The motorcycle hums beneath him.
It's a Model 16ZW6, Wash thinks. Maybe a W7. It's got all sorts of mods that he's pretty sure don't meet environmental regulatory standards. The bright red button labeled, in shaky handwriting, "FUCK 'EM ALL" is probably attached to something particularly illegal. Out of respect for the bike's erstwhile owner and his own continued well-being, he doesn't press it.
He's speeding through the capital city of a colony by the name of Fell. Semi-abandoned after continued Covenant attacks, it's become one data point in the convoluted network of Insurrectionist intel transfer stations. Total shitheap punctuated by the odd wealthy neighborhood sheltering the more respectable class of arms dealers.
Feels a bit like home.
He's bent over the handlebars, feeling the tension in his shoulders bleeding away with the steady thrum of the engine and the deafening roar of the wind—not all the old memories are bad ones—when somebody finally manages to shoot out his back tire.
For a second, he convinces himself it's just another near-miss. In the next second, he's toppling over into an eighty-kph skid, one leg pinned beneath the bike, his shoulder torn up by the slushy grit of the street, his skull cracking against the pavement and—
He coughs, choking on the cold air that seeps harsh and raw through his lungs. He's fourteen, pinned under the remains of his first stolen bike, blinking blearily up at a punk kid with brass knuckles and a creative interpretation of the enforcement of property law. He's seventeen, wrecked on his way out of that same shithole of a city just as the Covies roll in. He's twenty-one, dragging his busted civilian motorbike on a supply run to the front lines for his asshole LT. He's muttering, "Oh, for fuck's sake..."
He's a Freelancer. He's breathing.
Gunfire roars somewhere nearby—he'd forgotten how much it echoes in the city, pops and crackles like fireworks. He spits blood into the dirty, churned-up snow, tries to prop himself up on his right arm. When it gives way immediately beneath him, he swears, blinking back reactive tears, and refocuses his attention on dragging his leg out from beneath the bike.
The gunfire stops.
Someone's palm presses against his forehead, and Wash closes his eyes, sighing raggedly and slumping back into the snow. Maine is carding his fingers through Wash's hair to get at the gash in his scalp, apparently determined to find the single point on Wash's body that hurts the most, because fucking shitting what the fuck.
"Sorry," Maine says, but doesn't relax his pressure on the wound. And then, with a cautious shove to the shoulder least acquainted with the cheese-grater of the road, he adds, "You baby."
Wash snorts, his eyes still shut. "Got it," he says. His voice is hoarse. He wrenches his good arm around to snatch at the flash drive in his pocket, brandishes it above his head in a wobbly grip. "I totally got the intel."
Maine takes it from his shaking hand. "You helped," he says, firmly.
Wash snorts, flinches when a jolt of pain spikes through his head and sparks flicker behind his eyelids. "Okay, Mr. Third-On-The-Leaderboard, so you got it in the first place, but you threw it at me when those guys tackled you. Did you see me hotwire that bike under fire? That's difficult. Holo-encryptions and everything." He fidgets, wincing, trying to find a comfortable position. Now that the adrenaline's wearing off, the deep ache of fractured bone is starting to penetrate even beyond the background scream of a particularly nasty case of road rash. "I, uh. I think I need a hospital."
"Really," Maine says, deadpan.
Wash finally opens one eye; he's shivering, whether from cold or shock or both he's not sure, and right now he's really missing his armor. Maine looks unharmed except for a bright red mark on his forehead that's probably gonna become a bruise. He's also wearing a carefully blank expression that Wash has learned to interpret, perhaps optimistically, as fond exasperation.
Wash sighs, lets his head rest back against the snow as the sirens get louder and louder, their echoes eerily muffled by the snow. "Hey," he says. "You think they have jello in hospitals on Fell?"
As it turns out, they do not have jello in hospitals on Fell. What they do have is a secure comm relay that Maine manages to access via the expedient of persuasive glowering at everyone in sight, and with a few false starts they open a secure communications channel to the MoI. After checking Wash's hospital room for bugs, Maine actually drags the terminal in with him, and Wash props himself up in bed, feeling faintly ridiculous to be communicating with the Director while wearing hospital pyjamas. Maine looks even more ridiculous; he's proven especially susceptible to the cold on Fell, and has taken to wearing a bright orange beanie as his sole concession to the weather.
