(A/N) And here we are, with the follow-up to last week's first half of our triumphant return! This two-part split technically means that I've finessed my way into having both our two hundredth upload to this story and also its official two hundredth chapter, but I couldn't keep it all as one part due to its sheer size. That ties into why our upload is today, as our editors had quite the late night sifting through it all and ensuring that it passed the quality check!
I told everyone that I was expecting this particular chapter to reach 15,000 words in total at most. 35,000 words and two halves later, here we are. I can't help myself, it seems, but I hope that the wait is worth it! I first visualised this chapter in concept almost seven years ago so to have it published at last is a strange sensation. It's been through more rewrites than perhaps any of my other pieces of work so I hope that it's suitably rewarding.
Enjoy the show!
Chapter One Two Hundred - The Devil You Know
Fireteam Phoenix
Written by BrambleStar14
"The pain inside is the fuel that drives, this flesh and bone through blood red skies.
The death defying, hypnotising, one day you're gonna figure out that everything they taught you was a lie.
Watch the world burn.
The fear is what keeps you alive,
Break the fucking chains, take back your life.
The fear is what keeps you insane,
Break the fucking chains, take away the pain."
- Falling in Reverse, 'Watch the World Burn'
As soon as the rain of death began to fall upon the Crimson Sun soldiers, the Freelancers and Phoenixes were moving into action, scattering to divide the oncoming fire and opening fire in return before their targets could recover from the unexpected ambush. It was chaos in a perfectly calculated precision, the former enemies turned semi-willing allies splitting off into some semblance of a loose plan formed by the mind of a madman and tempered by less unstable sounding boards. If they'd just exploded into mayhem without coordination, the Phoenixes and Freelancers would have been clashing with one another within moments, both figuratively and, in some cases, literally. Instead, there was a cohesion between the group that most of its members would never have expected it to be capable of.
The Crimson Sun had no idea what hit them. Their foot soldiers were already overwhelmed when they encountered Freelancers. Adding in what had been their own former blend of a lethal special operations team and a force of nature was just asking for the building to burn down.
Before the glass from high above had even hit the unfortunate soldiers far below to either shatter on armour or slice through the vulnerable points between armour to add visceral crimson to the downpour, Crosshair's arm was raised. One of his grappling cables fired up into the balconies high overhead with a hiss of hydraulics, the line pulling tight and allowing the sniper to launch himself from the ground, rapidly ascending the building. Even as he vanished from sight, the heavy report of his sniper rang out, a single shot catching one of the soldiers on the lower balcony, passing cleanly through their skull to land solidly in the grenade sat at the belt of his comrade to his right.
The resulting explosion threw the would-be overwatch into disarray, screams ringing out and both smoke and debris of the walkway and soldiers alike thrown into the air, causing the Sun forces on the ground floor, trapped in the melee that was more of a slaughter to flinch in shock.
That second of hesitation cost them like nothing else could have. Time was precious in even the most casual of fights and now, in the last suspended moments of their lives, they were faced with a unit that had made it their business to decide exactly when the sand in the hourglass would run out for each and every one of their targets.
In a heartbeat, or whatever Harper had that passed for a heart, he was amongst them, blade flashing and magnum blasting. He was a whirlwind in his own right, his wings stretched enough to encompass the entire room, his presence cast across the battlefield, allowing him to stay aware of the flow and ebb of the battle. Every single scream, every clash of metal on metal, every echoing boom of gunfire, he felt them all around him, an extension of himself as he allowed himself to unleash the angel of death all over again. He was immersed in the rush of combat until it was all he was.
It was hard to tell whether the manic laughter that was lost amidst the chaos was his own, or Hunter's. They were equally aflame now, burning like nobody else here could quite manage as the other man dove in alongside him. Harper's hand swung the blade, and Shaw ducked beneath it, in perfect harmony, conducting his own symphony from the various instruments scattered across the battlefield. Hunter stabbed and Harper twisted to one side so that the man taking aim at him caught the machete through the heart. The two of them were at the heart of the hurricane, the eye of the storm non-existent as they turned it into a roaring cyclone of death that was just as dangerous as the rest of the maelstrom around it.
The Crimson Sun would find no shelter, and be given no quarter.
They were a damned gravitational vortex, drawing the conflict in around them, back to back against the rest of the damn galaxy. He'd missed this too much for words, all the way down to the very core of his being, wouldn't change it for all the world.
