— UNKNOWN SYSTEM, MANY YEARS AGO —
Sidestep, adjust footing.
The attack misses him, leaving his opponent overextended. An opening.
Press the advantage.
He doesn't expect his staff to land its mark, and it doesn't, but it does put Alastor on the defensive. Countering, his mentor lashes out with a blow from the side.
Change stance, block.
Holding his staff out at an angle, its upper half catches its twin before it makes contact of any kind with his head.
End it.
Pulling his weapon backwards, its tip retains its grip on Alastor's staff and sends the other wooden rod flipping into the air behind him. Not wasting a moment, he brings the head of it back down and strikes the older man in the center of his chest.
The force of it knocks his teacher to the ivory floor, a shocked expression overtaking his features. For a moment, the two of them are frozen- their positions as master and pupil reversed at long last.
He stands there, no thought to the slick sweat that beaded along his frons, nor the grains of sand wriggling into his wounds- all that matters to him is the slow widening of Alastor's smile that completely swallows the shock of before and replaces it with that which he has always coveted from his mentor …
Pride.
"Satis."
The command comes from his left, and Six immediately retracts his hand, placing the staff in its strap on his back. Rising back onto his feet, Alastor first bows deeply to the one who had spoken, their form hidden in the shadows of the plants hanging over the balcony they watch from. Then, he turns and bows again- to him.
"Our time as mentor and student has concluded," he said warmly, though his tone was tinged with regret- the emotion that always comes as an end approaches. "There is no more for me to teach you- but you have grown into a warrior that I know will bring honor to us."
Stepping forward, Alastor placed his hands on his shoulders. "I am proud of you, as I have always been proud of you- and as I will always be proud of you."
Swallowing hard, Six simply nodded. The urge to embrace his teacher- his former teacher- was powerful, but he resisted. Such an action was unbecoming of his status, and would lessen the meaning of Alastor's gift.
"Primus inter pares."
"Primus inter pares."
Finally, the older man made his exit, leaving only Six and the observer. He waited patiently for the letter to initiate conversation.
"… You have done well."
"I have done what was expected of me," Six replied humbly.
"True- but you have done well, nonetheless."
Walking to the edge of the balcony, they began to descend the stairs that led to the ground below, their elegant, gleaming robes of silver and gold trailing behind their feet. Walking across the ivory floor to where Six stood, they placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Walk with me."
Obliging, he let them lead him away from the sparring platform and onto the warm sands that blanketed the surface of the world they called home. He curled his toes in involuntary satisfaction, feeling their familiar heat travel up through the arches of his feet, and into his legs.
"I have received word that our enemy is broken- the tyrant mind has fallen."
Six looked at them sharply. "Spyglass is dead?"
He knew not the details of humanity's war with the omnipotent intelligence- only that beyond this world, Spyglass had seized the reigns of mankind's destiny. It seemed that, at last, humanity had taken them back.
"Yes," they breathed, "the threat of extinction no longer looms above us- but at a great cost."
They were silent for a moment, contemplating something above Six's comprehension- then gave a loud sigh, pulling back the hood of their robes to let the rays of sunlight reflect off the lighter strands of their lurid brown hair.
"I lost your brother long before you were born," the Advocate said, staring off into the distance towards the Insos' agora, one of the many places forbidden to Six. "I searched for years, always meaning to someday find him and bring him home- but circumstances necessitated otherwise."
He exhaled deeply, his gaze still focused far off into the horizon. "It seems that the opportunity has slipped through my fingers." At last, he turned, his golden-brown eyes meeting the wild blue of Six's. "Your brother has disappeared once more."
Six tried to look concerned, or shocked- but all he could manage was the painful expression that came from knowing you were only second-best.
It was a mien not lost on the Advocate. "Don't let your thoughts go unheard. Speak your mind."
Six sighed. "I feel as though none of my achievements will ever compare to his- not in your eyes, anyway."
"How so?"
"You refuse to speak of him to me, his past, what he's done- you only tell me that he betrayed you, betrayed your ideals. That his life was spent compromising your cause! And yet …" Six swallowed hard. "And yet, you have always spoken of him with admiration and respect. It always seems as though you wish you had him instead of me. I don't understand- am I not enough?"
The Advocate was silent for a few moments, taking the time to word his response before replying.
"My son, a shepherd does not value the life of one sheep over another. When one strays, he does not cast it out in anger- he always hopes that they return to the herd."
He looked away, lost in thought. "Four's betrayal was not done through a will of his own- but that severance of ties shaped him into the man he became, a man who embodied the obverse of what I had intended for him. He still exemplified traits worthy of recognition- ambition, determination, and an resolute spirit, unyielding against all opposition."
