AN: While this chapter is Dearka's, I swear I have read somewhere canon that Yzak's thing (aside from being second best to Athrun at EVERYTHING) is defusing bombs, which is delightfully ironic, so I try to weave that into a fic anytime I can. Tada.
Chance is the only game I play with, baby:
we let our battles choose us.
His first kill is not at all how he envisions it.
It's not in a mobile suit, for starters. It's in a dank underground facility on an abandoned colony in some nowhere corner of Lagrangian space. It's not a shot from a big gun, either. He's good with canons: the bigger the weapon, the better. He'd sit battle tactics and operate a Tannhauser if they'd let him; but he's a Red, so he makes due by piloting mobile suits with big, big guns. He totes around an M1500 Orthos high-energy, long-range beam cannon that he's nicknamed Otis.
So of course it's a surprise when his first kill - his first two kills, actually - are with a hand gun.
"I feel like it's already been established that the Le Creuset team is awful at reconnaissance." A shot pings off the wall a few inches from his face, flinging stone debris across his eyes. "So why are we here?"
He's speaking to no one, really. Athrun, Rusty and Nicol are somewhere above them in the maze of abandoned catwalks and underground tunnels. Behind him, a battery illuminates the gloom, and Yzak takes long, deep breaths through his nose. Dearka can see the sheen of sweat on his face in the lamplight.
A few more shots drill themselves into the wall in front of him. He returns fire before ducking back under cover, but he's firing blind: he can't see anything up in the darkness of the massive, circular chamber, and for all he knows he's firing up where their teammates have taken cover. The comms stopped working long before they reached this far down into the rock and metal of the colony.
"Oh, right - it's a Le Creuset special. Orders from high above. Tell no one. Send your youngest, most inexperienced, most unpredictable team of soldiers - excuse me, pilots - to do a recon mission in an abandoned colony that's actually full of Blue Cosmos insurgents."
"I can't concentrate if you don't shut your mouth, Elsman."
He looks over his shoulder. He can see part of Yzak's face behind the open porthole of the armoured container. The other pilot's eyes are fixed in intense concentration. Dearka thinks he may not actually be blinking.
"I bet you've had better time in Academy drills."
"Probably because I wasn't diffusing a real nuke in the Academy."
Another shot, this time from close by. He stands up to return fire, hears the clatter of a weapon hit the metal catwalk. It's a start.
He turns back to his teammate. "How much longer?"
Yzak wipes the sweat from around his eyes and exhales through his mouth. It's not a coincidence their team was chosen, Dearka knows. They were expecting insurgents. It was lucky the nuke was detected upon activation at all.
"A little more."
Dearka empties the mag from his handheld and slams a new one in, ramming the butt home. Sending Yzak made sense. The only time he wasn't threatening to fly off the hilt was while he defused an explosive. It was remarkable, really. Dearka figured Yzak could never calm down because he used all his calm to deactivate bombs.
Athrun made sense, too. His sharpshooting was impeccable. The mission, essentially, should've been Yzak working the nuke while Athrun held off the contingent of Blue Cosmos crazies.
Except the two would've torn each other's throats out before the mission began, he chuckles to himself. So they'd sent the cavalry in. And yet here he was, the worst marksman of the five of them, and the only thing between a successful mission and their collective death by nuclear detonation.
"Why did I enlist again?"
He crouches down to return fire and this time he can see the silhouette of a figure, assault rifle at the ready. He ducks as the wall above him is peppered, almost expecting not to make it, when the other soldier lets out a muffled groan and collapses in a heap.
Athrun. He looks up. The others must be up there, somewhere. No one else could make that shot.
"Yzak," he says calmly, summoning the nonchalance of his second nature. "I have one mag left. If you don't finish, or the others don't get down here by then, we are dead."
"I'm not dying in a place like this," Yzak mutters distractedly, as though on autopilot. Then he looks up, catching Deark's gaze. There's a hint of pleading there, if Dearka isn't imagining things. "I'm almost there."
Later, much later, he'll reflect on how lucky he was to have turned around at that moment.