Well. There was a change he'd have made. Even now, the Phoenixes gathered there could feel that tiny hole in their movements, the gap in their formation that they'd already subconsciously worked to cover when having to actively think about it might have been too painful to consider. Rook had been their newest member, but he was just a new puzzle piece to an endlessly shifting jigsaw, one that grew and adapted to form an entirely new picture when completed.
Without that puzzle piece, Harper's own battlefield omniscience reminded him of that loss with every passing moment, as it always had when he'd lost Isaac, and then when he'd managed to push Hunter away. It just made his flames burn darker, more violently, wings threatening to swallow the dying sunlight on the horizon whole.
He was aware of the moment that Geist made himself known once again, rematerializing into being behind one of the remaining snipers at the far side of the room, sword already placed horizontally across the man's throat. One clean slice, a splash of red across the helmet modelled on an old-fashioned gas-mask, and there was one less sniper to worry about. Turning on the spot, the assassin's silenced magnum was in hand, dropping a second sniper, then a third, and then-
Before he could shoot the fourth, the soldier abruptly staggered forwards with a gasp, swaying on unsteady feet, before falling onto his face with a sound that was lost among the symphony of the chaos below, a fresh bullet hole placed neatly in his back. Agent Alaska stood behind him, rifle raised, now aiming directly at the assassin, whose magnum was locked unflinchingly between his eyes in turn… before Alaska gestured at the door to their side with the barrel of his weapon.
"Shall we?" The question was polite, but pointed. The assassin shot one more look at the battlefield, at the laughing maniac brutalising his way through the flames. Inclining his head without another word, Geist stepped through the doors deeper into the facility, the red-armoured Freelancer following in his wake and the doors swinging shut behind them.
"Try not to have too much fun without me!" Firefly called after them, before ducking a particularly heavy swing from a Crimson Sun soldier clutching… a humbler? "Surely not, only Lucas is extra enough to bring one of those to a proper fight!"
"Next time you disable the central processing unit of a Mantis mech with your boxing techniques, you can talk all the shit you want, Aaron." Lucas's indignant retort came back over the open mic a second later. Grinning beneath the helmet, Firefly fell back into the classic boxing stance, both fists raised to shield his face from the next swing of the humbler, before diving back into the fray.
And through it all, California and Harper continued their wild dance with abandon, without concern for human life, without anything beyond the music that they were conducting together, the former Freelancer providing the rhythm and flow, and the former Insurrectionist providing the veil of death that they were drawing across their foes.
Whatever Minnesota felt when he saw them in that moment, Jason and Harper, California and Hunter, caught in that perfect harmony between his selves and back where it felt like he might have actually mattered, actually belonged, it was hard to give a damn about it anymore. His other half's laughter, whichever of them it was, rang through his head, even as he lost himself to the carnage, to the flash of silver, to the sprays of red.
It was a true disappointment when he felt Harper's weight leave his back, their wings that had been that beautiful mingling of darkness and flame, unable to consume or devour the other and instead turning their wrath upon everything else around them, separating after what felt like an eternity and yet never long enough.
"Won't be long, Jay. Gonna go deal with a few things real quick." He couldn't see Ian's grin, but he didn't have to. He could feel it, feel it all the way down in his soul, feel it stretching across his own face in turn, the two of them in concert even now.
"Don't make me come after you."
Harper made a clucking sound that sounded genuinely wounded, clutching a hand to his heart even as he ducked beneath another swing of Cal's blade without having to even think, hearing the wet gurgle behind him as another Insurrectionist hit the floor, throat opened in a second smile to match their own. "But that's the fun part, Jay!"
"Do you two know you're on the open comm channel?" Nebraska's voice was aghast, even as he took several potshots from the cover he'd found at the top of the stairs, felling the soldiers below with one practised headshot after another.
Firefly's laughter answered him. "Trust me, Freelancer, they know." His laughter continued even as the man kicked his larger opponent with enough force to send him staggering backwards, until he collided with a rather heavy haymaker that Colorado had wound up for him. Even as the Insurrectionist fell, she glanced in Firefly's direction with visible discomfort at the rather well-executed combination attack.
He waved back at her. He would never fail to take the little joys in life and run with them.
