Part 2 of the "swap meet" series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Fandom: Red vs. Blue
Relationships: Locus | Samuel Ortez & Agent Washington, Dexter Grif & Locus | Samuel Ortez
Characters: Locus | Samuel Ortez, Agent Washington (Red vs. Blue), Felix | Isaac Gates, Lavernius Tucker, Dexter Grif, Frank "Doc" DuFresne, Sarge (Red vs. Blue), Michael J. Caboose, Franklin Delano Donut, Dick Simmons
Additional Tags: Role Reversal, Role Swap, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Simulation Trooper!Sam, Mercenary!Tucker, no betas we die like man, GFY
"You're that twink from basic—the one with the knife fetish!"
It's perhaps not his proudest moment, but his entire character is built on flippancy and a perceived lack of impulse-control. He wouldn't be Private Ortez if his realizations were quiet, graceful things. It's part of what Sam likes best about his character. Being Private Ortez frees him from inconvenient social obligations such as tact.
And the reaction of the former-Private Gates—now self-styled as Felix—is incredibly gratifying. "Excuse me?" he says, voice deep and dangerous, every inch of his body screaming indignation. It's incredibly familiar and Sam's memory, while not infallible, hardly needs the added jump-start. "What the fuck did you just say to me?"
Tilting his head and rolling his weight from one hip to the other, Sam examines their previously-unknown assailant with a critical eye. "Yep," he says with a decisive nod, "I definitely recognize that voice. Gates, wasn't it?"
"You know, I hate to butt in"—the teal and grey soldier butts in from his crouched position between Felix and the rest of the group—"but seeing as this asshole just tried to murder you all and, oh yeah, shot me, could we maybe save this touching reunion for later and shoot him back, please?"
"Ugh, you," Felix sneers down at the injured man, distaste and loathing palpable between them. "Shut up and be glad those quick reflexes of your haven't failed you yet. They will one day, and I just hope I'm there to put a bullet in your head when they do." He smirks audibly and adds, "Or a knife between your ribs."
"Uh-huh, yup, there it is," Sam takes an obscene amount of delight in stage-whispering to Grif, who may or may not even remember the few stories Sam has told about Gates throughout the years but nods along gamely either way. "Knife fetish, I told you. Pretty much the only thing he ever talked about for three months was his precious collection."
He smirks when the grey and orange sniper's attention snaps back to him with an enraged shriek of "Who the fuck are you?" But he outstayed his welcome the second he aimed that SR S99-S5 AM at their Freelancer and pulled the trigger—never mind the soldiers he apparently sent after them—so Sam ignores his question and turns away dismissively.
"Freckles, could you please remove Private Gates from our presence?" he politely asks the MANTIS-class Assault Droid, which immediately perks up and begins charging its cannons.
"Affirmative," it replies, and a second later the ground where Felix once stood is little more than blackened metal grating.
Felix is nowhere to be found afterwards, but his adversary remains and Sam graciously relinquishes the situation back to Agent Washington. He's quite interested in hearing whatever story they're about to be told.
.
They escort the canyon's newest arrival around back to a more sheltered position, and surround him in a loose half-circle while DuFresne does his dubious work. Agent Washington monitors everything with the hard edge of Recovery One, but Sam reclines against a convenient boulder and observes with a more relaxed air. He trusts the Freelancer to be his leader and keep them safe—but he trusts his team even more, and they have without a doubt survived worse than the likes of Isaac "Felix" Gates and his half-trained militia.
DuFresne steps back while the man in teal gripes about no longer being able to feel his toes and Agent Washington steps forward into his space without an ounce of mercy in his stance. "You need. To start talking," Agent Washington says, very calm and very dangerous.
The man eyes him—or rather, the BR85HB approximately eleven inches from his visor—suspiciously before carefully straightening up and raising his hands non-threateningly. From his vantage-point and with his experience, Sam can see how much the action costs him. Their potential ally doesn't have much trust in him, to just dole it out to every super-soldier with a gun and an air of lethality.
"My name is Tucker. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you're Agent Washington?" he ventures, slow and careful, as if having weighed each word before saying it. "So that would make the rest of you the Reds and Blues."
Caboose gasps. "Oh my god, how did he know that?!"
"We're wearing red and blue armor," Grif answers with great patience, and Sam can feel his mouth curl.
"But how can he tell!"
"Will somebody please fix his helmet?"
"How do you know who we are?" Agent Washington asks, ignoring the back and forth, intent on the man he's clearly beginning to see as a threat. It's paranoid, but also prudent, given their numerous enemies.