Two insurgents on the left, coming fast. He swings around, fires off three shots. The first soldier goes down, the other toppling over him, down but not dead – he can hear them grunt and scramble to get back up.
"Time's up!"
He backs deeper into the alcove, a few feet from the nuclear weapon. He can hear Yzak slam tiny metal compartments shut, but slamming things is the silver-haired pilot's neutral reaction, so Dearka can't guess if something's gone wrong.
"Your left!"
The shrill cry is Yzak's, and as Dearka spins around he is thrown to the ground by a heavily armored figure. He feels a rifle dig into his side, knees crush the air out of his lungs and he thrashes until he can get the pistol snug against the insurgent's torso. Lucky that I'm right-handed, he thinks briefly, before he fires off a shot. Then another. The other man slumps heavily onto him. He feels his bones reverberate with the kickback of the pistol, pressed closed between them.
With a grunt he shoves the soldier off him, rolling the body onto its back. Blank eyes stare up at him and he recognizes the unmistakably empty gaze of death. Blood pools on the floor at his knees.
"Got him!" he yells, almost triumphantly. It's messy, but if it means saving his own skin, then it's a good first kill.
"Ah –"
He turns in time to catch the black shadow weave – impossibly quick, he thinks furiously – and come up behind Yzak. Thick, gloved hands grab onto his teammate's silver head, twisting. The glint of polished steel reflects off lamplight and white hair. Yzak brings his hands up to his face, trying to pry the gloved fingers away, and yelps in pain when the hands jerk his head back. The hooded figure leans over him, face lost in the blackness of the shadows.
Dearka sees the knife the dark – he could make it there in one lunge, perhaps, he's a good runner - but he also sees that this figure is strong enough to break his teammate's neck without it.
Slowly, he brings his right foot beneath him, the left still bent under him. The gun is in his right hand. Outside the alcove, he can hear bullets chime off the metal railings. Somewhere above them, Athrun is screaming orders. He thinks if he focuses enough, he can hear every word.
He's having one of those moments, he realizes - those moments soldiers talk about, on the brink of death or some impossible situation. Time slows down, suddenly, or perhaps he speeds up, but whatever's happening he's somehow aware of it all, as if from multiple perspectives at once. The movements around him are painfully slow and predictable and his senses are impossibly sharp: he feels every drop of sweat that falls from his face and hears every individual breath from the three of them, alone in the cramped gloom. It cannot be more than a split second, but it feels as if he has five minutes to consider all possibilities, during which he realizes he is not inclined to hear the sound of every bone breaking in his companion's neck.
He is the worst marksman out of all of them, but his raises his gun anyway and puts a bullet between the eyes of the man in the shadows.
The hooded figure crumples, and as he falls back Yzak falls forward, hands clawing at his throat. Dearka is beside him in an instant, lifting his silver head as he gasps for air. Beside them, the control panel of the nuclear weapon flashes a cheerful orange.
"Did you get it?"
Still unable to speak, Yzak raises a hand to the panel and flips the smallest, most nondescript switch Dearka can see. The flashing becomes a bright blue before Yzak slams the control panel shut, bringing his hand back to the earth as he keels over.
Dearka gets an arm under him and lift him slightly, peering over the edge of the nuke's armoured hull. The steady symphony of gunfire had subsided, and he can hear the shots from a long-range assault rifle fire at small intervals to the sound of grunts and moans, bullets burying themselves into flesh. Athrun picking off the stragglers, he figures. He kneels again, letting Yzak settle back down on the ground to wait until it's clear.
Dearka tries to stop the smirk that tugs at the corner of his lips, but he can't.
"So. I guess we're even now."
Yzak brings one hand to his throat, where the welts left by his assailant's fingertips burn bright red. With the other, he grabs onto the nape of Dearka's neck by the collar of his pilot's suit, and uses it to lift himself up a little more, face close to his teammate's. When he goes to open his mouth he can't speak yet, his breath still shallow, so he fixes his gaze on Dearka.
It could've been shut your mouth, Elsman, just as easily as it could have been thank you, Dearka chuckles to himself. For now, he thinks his teammate's breath in the silence is enough.
end.