Still right in front of Hunter, Harper offered a tiny salute, two fingers touching the place where his temple should have been, before reaching out to take hold of the back of Cal's helmet and pull him closer, metal touching metal for that brief moment, the two of them caught in their own private inferno for what felt like a lifetime, saturated in the chaos of battle, for just that single infinity, home.
The only home that Cal could possibly find now.
"See you soon," Harper breathed, before turning and sprinting for the stairs that led deeper into the building, leaping over the armrest and taking them two at a time.
By the time that Wyoming had even managed to shout his name, the Lieutenant was through the double doors and gone from sight.
"So, you're pairing us up? Splitting us off into smaller groups so we can keep an eye on each other?" Nebraska's question was cautious, the Freelancers each eyeing the Phoenixes in turn, wondering exactly who was drawing which straw; though Harper rather felt that they considered every single one of those straws to be the short one. Well, that was their short-sightedness. After all, when everyone had the short straw, nobody did.
"More or less. I've got a few ideas." Harper lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug without thinking, avoiding the wince that threatened to emerge when Shaw hissed at being so suddenly dislodged. "Circuit requested you, other Monty."
The redhead at the back of the Freelancers blinked in surprise, her head shooting upright as though not having expected to be brought up first. She glanced in Circuit's direction, meeting his half-wave with an unimpressed stare, and then looked back at Harper.
"Why?"
He gestured at the engineer, who looked unabashed. "Your skillset and enhancement pairs up decently with mine. Plus, I'm just not a good match for the others."
She eyed him sceptically, but didn't otherwise respond. Harper glanced at Church.
"That's a yes."
The Director said nothing. Spoilsport.
As soon as the rooftop team had breached the structure, they'd done much as the rest of their strikeforce had, far below, separating into smaller units. Circuit didn't exactly know what had become of the others, nor did he need to. He trusted the rest of Phoenix explicitly, handing his life into their hands without hesitation. They could handle themselves. Instead, his focus was entirely on clearing out the floor that he and Agent Vermont had been assigned to. The schematics for the building that he'd dug up (yes, yes, they were all very welcome for his hard work, since nobody else was going to thank him) were entirely accurate, guiding them along effortlessly.
Once they'd left the inner balcony that surrounded the hollow centre of the structure, they'd found themselves in a maze of rooms and corridors surrounding it, featureless and grey. It very much looked for all the world like an ordinary office building, just as most of ONI's facilities tended towards mundane and normal. It was a facade, a mask, one that was even looser here considering that Kestrel Site sat in the literal heart of a satellite facility, but never let it be said that ONI didn't disappoint.
Oh, wait. ONI constantly disappointed. That was how Phoenix had all ended up here in the first place.
He and the Freelancer worked in unison, a well-functioning machine operating without words necessary, carefully sweeping each room together, weapons held at the ready, checking corners, ensuring that they followed the most efficient route through the place that he'd planned in advance and sent to each of their HUDs. It was fine by him if she wanted to work in silence. He preferred it that way, save for the occasional mission-oriented communications.
She worked with an efficiency that was impressive in its own right. None of the flashiness of so many of the other Freelancers. She carried out her orders to the exact letter of the assignment, no more and no less.
So it was a surprise, really, when she spoke, her tone guarded, carrying a note of curiosity but one that was mostly masked. If he hadn't picked up a few tricks from Ian over the years and been looking for it, he wouldn't have caught it. Social situations, Lucas was clueless. Discerning what his allies were trying to say on the battlefield, Circuit was… adequate.
He still preferred machines. Machines didn't give you grief about your choice of weapon unless you programmed them to. Or get their limbs blown off and have you have to hastily design an entire replacement from scratch. Okay, maybe not from scratch. He might have had an incomplete design lying around in the veritable pile of blueprints scattered across his worktop. But that wasn't the point!
"...was it true? What Alaska said?"
Ah. Right. Vermont. Circuit didn't pause, but he did take a little longer in his next sweep of what looked to be several rooms stacked with crates of supplies in rows, enough to keep a small platoon well-stocked for weeks at a time. The gap in his words wasn't for effect. The redhead was trying to make sure his brain didn't jam, that the faded and rusted memories didn't cause any particular… errors in the rest of him that might impair him and allow for the Crimson Sun to get the drop on him.
He'd have said he hadn't thought about his past for a long time, but it would have been a lie. When he was bound in as many regrets as he was, as many unspoken 'what-ifs' and possible other lives as he was, it was impossible not to dwell on the past. His mother might have told him, once upon a time, that it was all a part of God's plan, that these things always had to happen a certain way.