The man—Tucker—sighs and shifts where he stands, obviously uncomfortable. "Look, after you took down Project Freelancer, you gained a bit of a reputation out in the big bad galaxy. Now, I don't know how much of it is the truth—you all don't exactly look like the galaxy's greatest soldiers—but…"
He trails off, and Sam feels himself drawn towards Tucker ever so slightly. Agent Washington takes a single, menacing step forward. "But?" he repeats, no trace of Blue Team Leader anywhere in his manner.
"But," Tucker agrees, "we are pretty fucking desperate here."
Sam blinks. "Just how desperate do you have be to want us," Grif asks, echoing Sam's thoughts. There wasn't much they, as a unit, could do for much of anyone; they could hardly do much even for themselves, and it still took them about eight years.
Tucker gives a short, grim laugh. "How much do you know about where you've crashed, exactly?"
"Well, no one's come to get us, that's for sure," Grif retorts, ignoring Private Donut's high-pitched protests. "We've been taking bets about where we are in the first place."
"You mean… you don't know?" Tucker says slowly, spreading a ripple of unease throughout the group, and Sam leaves his place by the rock to back up Wash. "You're on Chorus—the very fucking edge of the Outer Colonies, pretty much forgotten by the UNSC after the Human-Covenant War. In case you were wondering, nobody's come to get you because nobody knows where you are. You all somehow managed to crash in the middle of nowhere, on a planet in the middle of nowhere."
There's a beat of silence as everyone digests this revelation. "Fucking beautiful, everybody," Grif finally declares, throwing up his hands and stomping over to where Sam had stood moments ago. He practically throws himself against the hard stone and pouts at the fact that, of all of them, Donut's bet had been closest to correct.
"But… how did we end up so far from home?" Simmons asks confusedly. "It should've been a short flight."
His sergeant stays perfectly still for three point seven seconds before awkwardly saying, "Uh. One mystery at a time there, Simmons," clearly unwilling to admit to his tampering with the ship's engines.
"Oh, it gets better," Tucker injects with that awful laugh again, like breaking glass. "Not only that, but you managed to crash-land in the middle of a goddamn civil war, too. Nice going, assholes."
Agent Washington's attention zeroes back in on him. "So," he says, shoulders tight, "if this planet—Chorus—is at war, which side are you on?"
"The side that's trying to keep you alive?"
Something in his body-language tugs at Sam and he steps up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Agent Washington. "Try again, and try to be entirely truthful this time," he very pleasantly suggests.
Tucker's hand twitches, likely toward the combat knife holstered at his back, but he remains admirably calm in the face of a barely-restrained Agent Washington and whatever he sees when he looks at Sam. "The New Republic, lead by Vanessa Kimball," he finally answers Agent Washington, but his eyes clearly flick back to Sam every few seconds. "The Federal Army, lead by General Doyle, sent Felix here to make sure you guys—as some of the galaxy's most famous soldiers, if not the most skilled—don't join up with Kimball's crew. Apparently Doyle was a little iffy on the details about how, the dumbass."
"Uhhh, doesn't that include you?"
"Eh?" Tucker peers around their combined bulk to make approximate eye-contact with Simmons, who does a fair job at not quailing. "What includes me?"
"You said 'Kimball's crew' like you don't count."
"Oh, right, that's because I'm a freelancer." Sam immediately raises his M6H, empty hand dropping to the hilt of his sword, while everyone but Caboose points their chosen weapon at the newcomer. Tucker quickly backtracks. "Shit, like a soldier of fortune! A mercenary!"
The weapons ease back down and Grif isn't the only one who heaves a grateful sigh. For a split-second, Sam had felt the cold trickle of panic and failure for not spotting something like that. This Tucker was solid, well-trained, even impressive—but he didn't move the way Wash and Agent Carolina do, the way Agents Texas and Wyoming had. (The Meta was an outlier, and therefore wasn't counted.)
"So, this Kimball woman paid you to keep us away from the Federal Army?" Agent Washington prods, and Tucker does something like a shrug and a nod with his entire body, all of his weight rocking back onto his heels for a moment.
"Something like that," he hedges. "Felix and I—the skills we picked during the war—are basically keeping the war at a stalemate. After so many years of in-fighting, both armies are filled with half-trained kids and veterans who are alive due to luck more than skill. Whichever side snatches you up will probably end up being the side that wins. And if nobody gets you? Well, at least it's not a loss…"
"… which is why Private Gates sent his soldiers in first," Sam finishes in a flash, distantly noting how Tucker flinches delicately at the use of Felix's given name. "If we killed them, we proved ourselves capable. If they killed us, we were rendered useless to both sides. A Pyrrhic victory." His gaze sharpens on Tucker as he casually shifts his weight back and subtly increases the distance between himself and the group. Something has him spooked; Sam has theories as to what. "They sent you to collect us alone?"