Slowly, the Advocate began to shake his head ever so slightly. "But he also displayed a clear ignorance to the lessons I have taken great care to give you- that you owe allegiance to no man, no doctrine, no regime … the only true power-"
"The only true power is knowledge," Six finished, earning a rare smile from the Advocate.
"That's right. And knowledge is me."
— CASCADE OF SPIRITS, PRESENT DAY —
He felt the neural link take hold, and waited for the ocular systems to come online. After a moment, his patience was rewarded with a view of the interrogation room via Ellie's optics.
"Engage weapon systems!"
"Working on it!"
Small barrels emerged from the Nomad's forearms with a faint click as the metal components locked themselves into place.
No came the fun part.
Now linked within Ellie, Six raised his arms in an obvious fashion to whatever occupants were in the room behind the one-way glass. Holding them out sideways, he gave them a second to figure out what he was going to do.
Feeling that he'd allotted them enough time, he began firing and spinning in a circle. The rounds tore through the glass and the walls, creating even more chaos and pandemonium that would confuse those present and hopefully create a panic- he needed them off balance, disoriented … not unlike how he felt right now.
A clone.
It wasn't possible, he couldn't be- Four was his brother, the weak-willed traitor who abandoned the Advocate and followed his heart rather than his brain, he was nothing like him-
And yet, those pictures … that document, wherever the Ancilla had pulled it from, it told a different story. Gates and the one who the others had called 'Gray', they had known him, had believed Six was him-
He looked at them now, still lying on the floor as they kept their bodies as small a target as possible for his bullets. He aimed an arm at them, intending to finish them off …
"… Six?"
He stood there, frozen, unable to follow through. Ellie's voice broke through his haze, her questioning tone providing further evidence that he wasn't thinking clearly, he was unfocused- and he wasn't about to make any rash decisions in such a state.
Especially concerning the two people who had just cracked the foundation of his reality.
Need to get out of here.
Lowering his arm again, he turned and began to walk through the hole in the wall that Ellie had blasted apart. He crossed the threshold-
"Six, wait!"
He paused, looking backwards to see Gray tentatively rising up to her feet with her arms up. "Please stop- you don't understand, you need help-"
"No," he answered shortly, his voice emitting from Ellie's speaker systems. "I need answers."
Rotating back once again, he said far more softly, "And you don't have them."
Refusing to waste another second here, he started sprinting through the hallways away from the scene of destruction.
"Hangar isn't too far- make a right at this junction!"
Heeding her advice, he rounded the corner and maintained his speed. He was halfway down the passage when alarms began to blare, and he swore under his breath.
"This place is about to be swarming with soldiers-"
True to his prediction, the door at the end of the hall suddenly opened to reveal a squad of armed riflemen with weapons trained on him. One of them, likely the commanding officer, pointed aggressively in his direction. "Stand down, or we will open fire-"
He'd barely managed to finish the last word when Six dove forward in a leap that took him to the floor several meters forward. The grunts hastily readjusted their aim, only for their efforts to be fruitless as he exited the roll and lunged towards their heads. Predictably, they ducked their heads and gave him an opportunity to slip by easily.
"Hang on, you're letting them go-?"
"We've got more pressing matters, Ellie!"
Gone was his rigorous training in the art of invisibility, the quiet voice within that told him to leave no witnesses, to silence all who would threaten the path forward- now, his mind was simply that of a creature who had been cornered and wanted to get the hell away.
Landing on the metal floor and scraping forward in a shower of sparks, he performed a quick analysis of the situation. The alarm had put the frigate on high alert, and he could see some of its occupants in the hangar immediately taking notice of him and readying themselves for a fight- fortunately, it seemed as though none of them were armed with any serious weaponry, let alone anti-Titan munitions.
Still, the two of them have to be quick if they wanted to cross this hangar in one piece.
"Prepare thrusters-"
"Already coming online-"
He felt the familiar hum that accompanied them, the warmth that now pulsed near the small of his back, and made his move. Darting out onto the deck, his strides were long thanks to Ellie's digitigrade legs, and they covered ground far faster than if he'd simply been sprinting out-of-suit-
A staccato of gunfire erupted from his right, forcing him to slide forward out of instinctive reaction. Even so, he heard and felt the hard impacts of the bullets against his shoulder and ribs, their potential damage negated by Ellie's shields- but they didn't have the full capacity of the shield to work with at the moment, mostly due to Ellie diverting its power to their thrusters in preparation for what was to come.
Finally, they reached the threshold of the hangar. From this point, the exterior of the ship angled down sharply until it would simply drop off entirely, leaving whoever was unfortunate enough to slip to likely fall to their death. In this case, the Chorus dockyards had been constructed beside the city's seaport, which meant that everything beneath the ships that docked here was ocean- it was a moot point, however, as water would likely have the same effect as concrete if one were to hit it from this height.