Even so, he was glad that she'd passed away before he'd ever defected along with the rest of Phoenix and willingly stepped over the cliff on that mad crusade that was only going to end one way.
Lucas had never been one for God. It would have been hard to, with how Harper's very existence seemed to be a case of incarnated blasphemy that had yet to be struck down by any almighty. But even then, he'd never been able to quite… understand his mother's belief. It wasn't something quantifiable and didn't answer any of the questions he'd held about the universe. Faith in a deity above was impossible. He'd been abandoned enough. He didn't need to consider that he'd been left behind from birth on top of the rest of it.
She was still waiting for an answer, perhaps wondering if she was ever going to get one. And he'd been thinking for too long, his mind jammed again. There was nothing else for it.
"About my father?" A hum answered him, prompting him to continue without words. He'd been really hoping she'd been talking about something else. A sigh left him, spilling over their private channel, weapon barrel lowering. "Aye. Long time ago, but yeah. I wasn't surprised by it. He wasn't… let's say he wasn't all that invested before, if you get me. You know what the one thing I remember most about him is? It's not him leaving."
That had been easy to come to terms with. That was the part he cared least about. His life had only improved because of it. Vermont was silent, waiting.
"It was the same words. Over and over again. 'Not good enough'. It was all he ever seemed to think." He caught her gaze, before gesturing down at himself, clad in the armour adapted from captured super-soldier gear, modified through his own intellect, working alongside one of the UNSC's very own 'magic bullet' programs at the request of its Director. "Look at me now."
She had no response, staying frozen long enough that she needed to jolt herself back into motion, stepping past him. His eyes followed her, staring at the back of her head, before he broke the silence. "I read your file, you know." She stopped in her tracks, body suddenly stiff, not even daring to look over her shoulder at him. "I get why you asked. The thing that helped me move past it? Took a long time. I thought I found all these… cures. These coping mechanisms."
His skin was itching, feeling a vertical burn down the length of one arm. His fingers curled a little more tightly around the barrel of the weapon. "None of it did. I found people that gave a damn about me. Not for what I could do. Just for me. With all of my…"
Quirks. Eccentricities. The things that kept him awake at night on the verge of screaming into the void if it wasn't for the near-overdose of caffeine and a hundred different projects to keep his mind distracted from tearing itself apart.
"Well. All of my 'me'. I found somewhere I belonged. And I spend so much time thinking I'm not on their level. That I'm not doing enough for them. That I'm not good enough for the rest of them. I isolate myself, constantly. And they keep finding me, over and over again. They're my present. The rest of it? They put it in my past."
Now, he could move on. He could have purpose, a place, a family. He had the chance to make the most of the path he was on. He could put those 'what-ifs' to rest. He'd even gotten Isaac back, found more than he'd ever expected to, could have ever imagined. He was ending those regrets. And through it all, Phoenix would catch him if he ever fell from the path, if he ever relapsed, if his own wings faltered and he couldn't keep himself up, even for those few darkest, loneliest nights.
Maybe he had faith in something after all.
Vermont wasn't responding. After he'd waited for what felt like long enough, he shrugged, and kept moving, stepping past her towards the next set of doors. It was only when he drew alongside her that she spoke.
"...that doesn't feel like it's working for me."
Lucas glanced at her. Hesitated. Bumped his shoulder against hers. She seemed too shellshocked to shrink away. "Then keep looking."
Circuit gestured with his chin at the doors, trying to snap her out of the stupor, leaving it at that. "Enhancement time?" She shook her head sharply to clear it, before nodding a couple of times, taking a few uneven steps forwards and placing her hand against the wall next to the door. Lucas couldn't even hide his open fascination as her visor simply seemed to shut off, the faint gold vanishing, a deep black quite literally passing over it as whatever pulses her armour was sending through the wall and the chamber beyond were returned to her in a form of high-tech echolocation.
Removing her hand from the wall with an unsteady step as her awareness was expanded for a few heartbeats and then reduced back to its normal expanse, she glanced at him. "Seven of them." Ah. That could be problematic. Unless… he gazed at her palm, then up at her, and then back down at her palm again.
