Variation IV: Spark

At first, Tex adores Omega. He's angry and brilliant and while he really doesn't do much to make her better, he makes it feel better when she wins. Fighting's like drinking, for a while, sharp and burning all the way down, warm and heady inside her, a low murmur filling in the silence, whispering along with the ever-present rhythm at the back of her head, This is good, this is right.

She steps in, as usual, to cover the other Freelancers' tracks, but York and Carolina and Wash stumble in early, bringing the objective to the rooftop... not to mention a whole shitload of unwanted company. She stares around at them, realizes belatedly that York must have been released from the infirmary at some point. She can't remember why that seemed so important to her, before. Omega hums in her head, and what she does remember is the feeling of his armor buckling beneath her fist, the echoes of it running up and down her arm like lightning.

She waits for her moment, waits until the enemy's distracted by Carolina's camouflage job, and then she cloaks, and then she kills. She does a lot of killing. It feels good. It feels right. Omega is laughing, a deep, contagious belly-laugh, and she grins along with him as the Mother of Invention fires from orbit, as the heat of the blast washes over her. She sprints, grabs a jetpack, and shoves the package off the top of the crumbling building, diving after it, then past it, watching the ground rise up faster and faster.

Behind her and above her, she hears the sound of slow collapse, but it's drowned out by the thrumming of the rhythm in her head. She banks, looks up, watches Carolina, then Wash, try to line up the plummeting package with the carefully maneuvering dropship's open cargo bay doors. They're not gonna make it.

Exasperated, she activates her jetpack full-burst and body-checks the package into the cargo bay just as the dropship has to brake or risk a collision with the ground. Her jetpack sparks and shorts out, and she rolls to her feet, already yelling orders for the pilot who, to her credit, obeys immediately and without question.

Tex's jetpack maneuver apparently slammed Wash into the dropship along with the package, because when she stalks back into the cargo bay he's standing in the corner, rubbing his helmeted head and looking at her funny. "So," he says, conversationally, "That building sure blew up."

Omega thinks about how Wash looked with a bullet in him, and for a moment the image is strange, disturbing, and she feels him backing off, retreating with a mutter to the back of her mind. "Yeah," she says to Wash, grabbing the busted jetpack and turning it over, looking for anything remotely fixable. No dice. "Sure did."

"So," he says again. "Jetpacks, huh?"

She drops the busted jetpack on the ground, takes a running start, and dives out the back of the dropship, grinning all the way down. She'll figure a way out of freefall before she hits bottom. She always has.

Inspiration hits in the form of a rough but passable landing on a conveniently swinging window-washer's platform, and she makes it back to ground level with a series of leaps and bounds, practically humming with excitement. When she calls the Mother of Invention, she's nearly certain her voice is shaking, she's so keyed-up, but the Director approves the launch of the ordnance pod, so she can't sound all that bad. Ordnance is what she needs right now.

The pod opens, and she grins at her motorcycle. Yeah. Ordnance.

It's really good to be riding again, really fucking good, and she and Omega laugh with one voice as she follows up on Team A's trackers. Team B, apparently, is down, but North calls in for medical evac and it sounds like they've got things nearly wrapped up there. She's never liked Wyoming much anyway, Omega reminds her, and she cranks up the speed, handily drowning him out with the roar of her engine.

Within seconds, she spots Carolina and Maine—where the hell did Maine come from?—clinging to the back of a jeep while York does some pretty impressive driving for someone with no depth perception. They're surrounded by more of the guys with jetpacks, because of course they are, and she skids into the fray with a couple ramps that she'd never have dared to try, before (before what?). Now that she's closer, Tex can see that Carolina's on the jeep's turret, and Maine's slumped over, his biometric readings showing critical. Bullet-wound to the chest, large-caliber round. Sniper. Won't be enough to keep him down, she suspects—the guy's gotta be part ox or something. Still. It means Carolina's mostly on her own, and that's not gonna get the job done.

Tex takes down a few pursuers, coming up behind the jeep, and spots the briefcase latched to the back of Maine's armor. Package secured, at least. That should make this part easy. She guns it, but she's limited by the top speed of her bike, her reflexes straining and screaming at her to go faster, faster. She watches as Carolina tries to recover the briefcase, fumbles it, retrieves it, leaps to a flatbed truck to take the heat off York and Maine. And then Maine's back in the fight, his punches clumsier than usual but no less lethal.

