So. About a week isn't so bad, is it?
The theme of this section is WORK, which naturally covers everything before missions and after missions and nothing during, because it's hard to write a battle scene during a three minute song. (I'll take it as a challenge for the next set?) And it covers other workers in the universe. Which leads me right up to -
WARNING: This section contains spoilers for Resident Evil: Revelations, in the song responses to "Triangular" and "Write What You Know." Big spoilers! Game and story defining spoilers! Epilogue spoilers! So cover your eyes and scroll as need be for those two. (Also, if you have a chance, that's a game worth watching a playthrough or reading a summary of, as it is full of fascinating new things AND fun plot holes.) This section also has the usual angst (turned up to AHNGST on occasion), swear words, random second person, an interesting definition of "strip," and Wesker being creepy. Because he's good at it.
Rating: Remains T. For now.
Thanks to: The Lovely Betas Faye and Himawari for going, "No, seriously, stop screwing with it"; the folks I play ME 3 multi with, who keep me from endlessly refreshing my stats; both reviewers for leaving lovely comments; and, really, everyone who stays to read at least one of these. May you enjoy!
Death Cab for Cutie - "This Temporary Life"
the glass is full, the glass is broke,
and every day dissolves and there's no hope
of ever leaving this temporary life
Alarm goes off.
Funny that he keeps setting an alarm at all; he's always awake before it. He's come to know how light shades over his ceiling better than he'd ever admit to any sort of professional. Or his sister.
Roll over. Turn alarm off. Wouldn't want to disturb anyone else in this building. They leave him alone, and he likes it that way.
Stretch. Do first part of day's exercises. Consider shower, decide against. He'll have a shower tonight at the gym.
Pad to the bathroom. Stop, as always, and look at the mirror.
He always expects that one day, it'll show. Somehow, some day, he'll wake up, and the scars will be etched all across his body: the rifts, the gaps, the creases and creaks, the places where he's broken and sewn back together, all over again.
The scars remain only on his eyes, though.
And only when he looks hard enough for them.
And that's it for reflecting (ha) for the day.
Piss. Wash hands (don't look at mirror). Coffee. Breakfast, maybe. Clothes.
Off to work.
The world is waiting for him, Chris Redfield.
And it doesn't care what he's feeling or not anymore.
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Radiohead - "Optimistic"
Flies are buzzing around my head
Vultures circling the dead
Picking up every last crumb
Leon goes to sleep on planes and wakes up on planes. Sometimes in the middle he dreams he's on a plane. Sometimes, though, he's on a helicopter, though it's always a helicopter that feels off.
Leon's dreams have gotten to be very pragmatic since the government took over his life.
He sleeps. He wakes. He works. Sometimes, there's a break in the work, and he blinks and wonders if he's just woken up from another dream. If in this life, Raccoon City never happened. Or maybe, Raccoon City doesn't exist. He's just a butterfly who dreamt he was a man who went through hell, and finally he's awake. Time to go pollinate some shit.
Leon's waking mind is sometimes not so pragmatic.
It's important, though, to keep that part of him sharp on the job. The job likes to throw so many weird things at him, and it is his job - somewhere in his contract, he's sure it's written down, probably underlined twice and bolded or maybe put in that red WARNING WARNING color - to stay cool under fire. Contractually obligated. He is the US representative to the whacked out world of bioterror, and he's got colors to wear. Captain America, just in an awesome jacket.
He has been accused in his down time of being both boring and vapid. This sometimes comes from a fellow employee, and sometimes from a lady. He always takes it with a grin, and buys them all another drink.
He doesn't say to them: you'd empty your head, too, if you'd seen what I've seen. And continue to go back to it. I know what's waiting for me out there, and I'll just leave it there, all right?
No. No need. Just grin, and buy the next round.
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Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - "Counting Down the Hours"
As I go on
Wondering if I've got a soul and
Counting down the hours 'till it goes
The intel is waiting for him on the seat when he gets on the helicopter. It usually is at this point.