"Did you hear any humming when you were using that? A low pulse in the walls, maybe?" She followed his gaze down to her hand, before pressing it to the wall again. He watched her quite literally feel her way along the wall, hand falling, hesitating, and then rising again, until it found an innocuous stretch of smooth surface. Removing her hand, she nodded.
"There. Why?"
Setting his rifle down, he clicked his fingers and pressed his gauntlets together, quite literally sparking them into life, lightning dancing between his digits. "It's the electric circuits in the walls. Usually for the lights. I'm going to overcharge them, short out the lights, you kick the door in and shoot." She stared for a moment. Then, she simply snapped around and made her way over to the doors, raising the weapon without another word.
If only Harper would take his advice that easily.
Circuit lay his palms flat against the spot that she'd pointed out, counting down. He did like his countdowns.
"Three. Two. One." He flexed his hands, sending electricity surging through the surface and into the fragile and easily overloaded circuits behind. The lights above them plunged them into absolute darkness. Shouts began on the other side of the wall, but Vermont gave them no time to recover. Her armoured boot collided with the doors, kicking them open and falling to her knees, one palm flat against the floor.
Wild gunfire erupted over her head, but the Freelancer's other hand moved her weapon between each of her targets in turn, visible to her even in the dark, without having to spend those few seconds for her suit's night vision to adjust to the reduced light levels. Seven shots were followed by the thuds of seven bodies hitting the floor.
Silence fell between them in the darkness. Circuit couldn't see her save for the IFF tag on his visor, couldn't hear her, waiting for his own armour to adjust to the dimmer lighting until he caught sight of her, rising to her feet again, reloading her weapon without so much as a word. Of course, when Harper chose to speak from the doorway behind them, he started in shock, scrambling for his rifle.
"Very nicely done."
"Jesus fuckin' Christ, Ian, I nearly took your head off." He clutched at his chest from the near heart attack. Harper's laugh was soft and playful, stepping over in the dark to gently tug the barrel of the rifle down.
"Relax, Circuit. I just heard that talk about your histories, by complete coincidence of course, and just felt I had to drop by. After all, Vermont here's got quite the past. Quite the history in her wake."
Circuit could hear her sudden tensing, the creak of armour plates against armour plates, that fight or flight instinct triggered. "You don't know anything about-"
"I know everything about you. Don't think you can outplay me at this game, Freelancer. I know exactly what I need to know about you. I know about every connection you've ever failed to make, every little thing that's gone wrong in your life, before and after joining the military. I know every single person that's ever tried to use you for their own ends, without any real goal of your own. I know that you've been saddled with every single name under the sun. You've been a curse, a hex, an omen." He took step after step closer to Vermont, until he was quite literally staring her down, in the dark. "All those things that they called you. All the little things that you called yourself. Always running from it. Hiding yourself away."
He leaned closer, until he was at eye level with her, the open doorway behind him illuminating him with the weak sunlight shining through even now. "That's why I asked for you. You've been thrown from place to place with all of that damage behind you. You're using Freelancer as a lifeline, but for what? Why? Look at your Director. Look at your teammates. When the dominoes fall, Vermont, do you think you can rely on any of them? What's it all for? What do you want?"
Lucas couldn't see her glare, but he could feel her palpable fury, her voice tight, every single syllable wrapped with pained rage. "I don't need to. I don't need any of them. Just… me."
"Just you. You know what I see when I look at you, Vermont?" Harper's words were thoughtful, slow, measured. Circuit had seen this before. Seen it when Harper had needed to conduct interrogations in the field, finding a person's weaknesses like a surgeon. "Someone who knows what they are, but hasn't made it their own. You have no purpose, because you're too afraid to find one. Sooner or later, Freelancer's going to leave you in the cold, broken and bloodied. And you'll be left wondering if any of it was really worth it."
His head tilted to one side, letting the silence linger between them, before suddenly standing back to his full height, shrugging his shoulders and tone slipping from the slower, sly tone that he'd been using to something a lot more casual. "Better think about what you're going to do when the rest of them try to leave you behind, Vermont. You're internalising enough. Maybe it's time to let it all out, eh?"
It was moments like that that reminded Circuit of just how glad he was that he was on Harper's side. He'd seen him in his moments of weakness, knew exactly what kind of creature lived behind the hood of the reaper that he wore for the rest of the galaxy.