Once they've transferred their recovered intel, the Director is terse, abrupt: he wants Wash and Maine to remain deployed as a would-be civilian presence on Fell for three more days in order to facilitate Wash's convalescence and keep an eye out for any further Insurrection activity; yes, you may consider this shore leave; yes, the Mother of Invention has important business that needs attending elsewhere; no, he is not required to explain to his agents the nature of that important business. Which is fine, Wash tells himself, staring down at his callused fingers resting on the too-white hospital sheets. It's fine. He's never had much of a head for logistics, in any case.
They don't ask about the leaderboard, but the Director tells them anyway. Wash holds steady at position six. Maine drops from third to fourth.
"That is all," the Director says.
Wash sinks back against his pillow, watching a muscle twitch in Maine's jaw; he's still leaning in close, staring at the blank screen of the portable terminal. Wash lifts one hand—his shoulder feels strange and stiff and twinges in protest—to poke him in the side. "Hey," he says. "It doesn't mean anything. Connie thinks he makes up the numbers just to mess with us."
Maine grunts.
Wash scowls and hitches himself up so he's marginally closer to eye-to-eye. "We've got a job, no matter where we are on that list. Right? We keep doing good."
Maine shrugs.
Wash sucks in a breath, sits up straight, and drags the front of the beanie down over Maine's eyes. His mission accomplished, he flops back on his bed, panting with the effort of keeping himself upright. "Hey," he says again, once he can breathe. Maine's just sort of sitting there with the hat over his eyes. "You okay?"
Maine finally growls, dragging the beanie off his head and rubbing at his scalp, but there's a twitch at the corner of his lips. Contrary to popular belief, Maine has a terrible poker face.
"Good," Wash says. "You're okay. I don't need you moping around while I'm malingering, here. I think we should— wait, where are you going?"
Maine pauses in the doorway, donning his beanie with gravitas. "Pizza."
"Aw, Maine. Maine, no. Maine, don't—" Wash pitches his voice into a wail that carries after Maine down the hall. "Don't leave me with the hospital food!"
Maine stays gone the rest of the evening, but when Wash thrashes himself awake in the middle of the night, sweating and bleary-eyed from the painkillers, he finds a small cup of jello sitting on the tray next to his bed.
The hospital discharges him two days later. His doctor explains, in a harried sort of way, that the risk of hospital-borne infection is high, especially with the skin graft on his shoulder and leg, and that he'll be better off convalescing at home. Wash avoids mentioning that he doesn't actually have a place of residence at the moment. Two days of white, sterile rooms is more than enough to have him searching for an escape route.
Once the paperwork is settled—Wash wonders, vaguely, what kind of cover story has the hospital staff quietly agreeing to waive all fees and keep misdirecting the cops—Maine props him up, watches with quiet amusement as he wobbles into a wall, then claps a hand on his shoulder and marches him out the door.
The cold air has a sobering effect. This means that Wash is completely clear-headed when he yelps, "Fucking what the fuck it's cold!" and takes a step back toward the warmth bleeding out of the hospital. He's wearing fresh civvies that Maine dug out of his duffel, but they're not fancy climate-controlled power armor. He misses his fancy climate-controlled power armor.
"I miss my fancy climate-controlled power armor. How'd we pull an infiltration mission, anyway?" He rubs irritably at his arm, still in a sling, and takes a resigned step out into the cold. "York's out of the infirmary. Connie's not busy. Send them to the freezing planet full of Insurrectionist informants."
Maine shrugs, unsympathetically, and pulls a beanie out of his pocket. A bright orange beanie that's the twin of the one he's currently wearing.
"You have got to be kidding me," Wash says.
"They had a sale."
Wash stares at the beanie, stares at Maine, then sighs and tugs it over his head, careful to avoid the fresh scar in his hairline. He inspects his reflection woefully in a nearby shop front. "See, you can pull it off. Anyone laughs at you, they know you're gonna tear them limb from limb. I just look like an asshole."
"Always," Maine says, nudging him with an elbow, and Wash risks a twinge of pain to smack him in the shoulder.
They've walked several blocks before Wash's brain finally catches up with his feet. "Where are we going?"
"Pizza," Maine says.
"Oh thank god." Wash huffs a contented sigh, watches his breath curl in the air, and tugs his beanie down further over his ears. "Do we have a plan? Or are we just gonna eat pizza for the next twenty-four hours?"
Maine shrugs.
"See, that's what I like about you. You're always so decisive."