Funny how the BSAA can learn. Funny how just a little pressure, and he's got them trained. 'Course, really, they've got the power, the leverage. They could revoke his permission to travel. They could take away his status. They could lock down his gun.
But they don't. They've got their guilt to expunge. Fun little symbiosis they have going on here, but Chris isn't going to think too deeply about it. He'll just remember it if he ever needs to.
(And one day, he will.)
He rests, first. Lets the chop - chop of the rotors lull him, louder than the usual white noise but effective on him now. If he had a choice between a thunderstorm to sleep to or this sound, he knew which one would work better on him now.
And when it's all settled inside him, he picks up the info. Time to move on. Next mission waits.
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Matthew Good - "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra"
And if it can't get the blood off our hands
Then you and I we'll get it off ourselves
So another day
It was nice to have a good extraction, Jill thought as she slumped against the side of the helicopter. Normally, they were on the run from something - a mob they didn't have enough bullets for, enemies too strong for the bullets they had, an explosion of their own making, the usual - but this time, they'd managed a pretty quick in and out.
Didn't make the mission any less gruesome. So many humans, so many states of infection - and a new set of lives on their hands.
She glanced at Chris across the way. He had his head against the back of the helicopter, eyes closed. A peaceful sight, if it weren't for his fists clenched on his thighs.
She wondered if they felt tacky. They both wore gloves on missions, for shooting and to reduce somewhat the chance of infection. But it didn't matter that 80% of her hand was covered, the blood always seemed to run under the leather, cake against the edges of her fingers and palm. And on a mission like this -
She leaned over and brushed his knee.
"Mm?"
"When we get back," she said, putting on a cocky smile she didn't feel, "drinks are on me."
I'm here, if you need me.
Both eyes opened, and he regarded her down the bridge of his nose. Took her in. Did his own assessment. She did her best not to flex her fingers, to show the growing feeling of tackiness there, to show how her mind had picked up every minor blood stain present.
They never killed with their bare hands. It just felt like it, sometimes.
Then, slowly, he nodded. "First round," he said. "Second is on me."
Right back at you.
Her mouth quirked, but she nodded back. "You got a deal," she said.
They'd go. They'd drink a little. They'd unwind together, with someone who wouldn't mind the jumpiness, until the feeling of humanity came back to the both of them.
Crisis: slightly averted.
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Anouk & Sarah Bettens - "I Alone" (cover)
I'll read to you here, save your eyes
you'll need them, your boat is at sea
The thing is, no matter how good you are, people get hurt.
That's a fact. Can't be avoided. This isn't a movie, or a kid's cartoon show, where body counts are pushed under the offscreen rug. This is their life, made of the danger and the dull, and when that danger kicks in - people get hurt.
And sometimes, it's one of the two of you.
Not the scrapes and bruises and tiny scars hurt, either. That you both take with you after every mission. You've got a collection that'd shame some of those on active duty now, you're pretty sure. 'Cause your active duty doesn't end, is all.
This time, it's Chris's turn up for the big injury. For the injury that lands him in a hospital bed. He's breathing on his own, at least. You fucking hate watching him on a respirator. Bad enough for that IV to hang there, for that machine to beep at you with its tiny, high pitched recriminations.
You read to him then. He does the same for you when you're out. You read for him, and you read for you, because if you stare at him any longer, you're going to do or say something stupid.
That's not the thing you're allowed. People get hurt. You're just supposed to take it.
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Maaya Sakamoto - "Triangler"
It hurts.
Taking an optimistic lie for the truth hurts.
It takes time for Parker to be allowed to talk.
Oh, he can *speak*. But between the doctors poking and prodding him and the BSAA's insistence on a debrief, he doesn't really get a chance to ask something of his own. Not for the first few days.
They tell him about Chris and Jill, about the team on the Semiramis, about Keith and Quint. About O'Brian leaving his role. About the monster that took that ship down into the sea. They give him a lot of information, but they never really touch on what, to him, is the important thing.
"How did I get out there?"
"We were hoping you could tell us," he's told.
