This is what it's like.
A familiar place. Wash hunches forward on the barstool, feels the ghost of a hand on his shoulder. Thinks he remembers someone's lips on his glass, the warm burn of whiskey. The taste of someone else's mouth.
"You're in my seat, buddy."
Wash sways, takes another drink, feels his teeth click against the glass. Someone is behind him. Someone is behind him, to his left. Someone has a hand on his shoulder.
Epsilon doesn't like that.
"Fuck off," Wash says.
The guy behind him leans in closer; even over his own boozy haze, Wash can smell the alcohol on his breath. "The fuck did you just say to me? What the—"
"—fuck was that?"
Maine is sitting on his bunk, wrapping his split knuckles with gauze. He's still wearing most of his armor, including the helmet. When Wash strides in, he doesn't so much as glance up at him.
"York's been in surgery for hours! They say he's going to lose the eye."
Maine shrugs. "He'll live."
It takes a conscious effort for Wash to relax his hands from fists. "You violated protocol, put two operatives' lives at risk, and the Director praised you for it."
This time, Maine tilts his helmet at him. "Orders," he says.
Wash feels a chill that runs straight through his armor, and rubs ineffectually at his arms. He can't get the image of York's shattered visor out of his head, the little break in Carolina's voice when she'd ordered them back to their duties. The blood on the training room floor.
He means to say something dismissive, means to go run laps until his brain stops working. Instead, he says, in a small voice, "That day on the training floor, you and me, if the Director had asked you to test me with live rounds, would you have done it?"
Maine looks at him. "Yes," he says.
Wash sags back against the wall, slides down until he's sitting on the floor. The old bullet-wound in his back twinges, setting off aches along even older scars. Maine goes back to wrapping his knuckles. Wash stares at his hands in his lap.
"Yeah," he says. He tilts his head back, lets it rest against the wall behind him. "Yeah, I know."
The fight's quick, vicious, and entirely one-sided. Wash spins in his barstool, using the drunk's grip on his shoulder as leverage, and slams his face into the bar. With the force of his armor's servos behind it, the blow knocks out most of his teeth, and the guy chokes and coughs, slumping to the floor as soon as Wash releases his grip.
The bartender is staring at Wash. "If I ask you to go outside and cool down while I call this asshole an ambulance," she says, "you gonna give me any trouble?"
Wash sketches a shaky salute, slides off the barstool. Epsilon suggests that he kick the drunk in the back of the head before leaving, and Wash is happy to oblige. The bartender snarls something at him, so he stumbles outside, slumps down on the bench next to the front door—
—and puts his head in his hands. He's shaking, keyed up. He jumped off a fucking building. There's blood on his hands.
Somebody's saying his name. For the first time in months, it actually takes him a while to remember that yeah, he's Washington, that's him.
He looks up. North is crouched in front of him, looking strangely small out of armor, his brow creased in a frown. His hair's wet like he just took a shower. "Wash, you with me?"
Wash straightens. "Any news?"
North sighs, slumping into the chair beside him. "Wyoming's okay, turns out. Docs say he's unbelievably lucky. The bullets somehow missed every single major organ. But he's, ah. He's in a lot of pain."
The unfamiliar edge in North's voice finally pushes Wash's brain into action. "It's not your fault."
"I led the team," North says. "Kinda makes it my fault." He shakes his head as though to clear it. "Sorry. You must be worried about Maine. They managed to get him stabilized, but there was extensive damage to his vocal cords."
"Oh," Wash says. He's getting tired, he's getting so tired of hearing the litany of his friends' injuries. Blood on the training room floor.
North rests a hand on his shoulder; it's meant to be comforting, but Wash can't feel a thing through the armor. "Hey, he'll be okay. He never did talk much. He'll adjust quickly."
There's something wrong with that statement, there's something so wrong, but Wash can't figure out how to put the wrongness into words. He shrugs.
"You're both still on the leaderboard," North adds.
Wash feels sick. "I should," he says, "I should go, I have to... go." He staggers to his feet, shrugs off North's hand, moves on autopilot to the locker room. Strips off his armor and his bodysuit and stands under the shower, turning the water hotter and hotter until the automatic safeties come on, breathing in the steam, breathing, just breathing.
After a while, he turns the water as cold as it'll go, until he's shivering violently. With his eyes closed, it almost feels like rain.
His head's a wash of static. It's started raining, and the quiet rumble of thunder is turning Epsilon wistful. Wash can deal with wistful.
The drink's long gone, the glass broken at his feet. He wonders if he's supposed to pay for that.
