is ripping through her.
"A Level One stim. And really? That's your first question? I would have guessed you'd ask if I'd died, too, and if we were both in hell together."
She considers this idea for a moment, but unable to find a reason for using stims in hell (even if they are some kind of hell themselves) she instead settles on the realization that somehow or another – rather inexplicably really – she's alive.
"Why?" she demands, her body trembling, her teeth chattering.
"Because I need you up and off your ass. We have a long trip ahead of us, and I have no intention of carrying you the whole way."
"I'm not going anywhere with you."
"Oh, yes, you are."
"What are you going to do if I refuse? Try to kill me again?"
"So you remember then?"
She blinks at that because no, she hadn't really remembered. Not exactly anyway. She'd just kind of…known.
"You'll remember everything eventually. Until the stims wear off anyway. You know what happens when they do, right?"
"I return to whatever state I was in beforehand."
"That's right. And look down, Lieutenant. See your state."
She does, and is somewhat mildly surprised to see herself lying in a bed, tubes running into her. She lifts her hand up to her face, and winces, almost passing out from the pain that races through her when her fingers touch against one of the nasty marks on her temple.
"I shot you in the face with a sonic pistol. Somehow or another, you survived, but you're in bad shape. If I just leave you, you'll probably live a few days, maybe weeks. You'll likely starve to death or suffer a few massive strokes. None of which will feel terribly good I'm sure."
"Then just kill me. Finish the job."
"No."
"I won't help you hurt him. You know that."
"I do. You're too loyal to willingly do it, but then I wasn't planning on giving you the choice, Lieutenant." He holds up a blue syringe. "You were a medic in the war weren't you, Alicia? You remember what happens when you mix stimulants? You remember why unit leaders used to do it?"
She swallows but doesn't reply.
"I know your brain is pretty fucked up right now so let me remind you; they combined the stims in order to make soldiers more pliable, more willing to do as ordered. That way when the Commanders told their men to run screaming into a group of enemy soldiers while they slid away back to their safe little foxholes, you idiot grunts did what you were told without argument. "
"Don't do this," she pleads. She's not begging him, but it's as close to it as she'll ever come. During her time at the clinic, she'd seen more than a handful of soldiers come in after being exposed to stim cocktails. She can still recall feeling for the men and their terribly fractured psyches. As such, she truly fears what's about to be done to her. The idea of losing her mind and being forced to do something that she'll never be able to forgive herself for horrifies her on a level she's not completely sure she understands.
"Shh, relax. It'll all be okay. You have my word that when this is all over, I'll either kill you myself or let someone back in the Colony take care of you. Not that there will probably be much to take care of."
"Lucas…"
"Loyalty is a truly fascinating thing isn't it?" he says as he removes the cover from the syringe. "It makes us put ourselves in the line of fire for people. It made you take a bullet to protect his dream. I have to admit, there's something almost poetic about getting to use you to destroy him. I thought killing you would do that, but this, this is so much better."
"Lucas…"
"You know why? Because he'll never raise a hand to stop you. You could come at him with a knife and he'd let you kill him because his 'guilt' over you is so damned strong. Real shame he didn't feel that for my mom."
She shakes her head desperately (and painfully). "No, Lucas, listen to me. He did. He loved her so much. He…"
He doesn't let her finish the sentence, instead grabs her jaw and squeezes it. Quite involuntarily, she cries out. "Never speak of her," he growls.
Her only response is a tear rolling down her face. She hates that it's there, but the stims have made every part of her scream with pain and the rough contact on her jaw is almost unbearable. In spite of the chemicals rushing through her, she can feel shadows dancing in front of her eyes, beckoning her towards him.
All of that passes a moment later when she feels a stabbing pain as the chemicals within the blue syringe are pushed into her bloodstream. There's an odd coolness, and then suddenly, it feels like she's drifting, sliding away.
The only problem is, she's very very conscious.
By the time the first week passes, they all know that the chances of finding the missing bodies have become very slim indeed. It's only stubbornness that drives Jim Shannon on, making him leave Terra Nova every morning at just after sunrise and return just before darkness.
He's desperate the find the woman who had laid down her life for him and family.
And yet day after day, he comes home empty handed.
It breaks his heart.
On the seventh day, Taylor makes the decision to hold a funeral for her sans the body. The men need it, he reasons. They need to be able to say their goodbyes.
Wash would have hated the gathering, despised the tears and the clear sorrow. She would have wanted something simple like a plain salute and then back to business. Maybe a rose or two just for the sake of beauty.
What she gets is almost every man, woman and child in Terra Nova coming together to pay their respects. Everyone knows that it was her distraction which had allowed for Jim Shannon to escape and put the plan to save the Colony into action. They've even made it clear that it was her idea.
It's lovely really. Beautiful music and a eulogy that almost destroys Taylor to deliver. He's a man who's been forced to say a thousand goodbyes and yet this one just about does him in. Halfway through, he stops for almost a minute, his throat literally too closed up to allow words through.
When he resumes, he apologizes and makes a joke. He makes no attempt to wipe the tears away from his eyes even though he knows he should.
Afterwards, Taylor excuses himself, tells Shannon that he's in charge for the day. Tells the sheriff that he just needs a few hours of air.
Some space.
Jim doesn't ask why, doesn't ask anything really.
Just nods and says, "yes, sir."
He's never seen the stim cocktail in action before, and even he has to admit that it's a bit frightening to behold.
The lieutenant, who should by all rights be lying pretty damned close to death (as she had been just a few hours earlier) in a bed, is instead on her feet, pacing back and forth. She's anxious and agitated, but her reflexes are almost ridiculously sharp and her instincts are on a bizarre kind of super overdrive.
Every time there's a noise nearby, she snaps around, her hand reaching down for a sidearm that he hasn't allowed her to carry. Watching her now, he's pretty sure he's not going to give her one at all. She might end up killing everything within a five square mile radius (including himself) like this, he figures.
"Lieutenant Washington," he says, stepping over to her. He notices that her skin still appears to be hyper sensitive, and there's a flush to her face. She's breathing quickly, her heart likely hammering away in her chest.
These symptoms will pass, the study literature claims. Eventually, she'll barely be breathing at all, her body settling into a state of calm that defies physiology.
She turns towards him eyes still wide, but somehow sharply focused on him. Her personality seems to have been buried beneath the drug. The studies done on it have all said the same thing – if this damn thing didn't cause so many psychotic breaks, it'd be one hell of a super solider builder.
"Sir," she answers, her voice ridiculously crisp.
"You ready to move out?"
"Yes, sir."
"Fantastic. All we're taking with us are the packs over there. Can you carry one?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good," Lucas answers, handing her one of the packs(the one with the field kits and the rations – he wants to keep the stims on him, just in case the real Wash personality finds a way to reassert itself). "Then let's get going. It's going to take us a few days to get back to Terra Nova."
TBC…