Because sometimes, on missions, when Harper got ideas into his head, he terrified Lucas, in those moments that he failed to recognise his squad leader, his friend… hell, the older brother that had sat with him in the aftermath of Isaac's 'death' and grieved alongside him in memory of Isaac, shut away from anyone that could see or judge either of them, the most broken that either of them had ever seen the other.
Harper took a few steps backwards, never taking his gaze away from the soldier in olive armour. "Anyway! Places to go, people to see. Keep up the good work, you two. Food for thought!"
And then he was gone, leaving Circuit and Vermont in darkness.
"Moving on," Harper's hand came up to point next in the direction of a certain platinum-haired hellcat disguised as a… as a soldier? As a woman? Either worked, really. "South Dakota. I'm gonna send Crosshair up to you when the attack starts. He should be able to provide overwatch for your particular brand of violence."
As expected, her eyes flashed with her infamous temper.
"And just who the fuck put you in charge?"
Next to her, Wyoming grimaced. "South. Language, please?"
Her eyes narrowed on the far wall, mouth opening and closing. The cogs were turning in her head, calculating her next words carefully. Finally, nodding to herself, she raised a finger and tried again.
"...whomst the fuck put you in charge?!"
"No." Wyoming sighed, giving up the point altogether.
From his own position, Crosshair gave her a clinical, assessing look. "I'll be providing remote support, staying out of your way, and I won't be trying to hold you back. Up there, you'll be calling the shots."
She eyed him, clearly trying to tell if he was messing with her, attempting to read his face for any signs of deceit. Whatever she was looking for, she didn't find it, and her jaw clenched tightly. South didn't say a word, but when she finally offered a tight, irritable nod, the deal was done.
"Fuckin' took you long enough," South Dakota hissed at Crosshair when he finally drew himself up to the top floor, landing on his feet and disconnecting the grappling cable from the ceiling above. Already, the sounds of a chaotic rampage from the mingled firebirds and Freelancers could be heard far below. She pushed herself away from the wall that she'd been leaning against and the sniper was silently thankful that she'd actually stuck to the agreed-upon plan instead of charging in carelessly and getting the both of them in an unpleasant situation.
If she'd gotten herself killed, his team was being put at risk, after all.
"What's your plan?" He idly ejected the magazine from his customised rifle and replaced it, watching her try and find something to pick apart in his words, to find a reason to snap at him. When she found none, she jerked her head at the nearby stairs sharply, uncomfortably.
"I'm clearing the next floor. Your job is keeping an eye from a distance and clearing the rest up. You're not going first," she raised a finger, "you're only going to alert me if I've missed one," there was the second finger, "and you're going to let me do my damn job without questioning me. Understood?" She raised the third finger, posture tense, perhaps expecting him to fight back, to argue with her.
He wasn't North Dakota.
"Fine with me. I'll let you know when I'm in position." It was all he needed to say. His job here wasn't to assuage the Freelancer, just work with her. He was more comfortable at a distance anyway, and not just physically. If she wanted to do her own thing and keep his entire role as ensuring that she didn't take any stray rounds… he could do that.
She watched him evenly. "...great." It was spoken through gritted teeth, before she turned around and stalked to the staircase, vanishing from sight altogether to descend down to the next floor of the building. Crosshair turned on the spot, choosing not to follow her, but instead taking careful aim with his grapple cable and firing it, once again, into the ceiling above the chasm that ran down the length of the entire building. Ensuring that it was secured firmly, he stepped up to the edge of the balcony, glancing down that long, long fall and once again very grateful that he didn't suffer from vertigo.
He clicked his radio on. "I'm in position." He waited long enough for the affirmative, before stepping off of the ledge in the exact same instant that on the floor below, gunfire erupted. Allowing his body to pitch forwards, Crosshair descended, an upside-down spider-like figure, a silent wraith carrying death from afar, lowering himself until he was suspended in front of the balcony that ran around the perimeter of the next floor down. There was South Dakota, carving her way through Crimson Sun soldiers on the balcony, her SMGs blaring, stitching lines through them in close quarters. When her guns didn't work, she used her boots and fists to send her opponents spinning away, the perfect target for the sniper still suspended upside-down.
South was clearly used to working with another sniper. Every single one of her movements, when not lethal, were designed to cast her enemies out in the oncoming gunfire and sure enough, Crosshair picked them off, one by one, picking up the ones that she wasn't finishing herself.