The pizza's good. It's some Earth knock-off junk that doesn't hold a candle to the kimchi pizza that was all the rage on Wash's home colony, but it's warm and probably working on clogging his arteries with every bite. It's also finger-food that's especially easy to navigate with one arm in a sling, and the Earth-nostalgia decor of the pizzeria is complete with warm colors and a few jumping fountains to catch the eye. It's late enough that they have the place to themselves. Wash sighs contentedly, burrowing deeper into his corner of the booth, and downs a handful of painkillers with a swig of something that claims to be Super Sparkle Soda but is clearly some off-brand ripoff.
Maine, having just inhaled an entire pie, is staring past him out the window. Perched on a chair turned backwards, he seems distant and menacing, like the power armor's not so much military equipment as it is a state of mind.
Well. Maybe the bright orange beanie dilutes the effect. A little.
The fountains keep snagging Wash's attention, flickers of green and gold light dancing at the bottom of a deep pool at their base, the jumping jets of water capturing rainbows from prisms hung strategically throughout the room. The overall effect is gaudy by design. The fountains originally sprang up as status symbols anywhere droughts or desertification made water scarce, then found their way to the poorer districts as a necessary concession to style. Wash remembers spending a lot of time as a kid sitting on the floor of a falafel place that couldn't even afford decent tables, watching the reflected light sparkle and shine on the grimy ceiling. In the heavily polluted city with its hazy nights, he used to pretend the lights were stars.
He sighs heavily, grabs for his third slice. He notices something in Maine's hand.
Maine has curiously long, thin fingers—Wash has seen him cut and shuffle a deck of cards one-handed—and now those fingers are turning a small flash drive over and over across his knuckles, a show of casual dexterity.
"Maine," he says, cautiously. Maine doesn't react, still staring out the window. "Maine, what's that?"
Maine finally cocks his head to one side, stops playing with the drive, and holds it out.
Instead of taking it, Wash goes back to his pizza, chewing thoughtfully, watching the fountains jump, watching the hypnotic swirls of light on the wall behind Maine. Then he swallows, carefully, and says, "That better not be what I think it is. The Director told—the Director ordered you to wipe that drive after we transferred the data."
Maine taps the drive against the imitation-wood paneling of the table. "Didn't."
"Fucking didn't?" Wash lowers his voice self-consciously when the pizzeria's owner, a young woman standing behind the counter, looks curiously over to them. "Maine, you can't mess around with this stuff. That's... that's valuable intel! The Director wants it gone, it's gone."
The drive flickers between Maine's fingers, a sleight-of-hand spectacle that's annoyingly eye-catching. "Not necessarily."
Wash exhales, hard. He'd somehow escaped a serious concussion in the crash, but now he can feel a headache building behind his eyes. His voice comes out in a strained whisper. "So you're gonna, what, turn it in? Who the hell are you gonna take it to? We're the good guys, Maine. It's already reached the proper authorities."
Maine shrugs. "Could sell it."
"For what?" His voice cracks again. "What the hell do you need that the Director hasn't already given you?"
"Not for me." The drive stops spinning. Maine tosses it onto the table so it lands in front of Wash with a clink, like he's dealing out a hand in poker. Wash stares, makes no movement toward it.
"This supposed to be a gift?"
Maine has gone back to staring out the window.
Wash is vaguely aware that his voice is rising again, high and panicked. "Is this about the leaderboard? You acting out? 'Cause you've got lousy timing. What the fuck, Maine?"
A heavy sigh. Maine looks down at the flash drive between them. "Could go home."
Wash laughs, a harsh sound. He surprises himself a little, with that harshness. "Fuck home."
"Could make a home."
Wash scrubs both hands back through his hair, because, fuck, now he's thinking about it. Now he's thinking about how much money he could dredge up with a drive full of intel about Insurrection targets. Sell to the highest bidder. Sell again to the Insurrection to reveal just how much information is on the open market. So much of Project Freelancer is off the books. It'd be one short step to disappear. Find somewhere quiet to live out the war.
A clattering at the window draws his attention. The lowering clouds that have been threatening all day are finally making good on their promise. The metallic rattle of sleet against the glass puts Wash in mind of the sound rain makes when it strikes the helmet of a suit of power armor.
Maine is watching him. Maine is... unsure of him, Wash realizes. He's got a lousy poker face. There are lines of tension in his shoulders like live wires. There's something wrong.
"I'm okay, Maine," Wash says, making his voice careful, gentle. "Just get rid of it."
Maine raises a brow, holds a hand out flat above the flash drive. Makes a fist, releases it. When he turns his hand over, his palm is empty, the drive nowhere to be seen.