"I—" Tucker hunches his shoulders, defensive. "We ran into that orange shithead on our way to your crash-site. He got the rest of my team before we found you."
"My condolences," Agent Washington says sharply, "but I still haven't heard anything that tells me why we should help you at all or, failing that, why we can't just get a ship out of here."
Tucker straightens back up to his full height and his aggressive stance makes Sam think he's probably glaring. "Because the Federal Army would rather shoot you out of the sky than see you help us," he bites out. "Because I lost two kids trying to keep Felix from finding you assholes. Because if you tell Felix that you're not interested in fighting this war, he'll put a bullet in your heads and tell Doyle that the mission went sideways, not his fault, nothing he could do to stop it, those New Republic soldiers were just too vicious."
Agent Washington doesn't say anything.
"Now if you'll excuse me," Tucker continues, "I have to radio HQ and tell them that Gutiérrez and Lonny aren't making it back home and that Felix is gonna turn this canyon into a bloodbath if they can't get reinforcements here fast enough."
Agent Washington watches Tucker as he furiously stomps away from the Reds and Blues, and Sam watches Wash as his eyes track the self-proclaimed mercenary's progress. A civil war and a freelancer and old friends turned enemies and innocents caught in the crossfire—it can't be a comfortable story for him to hear. If Agent Washington were a lesser man, Sam thinks, he might even have flinched a time or two during Tucker's tale of woe.
But Wash is strong and steady as a rock and his voice doesn't waver when he turns to them and says, without preamble, "I don't trust him."
"Seconded!"
"Uh, yeah, same."
"Hear hear!"
"Over there!"
"Ah, c'mon, guys!" DuFresne throws his hands up in exasperation before crossing them. "He seems pretty earnest to me—why not give him a chance? What could it hurt?"
"Uhhhh, us? Since, you know, apparently there's an actual war with actual soldiers and actual death?" Grif responds sarcastically, and Sam resists the urge to point out that most of the death they experienced with Project Freelancer was real and fairly permanent—artificial intelligence programs notwithstanding.
The others start to bicker but Sam's gaze wanders back to Tucker staring out at the rest of the canyon. His hands are on his hips and his shoulders are once again hunched. He's speaking fast, voice too low to discern any of the words, but his tone says it all and there's a conciliatory edge to his body language. Whoever is on the other end of the radio must have been close to the deceased members of Tucker's team.
"Ortez?" Wash's voice is quiet, covered by the combined noise of both teams, as he comes up just behind Sam's shoulder. They don't touch. "See anything we don't?"
Many things, in fact—not all of them important, and not all of them his to share, but he knows what Agent Washington means. "I'd say Tucker's telling the truth, if not all of it," Sam finally settles on. "He and Private Gates probably have a shared history, one he isn't interested in revisiting."
"Clearly, he isn't the only one," Agent Washington replies pointedly.
Sam grins, unrepentant.
"They fought together in the war; I just recognize him from Basic training."
Wash huffs.
"Anything else?" he asks, toeing the edge of sarcastic.
"Mmm, nothing substantial," Sam says. "But if Gates does come back, then we're going to be hit hard. Are you willing to turn down help just because you don't fully trust the person offering it?"
It would be a low blow, if Sam meant it to be; if he meant it as a jab, as a reminder of the things Agent Washington has done. But he doesn't, and it passes between them as it's intended—a question, pure and simple. Agent Washington nods thoughtfully, but doesn't answer.
A moment later, Tucker limps back over to group and sighs forcefully. "Welp, reinforcements are on the way, but I can't guarantee they'll get here in time. Mind giving me a list of whatever supplies you guys have?"
"Why would we do that?" Agent Washington says, suspicious yet. "We haven't even decided if we believe you."
Tucker snorts. "You may not want to be part of this war, but you're about to be, either way. The Federal Army is in just as shitty a shape as the New Republic, but Felix has a habit of turning every battle he's part of into a slaughter. You really wanna make it easy for him?"
"I can mark potential sniper's nests and the Reds can set up choke points," Sam offers, when it becomes clear that Agent Washington is torn between two warring instincts: protect and survive.
He looks at Sam, then gives a curt nod.
Turning back to the others, he begins barking out orders that immediately have everyone arguing, and they set about preparing for war.