"You got somewhere to go tonight, buddy?" The bartender's crouched in front of him. Her hair's wet, sticking to her forehead. She hands him the helmet he left under the bar. "I mean, I assume even dudes in creepy robot armor gotta sleep sometime."
Wash takes the helmet from her, watches the rain wick away from its hydrophobic visor, then lets it drop back to the ground. "The guy I hit—"
"In surgery," the bartender says. "You hit him pretty hard. Apparently he stopped breathing on the way to the hospital."
"Oh," says Wash. Epsilon prods, so he says, "Did you know him?"
"My asshole brother," says the bartender. "Don't worry about it."
"Oh," says Wash, again. Epsilon settles uneasily.
She tilts her head, frowning. "You're kinda—"
"—fucked up, Wash," says York. "You both are. I know how close you were to Connie."
"CT," Wash says. He's wrapping his hands the way she taught him, stares across the training room to see Maine doing the same. "She told me to call her CT."
"Right, yeah, CT," says York, impatiently. "What I'm saying is, engaging in a late-night out-of-armor hand-to-hand brawl with Maine may not be the most healthy way to grieve. Or, you know, keep breathing."
"We're next in the rotation, according to the Director. Not the first time I've been volunteered for a fight with this guy. Besides, he never got to finish his training with Sigma." Wash bares his teeth at York in a grin. "You wanna join in?"
York shakes his head. "This is messed up. I'm getting the medics."
"Suit yourself," Wash calls after him, and charges.
The fight is brief and brutal. Wash has never been much for hand-to-hand, and with Sigma changing up Maine's staid fighting patterns, he only manages to land one quick rabbit punch, which Maine shrugs off effortlessly. Then Maine fades left and blitzes forward to hit him square in the chest with a closed fist.
Wash can't breathe. Instantly. Maine hits him again, in the same spot, and this time the crack of his ribs is audible. He doesn't go down until the third hit, a roundhouse kick that catches him behind the ear, flattens him to the ground.
He doesn't pass out. He lies facedown on the floor, wheezing blood, waiting for the medics to take him away. Maine stands over him, his head tilted to one side, his lips pressed together into a thin line, and doesn't say a word.
"This guy one of yours?" asks the bartender, but she's not speaking to Wash. She's speaking to a figure in white armor who's standing out in the rain.
When Sigma flickers to life beside Maine, Epsilon does something strange in Wash's head, a sort of push/pull. Wash feels his own breath catch, and he leans forward to snatch at his helmet, squinting through the tiny droplets of rain on his eyelashes until they smear everything into a blur. When he slips the helmet on, seals blocking out the gentle clatter of the rain, Epsilon relaxes a little, sliding back into a storage compartment. His vision clears.
"Agent Washington," Sigma says. "We were worried when you didn't report back to the rendezvous point. Are you still having significant difficulty with Epsilon? It's unfortunate that you continue to relapse on this front."
Wash laughs. It's rough and uncomfortable, and he doubles over, retching for a moment. "Something's wrong," he says. "Something's been wrong for a long time and I think I'm starting to remember—"
STOP.
The word, flickering across the long-neglected text channel he keeps open to Maine, makes him look up sharply, but Maine says nothing, does nothing.
"Or not," Wash says, and Maine cocks his head to one side. "Maybe I should have him looked at again. Just in case."
"That's probably wise," says Sigma. "You have been listed as AWOL for nearly two days; you abandoned your post during a mission and never returned. The Director sent us to find you. Do you remember?"
Wash blinks slowly. There's a weariness weighing on him that lends truth to the statement. He thinks about asking whether his inattention got someone hurt, got someone killed. Epsilon flinches away from the thought. "So you're the cavalry," he says instead. He has a blurry, vague sense that this has happened before, that there was a long, silent slumber in between. Sleep sounds pretty good about now. "I should come with you." Epsilon shivers, caught again in the push/pull.
The bartender's still standing beside him, behind him. He only realizes this when she snorts, slaps him on the back. "Good luck, creepy fucked-up robot armor dude." By the time he thinks to turn back, she's already disappeared into the bar.
"Our transport is just outside town," Sigma says, "A short walk may do you both some good."
As Sigma flickers away, a tendril of memory unfurls in Wash's mind. A peace offering from Epsilon, maybe. As he stumbles obediently after Maine, he opens the text link one more time, sends, So Sigma's a bit of a dick, huh?
Maine doesn't reply, but Wash thinks he sees his hand twitch as though stifling the signal of a smile.