Survivor by 2WEI

Confident by Demi Lovato

Rise by Katy Perry

Numb by Holly McNarland

Nobody Saved Me (Mash Up) by Linkin Park & XXXTentacion

Nobody's Listening by Linkin Park

The Day is at Hand by Immediate Music

2020

Verdun

Reset 45

Rita was watching her team laugh and jostle each other as they knife tossed out of sight from the camp. As much as she enjoyed watching this, it killed her to know that it changed in an instant on that battleground tomorrow. She could feel herself slowly starting to harden with each reset. It was inevitable, really. She wondered how long it would be until she stopped caring altogether.

Travis came over and nudged her after a while.

"You look too serious," he commented.

"I'm a serious person."

"Clearly."

Rita resisted scoffing. After she'd left Luke, she'd closed herself off to all others. She didn't want to get close to anyone ever again. Getting left or hurt by them was too much, and she knew she couldn't survive another loss like Luke's, even though she'd been the one to leave. There had been one man she'd been intrigued by at the school she'd taught at, and he'd ended up leaving her hurt too. In the end, she'd decided to just be alone. It was better to be alone in her opinion. And could she really give someone else her heart when Luke Wright still had it?

She looked at Travis as he smiled at her. She wasn't going to deny that Travis was a handsome man, but she was not attracted to him. He'd be lucky if she let him be her best friend, but he was rather persistent in trying to be just that. Rita felt like she could be friends with him despite her feeling it would only hurt her later.

"Farell!" Pete hissed, and they scattered. Rita still felt curious about Farell. She still felt like he had a story behind the pain in his eyes.

"What's with the chain?" Travis asked as they walked side by side back to their temporary barrack. They shared space back at Heathrow too.

"What?" Rita asked, taking her fingers off the chain.

"You touch it a lot," Travis noted. "Does it mean something to you?"

My favorite letter in the alphabet is the letter "R," which is a happy coincidence since you're my favorite person. I think it's a sign.

Luke's voice was forever popping up in her mind still. She swallowed. It did mean something to her. She'd lost the "R" charm long ago, but it now held her wedding band. It was like her dog tag almost. Touching it made her feel safe and grounded. Touching it was her way of touching Luke.

"It's just a touch stone," she answered.

"Ah, a grounding tool."

"Yes."

"Who gave it to you?"

"No one," she lied. She fidgeted with the pocket of her cargo pants and clenched her jaw.

"I think you're not being honest with me," Travis said, reading her mind.

"I am."

"I was married, Rita. I know when a woman is upset," Travis chuckled.

"Chloe," she said. He looked slightly unnerved, but he nodded. Rita knew it always took him a bit to get used to her knowing things he didn't or things he didn't know he'd told her already.

"Promise me you'll update me on things I've told you," he said suddenly. "I don't like not knowing what you know about me."

"Okay," she agreed. "Your wife died, you hate peanut butter, you lost a 15 pound fish with your best friend and his dad when you were 10 years old, that same best friend stole your first girlfriend, and you cry at Marley and Me and Gifted. You love black licorice but hate purple popsicles. You broke your collarbone at age eight when you rode your bike into a parked car. You're an only child, and once, you jumped off a deck with an umbrella to see if you'd fly like Mary Poppins."

"Wow," Travis said. "I told you all that?"

"I didn't ask you to," she answered. "You are insistent on trying to become best friends. Why after all this time of working together you're doing that, I have no idea."

"Am I right in assuming that you don't tell me squat about yourself?"

"That's right."

"I wouldn't remember anyway," he mused. "That must get annoying, me asking you the same questions all the time."

"Oh, it does."

He laughed out loud, clearly amused by this. They'd reached their sleeping quarters at this point, but a ghost of a smile did appear on Rita's lips. Travis crawled into bed and groaned as he got comfortable. Rita wasn't tired, but she knew she couldn't stay awake all night. She didn't operate well when she was tired.

"See you tomorrow," Travis said, yawning.

"Uh huh," she replied. She could hear the others joking around with each other as they wound down for the night. She stared at the ceiling in the darkness and wondered where Luke was and what he was doing right now. She wondered if he was even still alive.

Her brain wouldn't stop. It ran over memories like a movie with no sound. She could picture Luke walking into her house for the first time, the way he cared for the animals and talked to them like they were people like she did, how he would throw Keira up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and make her squeal with laughter as he spun her around or threatened to drop her, and the way he always looked at her like she was the only person in the room.

She felt a sob building. Thinking about Keira always hurt. She hated how her life ended, and she almost wished she'd been with Luke when he'd killed her murderers. It had taken a long time for Lucy to heal, and Rita had fallen into a pit of depression so deep she nearly drowned in it.

Luke had pulled her out.