Aside from the brief moment where she spun around to spot him dangling there, hanging from his cables like a spider and muttering "you've got to be fucking kidding me", there was radio silence between them. She tore her way through the soldiers in her way and he cleaned up in her wake, magazine after magazine abandoned to fall down into the abyss far below… above him?
Even in the moments that she vanished through doors into the corridors and rooms behind the balcony and deeper into the building, his HUD was painted with the silhouettes of marked soldiers that he could pick off with careful shots through the walls, or drop whenever South bodily tossed them back into sight through the open doorways.
The more she worked her way around the floor, the more he twisted effortlessly on that cable, suspended above the drop, his weapon an extension of himself as they fell into a rhythm of sorts.
It was, of course, just like Harper to cut across their silent flow by speaking through the comm channel right as South chose not to exit back onto the balcony by stepping through one of the doors, but to instead shove it open bodily by throwing an enemy into it, sprinting through to engage her next group of targets.
"So, how's it going, South Dakota? Not giving my sniper any grief, are you?"
Crosshair saw her pause, tense up, and then keep slaughtering her way through her opponents with a renewed frenzy, her wrath only inflamed by the sound of Harper's voice.
"What do you fucking want, Harper?"
He tutted down the mic, sounding disappointed. "I thought I'd see how you were getting on with my old organisation."
"Funny. I don't see you." Her boot met the chestplate of one unfortunate soldier, sending him careening over the balcony to plummet with a scream. Crosshair took careful aim and picked him off with a single shot before he could hit the floor, cutting his scream abruptly short. A bullet wasted from a clinical, numbers-oriented approach, but less so on a personal level. "What do you really want?"
"No, seriously. I just wanted to know how you were finding your little partnership with Crosshair. He's not exactly North Dakota, is he?"
Oh, Ian was trying to get him killed. Wonderful. South's snarl could be heard over the channel.
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Meaning, South Dakota, that I've set you free, just for a little while. Free of that endless watchman on your shoulder, telling you what you can do, what you can't do. Free of that voice in your head, wondering just what you'd be without him. Free of the fear of taking that final step, of being just you. Just South Dakota. Nobody else with that energy shield. Nobody playing the good cop and trying to temper you. Because one day, South, you're going to figure out just what you are, and whether you can be anything other than one half of someone else's whole."
Her SMG was pressed against an opponent's visor so hard that it cracked the glass, her finger pulling the trigger and sending the unfortunate man spinning away like a ragdoll, blood blooming from the back of his skull. Along with most of his skull.
"I don't need a damn thing from you, unless you want to go a few rounds. Go and deal with your own sibling problems."
Crosshair blinked at the reminder of Isaac, the one member of Phoenix still alive that wasn't accompanying the rest of them on this particular mission swimming to the front of his mind again. One of Phoenix's collective regrets, one of their biggest, the original sin from which all of their carnage could be traced back. The first wound that their trail of blood leaked from, rapidly becoming a river, and then a veritable ocean with just how much more they'd spilled, between themselves and amongst the rest of the universe.
Isaac was the second sibling he'd lost, the second one he'd failed to save when he watched over the rest of them every second of every day. Even the miracle of getting him back didn't change what they'd already done in his name, in his memory. It didn't change that they thought they'd lost him, that Mike hadn't watched over him well enough, hadn't taken care of him. He was never going to make the same mistake again. However distant he was, however long he had to stand guard, however many watches he had to take, from dawn to dusk and all the way through to dawn again…
No more dead Phoenixes. Not until it was their own sunset.
"Already dealt with, South." Ian's voice was cheerful, refusing the acknowledge the barb. "But you admit that there's problems. That's a good start. Truthfully, I don't want you to need anything from me. That's not why you're here. I'm just giving you the taste. The little thought of… 'what if'. What you could be if you weren't too scared to take that last leap."
South's rage exploded over the channel. It was fascinating to watch, to see how she got faster and faster the angrier she got. The more enraged she was left, the riskier that her movements became. Blades came closer to her body, bullets sailed centimetres from her skin, but her takedowns became more violent, more brutal, more bloody. Soon enough, her gauntlets were as red as Alaska's armour, blending with the pink of the rest of her.
Crosshair spun on the cable when his own IFF system pinged someone behind the two of them. South wasn't even looking in the direction of the soldier on the far balcony, taking careful aim at her back. Whether her own wrath had focused her entire world down to the singular carnage her body was wreaking, or she simply trusted in the sniper eternally at her back to take care of it for her, she wasn't looking.