"Raymond," he replies. "Raymond Vester. He was on that ship - he helped me get off it." He shakes his head. "But I don't remember - " He wants to touch his leg, the bandages there, or his head, where there are no bandages, and see if either sparks something. Raymond had taken his hand. Raymond had taken it all in hand there, at the end.
But where was he now?
And what was he truly up to?
"That is something Director O'Brian might be able to tell you," say the agents who've come to debrief him.
But Parker isn't dumb about how the BSAA works. O'Brian's taken all his little secrets with him. And it seems he will never know what happened to the man he knew as Cadet - and as a friend.
That he thought was a friend.
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Incubus - "Monuments and Melodies"
And each scar I bear sings
Monuments to where I have been
And melodies to where I am going
Claire offers Jill a place to stay when she gets back from Africa, and then promptly goes back to work. It means that she and Chris have some time together, just the two of them, to deal with some of the crap that currently lays between them. And even with the rescue in Africa, there is some crap that lays between them. There always has been as partners, but Jill's heard some rumors about what Chris has been up while she's been dead. And there's a good way to confirm it.
She asks him to strip. She demonstrates what she means by taking off her shirt for him first. She's got a sports bra on underneath, nothing more than he'd see at a beach. But his eyes still take her in for a long moment, and she knows that they're partially focused on the white bandage on her chest. The wounds no longer seep, but it'll minimize the scars to keep them covered and slathered in antibiotics.
Jill's fine with scars. But she'd also like to wear a V-neck again in her lifetime without too many questions, too.
Chris follows orders all right, when he understands them. He pulls off his shirt and turns around, rolls his shoulders fore and back, letting her see the new scars that lace his skin.
She steps forward, hand hovering in the air between touching him and covering her mouth. He - he doesn't look like he crawled through barbed wire. But there are so many more on his skin than before, the little dings and nicks and scrapes that mark each mission permanently on all of them.
There's so many stories there. More than she thought.
He turns to look at her again, and she covers her mouth at the others she can see now, on his chest and arms.
And through her fingers, whispers softly, "Tell me."
Better to start now than later.
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Stars - "Write What You Know"
Write what you know...
O'Brien flipped through his notes, then dropped the yellow pad on the desk with a sigh. It had always been his dream to write a detective novel, but with the state of the world and bioterror as it was, he had more important things to do. There were always more important things to do.
But now he had all the time in the world, and with the pension checks steadily settling extra tidbits on top of his savings, the comfort to do it in. Except all the time in the world didn't translate to ideas now, did it?
Well. Except the one.
The BSAA wouldn't like it. He was fairly sure Chris and Jill and the rest of them wouldn't be too happy with it, either. But if he changed some details, tweaked this and that, fiddled with the names -
It was a damn workable story. It was a story that'd captivate an audience, he knew that for damn sure.
And didn't they always say to write what you knew? This he knew inside and out.
He licked his pen - unnecessary habit, that - flipped the page, and started his next outline.
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Vienna Teng - "Soon Love Soon"
And we will be as one god
And we will be as one people
Jill is an experimental subject. Soon, he will release her to understand the full nature of her experiment. Soon, he will transition her to the next part of the plan, the one that Excella will think is her own. Which is fine by him; he understands how to feed her ego now, to make the thoughts he has had months ago appear to be her own. She has ways of stoking his own fires. It is an excellent circle they have between them, and he can admit that.
But for now, he likes to summon her to him. He opens her tube partially, though without releasing her bonds, enough for the fields that hold it to the necessary temperature and pressure to stay in place. It is easier to look upon her this way. To talk with her this way, though she never replies.
He doesn't need those replies. He just needs a focus. In Jill, he has an almost perfect one, for what she represents: the beginning days of his rise, her part in STARS and in the hunts for him across the globe, her connection to Chris. In a way, he feels that talking to her is like talking to him.
He will bring Chris to him in the fullness of time. He will guide his mind to understanding what will come. He will show him the path he has so long denied for himself and others.
All will be one. The virus will ensure that. They will writhe together, a new fullness of humanity.
And he will rule over them all.
God in him, man in them.
Triumphant and peaceful at last.