That was why, despite not hesitating to do so, it was with no small amount of trepidation that Six leapt off the edge of the hangar. Landing on the steep decline of the ship's hull, he began to slide forward on his legs and rear, using his hand to balance and steer himself with the slightest of control.
"Thrusters warmed up, preparing ignition-"
"Time's running out, and so's the runway!" he shouted, unable to slow their rapid descent. "It's gotta be now, Ellie, now, do it NOW-"
Just as they slid off the edge of the ship and he felt the signature weightless sensation of freefall as they began to plummet towards the sea below, there was a roar of flame and motor as the thrusters activated, and they immediately started to slow. Angling his body to level their trajectory, he evened out and achieved a stable flight pattern.
"There!" Ellie said, marking a location on his HUD. "We can lay low for a bit there, figure out where to go from here."
Back in the hangar, the Ghosts barely reached the hangar in time to see their former captive soaring towards the skyline of Chorus, the faint glow of his thrusters disappearing as the distance became too far.
Danvers coughed into his hand. "So, uh … it can fly. The mini-Titan can fly."
"So it would seem," Husher murmured. "I think we know now how he's been getting on and off the ships he's raided."
"What do we do, Lieutenant?" Vogel asked, seemingly at a loss. It wasn't too far off from how Gray was feeling herself. Something wasn't sitting right with her, and it wasn't just the fact that their closest lead to finding Tobias Four in six years had just gone and flown the coop- literally.
"Ghost-Actual to Ghost-1, come in."
She opened the comlink channel. "I'm here, Blisk."
"Interrogation room's in a right mess, but everyone's fine. I'm sending Gates and a few others to the infirmary for a medical examination, just in case." He sounded tired, but grateful for how the situation had played out; worse than they'd expected, better than it could have gone. "What happened?"
"He got away. Looks like he's been using some kind of experimental Titan chassis on these raids for insertion and extraction- flies just as well as any Northstar I've seen. Thing must have been hiding on the hull when we captured him, and worked its way through our ship's maintenance shafts over the last thirteen hours."
"Copy that, I'll include it in the report. This whole thing's gone to shit … anything else to note?"
She hesitated for a moment, trying to find a way to express the uncertain feeling she had. "This feel's off, Commander."
"How so?"
She neglected to reply until she had a proper response to give him other than 'a hunch'- and like a switch had been flipped in her mind, the answer came to her.
"He let us live."
She thought of the destruction Six had caused- everything from the now-unrecognizable interrogation room to the dented floors and black scrapes in the metal hallways. "That Titan was more than capable of laying waste to our forces, and then some- but he chose not to."
"Care to hazard a guess as to why?"
"Either his moral code is a game of roulette, or he was too terrified to think properly- he just wanted to escape, and he didn't care about killing witnesses like he's done before."
"What would terrify the Wraith?"
She swallowed. "The truth."
—VI—
He landed hard, far harder than he'd meant to- thankfully, it appeared that this alley had been deserted. Even in a city like Chorus, the crown jewel of Harmony, there were plenty of dirty, abandoned slums to hide out in. Not that he would know this, of course- he'd never been in a city slum, hell he'd never really been in a city aside from the Insos', and that hardly qualified.
But Ellie had known.
"Let me out, Ellie."
"Disengaging Pilot protocol."
As she spoke, the plating of her front split apart again, allowing him to exit freely. Stepping out of her, he spun on a dime and faced her just as her pieces shifted back into place and her two optical lights met his steely gaze.
"How much did you hear?"
"Enough." Her voice sounded shaky, though it was possible she could be feigning it. He had to know.
Clenching his hands into fists, he rounded on her. "And I'm sure you expect me to believe that you had no idea about any of this?"
"I didn't-"
"Don't lie to me, Ellie."
She hesitated for a moment. "When we were first partnered together, I was ordered not to interact with you outside of operations. I'm sure you were told something similar?"
He nodded slowly, remembering the day he'd first met her- he'd been sixteen at the time, and been deemed ready for his first mission. The two of them had boarded the Jericho, a mission he considered to have been executed flawlessly.
Beforehand, however, Alastor had warned him that their operations would be monitored closely at first, ensuring that the two of them were indeed up to the task- and one of his mentor's commands had been to keep all communication relative to the mission …
"Consider this a trial run; it will determine whether or not excursions like this will continue. Your interaction with LE-2 is to be kept to a minimum, and only done in accordance with mission parameters. Do as you have been taught- there will be no discussion of your upbringing, none of your training, and none of the outside world. Is that understood?"