He reaches out, and Wash, still unnerved, flinches. Just for a moment, he flinches. But Maine only grabs the front of Wash's beanie and tugs it down over his eyes. Wash blinks in the darkness, taking in the sound of cutlery clattering, the smells of fresh dough and melted cheese.
"You're okay," Maine says, and something in the room shifts, some elastic tension finally snapping.
Eventually Wash pulls the beanie off altogether, listening to the crackle of static in his hair, and leans back in his booth to watch the fountain flash green and gold and green and gold, to watch the reflected motes of light send constellations across the walls.
Shore leave is cut short; a Pelican from the MoI arrives to pick them up that afternoon.
Connie's waiting for Wash when he finally finishes his debriefing and stumbles into his quarters. His arm aches. His head is throbbing. He's pretty sure he's never actually given Connie the passcode to unlock his room.
"Uh," he says.
She's sitting hunched over on his bunk, elbows on her thighs, hands hanging limp in front of her. She's staring down, picking at a thumbnail. "Hey, Wash," she says. "Heard you got a little fucked up on the mission."
He hesitates on the threshold for a moment, then steps across it and dumps his duffel in a corner. He keeps the door open. "Me and motorcycles have not, historically, gotten along well."
"And you do so well with cars," she says, a teasing edge to her voice.
He shrugs his good shoulder; the other's still immobilized in its sling. "A little road burn, a couple small fractures. Nothing too serious."
She watches him start to unpack his clothing, fold it, and return it to its proper drawers, inspection-neat. There's an anticipation to her silence, like she's waiting for him to ask something. Finally, with a hint of exasperation, she says, "You're not wondering where we were that whole time you and Maine were stuck on Fell?"
Wash shrugs. "Figured it wasn't relevant. The Director would've told us if it were."
"How do you do that?"
He pauses, uneasy. "Fold clothes? Pretty sure there's no real trick to it."
She leans forward. "How do you act like it doesn't bother you?"
For a moment, he focuses intently on balling up a pair of socks. His head is pounding again. "Connie, cut the bullshit. What's going on?"
"Nothing," she says. "That's the problem. Nothing. As far as I can tell—and I have my sources—we didn't do anything in particular during those two days you were gone. We were in the vicinity. We could've picked you up, but for some reason the Director wanted you to stay."
"I was in the hospital."
"You could've much more easily recovered here."
Wash groans and rubs at his eyes. "I don't want to hear this, Connie. I don't know what's gotten into you lately. You and Maine both."
Connie cocks her head to one side, her brow furrowing. "Maine? What did Maine do?"
"Nothing," he says, quickly. "Maine did nothing! You're the one who's wandering in here and—" He cuts himself off. "Connie, you know I don't have a good head for this stuff. I just want to do my job. So if you've got something to say, come out and say it."
She stares across the room at him, and the effort's reflected in her face, the work it takes her to drag herself back and start along a new line of persuasion. "Wash, if this was some fucked-up test of your loyalty, and if you're saying Maine was in on it—"
"Connie. Goodnight."
She holds up her hands. "I didn't mean to upset you."
"I'm not upset!" Wash scrubs a hand back through his hair. "Why does everyone keep thinking I'm upset? I'm happy here, Connie. I'm happy with what we're doing. I'm happy I can do some good. This is... this is just how things work. There are trade-offs, there are these stupid games like the leaderboard, but only because what we do is so important. It's a necessary evil."
"You believe that?"
"Of course." He turns. He realizes, for the first time, that she's been sitting in the dark, her hair matted against her head like she's been tossing and turning. "You don't," he says. It's not a question. He leans back against the wall, folding his arms. Thinks of the rain echoing against his helmet, not so long ago. "He's given us everything, you know."
"Oh," she says, softly, "I know." She stands. "It's okay, Wash. This was a mistake. I'll get out of your hair."
"Connie..."
She pushes past him. She smells like gun polish and sweat and, faintly, blueberries. She pauses in the hallway, looking back. "Glad you're okay, Wash. Glad you're still on the leaderboard. You tell Maine he got bumped back up from fourth to third. Wonder what he did to deserve that."
She turns and walks away, leaving him alone in the dark, breathing a little too hard, his heart pounding a little too loud. It won't be the first time.
He turns on the light, bends over his duffel again, feels around to make sure it's empty. It's not. He pulls out a ridiculous orange beanie. Stares at it until his chronometer informs him of precisely how little time he's got until his morning training sessions.
He sinks stiffly back onto his bunk, turning his aching shoulder to the side that's still warm from Connie's body, and presses his face into the pillow until the lights behind his eyelids start flickering like stars.