She tried to even her breathing as she remembered the way he'd kissed her for the first time properly. He'd never given up on her, and he'd put aside all worry about her father in order to finally be honest and tell her how he felt.

"You okay over there?" Travis asked, and Rita mentally cursed herself for being too loud with her tears.

"I'm fine," she answered.

"I know stifled sobs when I hear them."

"It's really nothing," she insisted.

"You know, it's okay to admit you're hurting," he said after a moment. "That doesn't make you weak, Rita."

She said nothing, and he didn't push. He sounded a lot like Luke at times with things he said. It startled her sometimes. She pressed her hands into her eyes and tried hard to forget about Luke for now.

It was extremely hard.

Reset 48

Rita watched Farell carefully. She couldn't help but be drawn to him and his pain despite not wanting to get involved in it. She decided today to just approach him and talk to him. She could always reset, and he'd never remember it.

"Can I help you, Corporal?" he asked, not looking at her as she walked up to him.

"Just looking for some conversation, sir," she answered. He lifted a brow.

"Really."

"Yes, sir."

Farell chuckled and shook his head. He finished signing off the reports in front of him and turned to face her.

"What makes you think I want to converse with you?" he asked.

"It was worth a shot," she answered, shrugging.

"Well," he said, crossing his arms. "Today must be your lucky day. What do you want to talk about? Is your squad misbehaving?"

"No," she answered quickly. "I just couldn't help but notice that you look...tired."

"Aren't we all?" he asked sarcastically.

"Yes, but maybe there's more to it than that."

He surveyed her carefully, and she saw his walls go up.

"I'm not about to have a therapy session with you, Corporal," he said after a moment. "Mind your own business." He turned away, and Rita knew he was shutting down from the conversation. She kicked herself for even trying. Why did she even care?

"Have a good evening, sir," she said, walking away. She dared to look back, though, and he was watching her with an expression on his face that was difficult to read. She went through the door and didn't stop.

Reset 57

It was getting harder to avoid Travis's questions, and Rita was discovering that avoiding talking about her life was making her feel worse. She used to be the person who was chatty and personable. She used to be the person who cared about everyone and everything. So much had happened in her life, though, that made her turn colder and harder to anyone but Brendan with time, and she hadn't known how to be her old self again for the longest time.

Travis, however, was slowly changing that.

He reminded her of Luke and how easy it was to just talk and be herself. She couldn't believe it at first, but he also helped her to feel safe. His easygoing manner was hard not to like. Yes, they'd worked together for a while, but she'd never gotten to fully know him. The hard part was that he didn't remember all her information, but the more she learned about him, the more she wished she had let him in sooner.

"So Luke doesn't know about Brendan," Travis said, scratching his chin absently. "Why not?"

Rita decided to tell him, mostly because she knew he wouldn't remember. She hadn't told him about Simon until right now, though.

"My cousin, Simon, threatened to kill me," she answered quietly. "He threatened to kill Luke, and I knew if he found out I had a baby, he'd threaten my son too."

"Geez, Rita," Travis said, sounding sad. "That's awful to live your life in such fear all the time."

"I don't know why I let him scare me so bad," Rita admitted, running a hand through her hair. "I mean, I should have just told Luke about it, and he probably would have dealt with it."

"You mean kill him? I would have," Travis said with a chuckle.

"But Simon showed me a video of Luke saying these horrible things about me," Rita went on, "and I know it's real because I had it analyzed. I...I didn't want to fight for our relationship after hearing it."

"It must have been some pretty harsh stuff."

"It was," she said quietly.

"So you just up and left?" Travis asked.

"Yes."

"Wow. He must have been devastated."

"I don't know," she said. "I wasn't there." She picked at her jacket absently, trying not to think about how Luke would have reacted to her being gone.

"You know," Travis went on. "It's never too late to go back."

"What do you mean?"

"You can always go back and explain," Travis suggested. "Tell him you're sorry. Let him tell you his side of things."

Rita felt her stomach clench. She knew he was right, but it didn't stop her from feeling scared to have the conversation. Old habits die hard.

"I'll think about it," she said to appease him. She hadn't told him that she had gone back only to find Luke with someone else despite still being married to her. It had broken her inside, and she'd vowed to never go back. That's when she'd allowed herself to be intrigued by Brian, but she wished she hadn't. It had just ended in heart break again.

"That's all I ask," Travis replied with a smile. She said nothing else as he busied himself with a task.

...

Rita stumbled upon Pete sitting amongst crates and looking at a photograph. She stopped in her tracks just as his head snapped up to see her.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

"It's fine," Pete said, wiping at his nose with his arm. He tucked the photo away, and Rita tried not to wonder who was in it. She reached to pull out more ammunition for her gun and replaced the lid afterwards. She noticed him still sitting with his hands folded hanging off his knees, staring at the floor.