And he'd obeyed. He had been used to the routine by that point- he was the Advocate's closely guarded secret, unknown to all but a few of the Advocate's inner circle; socialization was forbidden to him. He'd never questioned why this was the case- it just was. If anything, it only served to embolden him, to give him the sense that he was important above all other treasures, more precious to the Advocate than any knowledge. If they held value in his existence's continued secrecy, then so did he.
But if Ellie had been given a similar order … if she'd been told never to talk of things beyond his scope, if she'd been told never to ask him of the circumstances regarding his past or to talk to him of life on the frontier … then that meant that information wasn't just supposed to be kept from her- it was to be kept from him.
"Didn't stop us from getting to know each other well," she continued, ignorant to his thoughts, "but it made topics of conversation rather difficult to begin. I've wanted so badly to ask you about the frontier, about the FDN and their motives-"
His head snapped towards her. "What do you mean? You don't know?"
She seemed just as nonplussed as he was. "Do you not?"
He shook his head. "I always assumed- I thought you knew what all this was for, I thought-"
His very way of life was crumbling before him, and he slumped against a wall of the alley, sliding to the ground as he did so. Ellie was taken aback at his admission, and realized the gravity of their situation.
"All this time, neither of us has known why we've carried out these operations … we've been fighting and killing people without knowing why we're killing them-"
"They're the enemy," he muttered numbly, unable to provide any better answer.
"Our enemy, or the Advocate's?" she countered, crossing her arm.
"There's no difference."
She scoffed in disbelief. "Even now, after everything you heard- after finding out everything you've known is a lie- you're still defending them? You saw that document for yourself-"
"The information could have been fabricated-"
"And I'm sure that the photo was fabricated too, right?"
That shut him up. The picture he'd seen of Four, the one of him with his squad of 'Heartless' … it was the one thing he couldn't explain away. The same face, but with a totally different expression than any that Six had ever worn … he'd genuinely seemed happy.
Of all the things Six had been taught, the things he'd experienced … that was something utterly foreign to him. He knew of pride when he was praised for his successes, he knew of how it felt to have others respect you, fear you even … but happiness remained a stranger to him.
That was the one damning piece of evidence that he couldn't fathom- seeing the sheer enjoyment on a face that he'd always known as his own, and yet also knowing he'd never felt as Four had in that moment.
Ellie noticed his silence. "Six? What do we do now?"
The question bounced around in his head, joining all the hundreds of others that had recently manifested and now banged and shouted in his mind, demanding answers. The truth was that he didn't know what to think anymore- his whole life, he'd been led to believe in one thing; the Advocate. There was no talk of gods, no discussion of a higher power- as far as he was concerned, the Advocate was the Alpha and the Omega himself.
So who was there to turn to once your god has abandoned you?
"The Advocate will already know what happened on the ship," he said quietly, his voice barely rising above a whisper. "I don't know what to believe- but I'm going to find answers one way or another, and I can't do that if I head home, I'll never be allowed to leave again- not after this whole mess." He paused. "I'm going to find that memorial the document mentioned, learn what I can."
She nodded, and stepped closer. "Alright, I'm ready to move-"
"You're not coming with."
There were several seconds of silence, one which was only broken by a confused and somewhat hurt, "What?"
"The Advocate will have already sent teams to retrieve me," he explained with a grimace. "I need to find out what I can before they find me- but what do you think they'll do to you after what happened back there?"
She was quiet as she processed exactly what he was saying.
He shook his head. "If you're with me when they show up, you're as good as dead. You need to leave, now- get as far from me as you can, hide for as long as it takes- it's the only way you're walking out of this alive."
There was no response for a moment or two, just the sound of distant bustle from traffic and people who had no idea of the revelations taking place so close to them. Finally, she stepped backwards, pulling away from him.
"The one time you show a shred of affinity for me, and it's when you're telling me to get away," she remarked with a mirthless chuckle. "How perfectly … you."
The words stung, but they weren't unwarranted. He pursed his lips as he remembered what he'd told her on the Cascade … evidently, she did too. Turning around, she took one more step before turning back to look at him.
"For what it's worth, Six- I hope you find what you're looking for."
With that, she sprinted out of the alley and into the next- out of his sight, and gone from his life.
He couldn't have told her just how deeply he'd meant what he'd just said, how much her safety actually mattered to him, and how he wished he could take back what he'd told her before- she'd have never left him behind otherwise. Despite what the Advocate had taught him regarding the abandonment of his emotions, he knew he wouldn't be able to live with himself if what he predicted came to fruition- if she was harmed protecting him.
Of the two ways to lose his closest friend, he felt he'd chosen the better one.