Tex almost fools herself into thinking Carolina and Maine can handle it, and then one of the guys with the jetpacks shoves a pistol under Maine's chin, firing again and again. Maine crumples, and Carolina yells and throws herself at his assailant like it's not too late, like one moment of inattention isn't all it takes (and why does that lesson feel so familiar?). Omega ruthlessly focuses Tex's attention on the blood coating Maine's white armor, but damned if Maine isn't staggering to his feet, firing off one last explosive shot—

The truck bed sways wildly, a couple tires punctured, and collides with another car, sending everyone freewheeling forward; Maine strikes a truck, plummets off the freeway, and Tex snarls and guns her bike again as a jetpacked Insurrectionist snatches the briefcase from the air and tumbles straight into a full retreat, clinging to an ally's Hornet. He's finally within range, so Tex fires a few wild shots, forcing the Hornet to squeeze itself into a tunnel. Pursuit narrowed, focus narrowed. Easy.

She passes into the tunnel, everything amplified, everything echoing, Omega's voice louder and louder and louder in her ears, and she's nearly got this, the hairpin twitches of the handlebars that slam her around trucks and cars, the careful aim—

There's something pale blue in the corner of her eye, something moving faster and faster, dodging across from her, keeping up on foot with their breakneck pace. Carolina. Of course it's fucking Carolina, Carolina who's worked out how to use her armor's equipment in the field, Carolina who wouldn't know how to lose gracefully if her life depended on it. The rivalry bullshit she keeps trying to play on Tex is annoying, confusing, irritating because... because some part of Tex likes the overt challenge, because it's something she can win.

She yells at Carolina to fall back, gets a predictable cocky response, pushes past her as they clear the tunnel, and—there, yes, a ramp, perfectly lined up. Tex feels a moment of regret as she leaps free and lets the motorcycle go, watches it smash the Hornet out of the air, but the damn guy with the jetpack still has the briefcase, and now he's speeding away faster, too fast, and she's got her feet back under her—

Carolina darts past, little more than a blur, hyper-focused, and follows the guy off the freeway with a haphazardly aimed grappling hook. They're out of sight in seconds, and Tex pulls up a map of the area. The jetpack guy's obviously panicked, so he won't be trying anything fancy, and Carolina's a human bullet, straight to target. It's not hard to work out where they're gonna cross the freeway again, and Tex jogs into place, watches the spiraling plumes of destruction off in the distance, along the tops of buildings, growing closer and closer.

Carolina actually catches the guy as they pass over the freeway, but they're still moving too fast, and she doesn't seem to have figured that out yet because she throws a punch that slams them both off balance. Omega drags Tex's attention to the sound of Carolina's armor skidding against the pavement, the rattle as she curls desperately into a ball in the face of an oncoming truck. All of that souped-up momentum finally expends itself in an uncontrolled tumble, and Carolina slides to a stop flat on her face on the pavement.

The briefcase, separated from its owner in the struggle, is also lying on the pavement. Tex bends down, scoops it up, and calls for extraction. The Director praises her on a job well done—as well he should, Omega points out smugly, considering Tex single-handedly completed both teams' objectives. Behind her, Carolina pulls off her helmet and struggles to her feet, one arm clenched in tight against her body, guarding no-doubt broken ribs.

Even before she turns around, Tex knows exactly what expression that must be crossing Carolina's face right now. She knows that loss. She knows that frustration. Omega points out how glad she must be that this time, it's not her feeling it. Omega points out that this time, finally, Tex gets to win.

Omega puts a spring in her step as she drops off the freeway. Omega suggests a song for her to hum on the way home.

Omega helpfully blots out the memory of Carolina's wide, pain-bright, too-familiar eyes.

Note: As a reviewer pointed out, this story is beginning to deviate from canon! I wanted to play with the premise that Omega and Tex really were "something else", that Omega emerged from the Alpha more easily than any of the other fragments (for which they needed the technology stolen during this chapter). Apart from that detail, this story should run relatively close to canon.