"You wanna talk about it?" she offered. She was a team leader after all. It was talking about herself that she didn't like.

"Ah, it's nothing," Pete said dismissively. "Just lost in memories."

"Okay." She started to walk away when he cleared his throat and spoke again.

"He died," he said. She slowed her steps and waited, knowing more was coming. She wasn't disappointed.

"My brother," Pete went on, finally looking at her. "Randy. He died here fighting this stupid war."

"I'm sorry," Rita said sincerely.

"You think you have all the time in the world," Pete said, fidgeting with his fingers. "You think that there will be a next time or another chance, but then there isn't." He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up slightly. His jaw was twitching as he stared straight ahead. "I guess we just shouldn't waste time, eh? Why put off til tomorrow what you can do today?"

"Yea," she said quietly.

"What really pisses me off is the fact that Freddy took the easy way out when my brother got slaughtered," Pete finished. Rita didn't know what to say, but she didn't have to say anything in the end. Pete got to his feet, dusted himself off, and gave her a tight lipped smile.

"I don't normally talk about this," he told her.

"It stays with me," she promised.

"Thank you."

She was a bit surprised when he reached to squeeze her shoulder on his way by, but she knew it was just a fond gesture that he did. It didn't mean anything else.

It made her think a lot about Luke, though.

Reset 60

Rita couldn't eat. She pushed her food around with her fork, trying to go over the battleground in her mind and tune out all the chatter from everyone in the mess hall. It seemed almost impossible to keep her team safe from harm. Almost, but not quite. She could pull it off; she just needed to think harder about it.

"Hey, what's with you?" Harvey asked, leaning into her. She shook her head.

"Just thinking," she answered.

"It looks a bit more serious than 'just thinking,'" he said, using air quotes. She just gave him a look, which earned her a smirk back from him. Harvey didn't seem to be fazed much by things. She wondered why that was.

"You've been around me for too long," she commented, setting her fork down.

"Damn straight. We're a team, Rita. You can talk to us. What's going on?"

"I'm just tired," she said. It wasn't entirely a lie. She was exhausted from constantly doing the same thing every day. She had noticed that if she put herself in a different place at a different time, she had different conversations with her team. Sometimes things differed all on their own while other things were exactly the same. Rita felt like she influenced a change if she did or said something different. It was strange at times. She watched as Harvey leaned into her, giving her a serious expression.

"You know," he said, "between you and me? I think they're putting something in this food to make us tired and sloppy. They want us to lose the war." Rita stared at him, incredulous. He couldn't be serious, could he? She blinked, and he started to laugh and slapped his hand on the table, proud of his joke.

"You've officially gone mad," she said to him, annoyed.

"Just trying to make you look not so serious," he said, nudging her. "Come on, we're probably all gonna die tomorrow, so you might as well enjoy tonight."

Rita knew he had no idea how right he was. She just gave him a grim smile and leaned on her crossed arms as he moved to talk to Kamden about a "hot" blonde he'd gone on a date with once. She envisioned Luke sitting across the room from her and looking back at her, just like he had on her first day of high school. It faded after a moment, and she sighed and turned to see Kamden now arm wrestling with Harvey while Pete supervised. Travis was watching Rita with a thoughtful expression on his face.

She excused herself and walked away just as Kamden slammed Harvey's arm down on the table in victory. Their laughter and whooping followed her out the door and into the night air.

...

Rita sat on her cot and reached to pull out her bag from under it. She rooted around for her journal and tugged it out. She opened it to the next blank page, and she started to write. She wrote all about her resetting. She wrote about the memory of Brendan pulling himself up higher onto a stool by grabbing the far left corner of a shelf above his head and having said shelf come free from the wall and dump all the VHS tapes, each one smacking him on the head on the way down. He'd had sense to hang onto the shelf to avoid getting hit with that, but she'd never forget the shocked look on his face or the way she'd covered her mouth with her hands and tried not to laugh while feeling concerned for him at the same time. She wrote it in great detail, knowing one day it would be read by Luke so he would know and experience the memory. She closed the journal after a moment, knowing she'd have to rewrite it again tomorrow. She'd kept journals all through her pregnancy, and she'd just kept writing after giving birth to the point it was now a habit. Should Luke ever get a hold of them, he'd know everything about his son's life and hers.

She wiped at a tear that slid down her cheek and put the journal away. She'd been so afraid of Simon finding her and Brendan. She'd kept a low profile for so long, and there had been so many nights where she'd been lonely and cold and thrashed around looking for Luke that she'd almost gone out of her mind.

She'd left him, yet she couldn't let him go.

She was under the covers when Travis got there. He didn't say a word, and she heard him groan as he crawled into bed. Tomorrow was another day of many. She hoped she would get this vision soon.

Before she really did lose her mind.

Reset 62

"Okay," Travis was saying as he swung his melee and crashed it into the fake Mimic. "Tell me again how you're doing this?! I'd be going mad if it were me."

"It's difficult at times," Rita agreed, dodging the robotic Mimic in the nick of time. She brought her blade down on it when it passed her again.

"You've never tried to tell anyone else outside of this Dr. Carter fellow?"

"No. Just you."

"I'm flattered."

"I can trust you," she said simply. They were standing on the training floor now, having finished. Rita was catching her breath while Travis looked like he barely broke a sweat.

"The feeling is mutual," Travis replied. "So, how long do you keep doing this for?"

"Until I get the vision," Rita answered. "Dr. Carter is confident that after a while, the Omega will reveal itself to me and where it's located, and then we can go kill it."

"I love it," Travis said with a grin. "Does it feel weird? Having their blood in you?"

"Not really," she answered. "I mean, I can feel something, but it's not a big presence."

"Creepy," he said with a shudder. "Guess you can't bottle it up and share it can you?"

"I don't believe so, but it's something worth trying if you're interested."

"Like a blood transfusion?"

"I guess." Rita wasn't really sure. She felt a bit of anxiety of thinking that if they took her blood, she'd lose the power and then really die.

"No offense, but I don't know if I want to go through what you are right now," Travis said.

"Fair enough." She wasn't going to try and convince him. Maybe they'd try later if they needed more people to be able to reset when they were trying to kill the Omega.

He didn't say anything else as he rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck before going to put away his melee. Rita felt a headache starting, and she pressed her fingers against her forehead, massaging it gently.

"I still haven't heard anything about Brendan," Travis said when he came back. "I wish I had better news in that area."

"I know. Thanks anyway." Rita tried not to picture her son dead somewhere. She was still mad at him for joining up underage, but she also was scared for him.

"What about his father?" Travis asked on cue. "Is he...?"

"Not in the picture," she answered. She wasn't in the mood to get into the whole Luke saga tonight.

"I see."

"You told me you weren't able to have kids," she said, remembering.

"That's right," he answered. "We fostered for a little while, but then we just decided to see the world as much as we could. Then Chloe got sick, and well...that was the end of that."

"I'm sorry."

"We had some really good times, her and I," he said, a soft smile on his lips. "She could always call me out on my bullshit, you know? Not that I did that to her much. She just always knew when I was trying to hide anything from her, even if it was for her own surprise."

"You just have an honest face," Rita said, gesturing. "A lie sticks out on it like a sore thumb."

"Lucky me," he said dryly. "Good thing I'm not a professional gambler."

"You wouldn't be there long enough to become a professional gambler," Rita pointed out.

"Ouch!" He laughed. "You really don't hold your punches."

"Nope."

Travis took a swig of water from his bottle while Rita put her melee away next. She grabbed the towel on the table and wiped her face down, feeling her hair sticking to her cheek. It was falling out of its bun.

"So," Travis said as they walked out together. "If we see Brendan's father here at all, you want me to blow his head off?" Rita snorted.

"No," she replied, shaking her head. "He wasn't a bad guy. It just didn't work out."

"I see."

They reached their barrack to find Farell waiting outside for them.

"You're out late," he commented, brow lifted.

"Just getting some last minute training in, sir," Rita answered.

"It's still breaking orders, Corporal," Farell said. "Both of you drop and give me 50."

Rita held in her groan as she got down to the ground. She didn't have to look to see Travis smirking.

Reset 79

Pete was struck instantly, and he crashed backwards into Rita's chest. She caught him and fell with him, landing hard and getting slightly winded.

"Shit," he gasped, blood gushing fast from his chest. "I'm down."

"I got you," Rita said, moving him so he was on his back. His hand reached to grasp hers tightly.

"You think...there's something...after this?" he asked, choking and coughing. Rita thought of all the people she'd lost, how she'd always pictured them in heaven. She'd always believed in something, that she'd see them again. Lucy had spent enough time talking about church and God that Rita just adopted a form of it into her life in her own way.

Looking at Pete now, she knew he needed to hear it. He wasn't hiding the fear in his eyes anymore.

"Yea, I do," she told him. "I do. You're gonna be okay. You're gonna see Randy again." He nodded, gasping for air. After a few more moments of struggling, his eyes stared blankly at the sky.

Rita forced herself to let go of his hand and stand up. She turned to see Travis fighting a Mimic off to her left. Harvey and Kamden were standing back to back trying to hold their own.

She couldn't keep doing this. Watching them all day every day was killing her. She wanted it to end. She wanted this war to end.

She looked back down at Pete's lifeless body one last time, and she tried to breathe.

Then she was killed.