A single shot put the threat down, before Crosshair twisted back around to fire a few more rounds off through the wall at a group looking to ambush her from the door behind.
"I'm not scared! Not of you! Not of any of them!"
"Not of Arkansas? Not of Georgia?"
South's chaos halted abruptly, the Freelancer stopping in her tracks as the last of her enemies fell around her, most of them already dead. South didn't even notice when the few stragglers, crawling to either weapons or just simply trying to escape, were finished with a single shot to the head each. Her voice, when she spoke, was uneven, her breathing heavy, sounding on the verge of an apocalypse.
"You don't get to talk about Georgia or Ark to me. You didn't know them like I did. Don't you dare…"
Harper waited for a few moments, before replying, voice for once completely void of emotions. "I was there when Ark buried Georgia. I heard his eulogy, the words he said, the things he'd left unsaid for too long. It broke him, South Dakota. Broke him in ways that he'll never recover from until the day he dies. Missed opportunities. Things that could have been if they weren't so afraid to take the leap. You could have everything you ever wanted for yourself, if you just reached out and took it."
She didn't speak, frozen, staring at something that only she could see as the serpent breathed the words into her ear, coiling around her very soul itself, tearing every single one of those scars open afresh and filling her with fresh venom.
"The only question, South Dakota, is why haven't you?"
The radio channel clicked off, leaving Crosshair watching her, stood alone amongst the dead, looking for something that he wasn't sure even she could identify.
"I'm sorry. He's…" He didn't have the words for it, to encompass exactly what Ian Harper was, why he was what he was, to explain the things that he did that only he could truly understand. He couldn't even begin to explain Phoenix's own hangups with siblings, or sibling figures. "I'm sorry."
She jerked her head in his direction, her visor splattered with red that dripped down the reflective surface in twin trails.
"Save it. Let's go and clear the next floor." South didn't wait for confirmation, making her way to the next staircase, ejecting her magazine and casting it aside with a hollow-sounding thud, clicking another into place with the same finality that she ended the radio channel.
Crosshair hung there, suspended silently in the middle of all of this anarchy, all of the chaos and the bloodshed. And in it all, what else did he have, save for his teammates, for the only people left in the universe that he could bring himself to care about. He was their overwatch, their watcher on the wall, the thing that stayed up all night in the sniper's nest just in case an unknown threat approached the base and put them at risk.
They were his. They were all he had. He was with them to the end of the line.
Gunshots began to ring out on the floor below. The sniper activated his cable and began to descend, adding the sound of his shots to the carnage South Dakota was leaving in her wake.
"Now, since the good Doctor has insisted on having you along, Alaska, I'm pairing you up with Geist over…" Harper's finger, raised to point in the direction of Geist's new position to the Freelancers' collective right, paused when it landed on empty space. He searched for a moment, only to find him back in his original spot in the shadows of the brightly-lit leaderboard, that monument to the project's infighting blocking out the assassin from view.
It was truly infuriating how he was able to do that.
"Over there." He finished, after the pause had gotten slightly too long to be entirely comfortable for anyone in the room save for the assassin and the silently laughing Firefly. "Honestly? I just think he's the one you won't get a rise from. You can absolutely take that as the blatant manipulation that it's supposed to be and take the challenge."
Alaska's head turned to study the Frenchman, who was watching him in turn without giving a single thing away about what went on beneath the surface. He might as well have been carved from ice, which made it doubly impressive that he could ignite in the way that he could, striking from the shadows to leave the kind of burns that reminded those receiving them that a flame was never tamed, never controlled, and never 'safe' simply because you couldn't see it.
Given enough time, everything burned.
"So why aren't we sending New Hampshire then, if we need to take out a swordsman?" Nebraska's eyebrows rose when his question was answered by the outpouring of mirth from Aaron, the pyro having to turn and lean back against the table to contain the uncontrollable giggling. "Was it something I said?"
Holding up a finger, Firefly tried to speak, and then fell into laughter all over again when he looked at the mildly puzzled expression on Nebraska's face.
"I mean, sure, you could send New Hampshire," Circuit put in when it didn't look like Aaron was going to get himself under control any time soon. "If you wanted to get him killed and give Geist a second sword."
Firefly's cackling practically begged them to try. Unsurprisingly, nobody questioned Alaska's presence with the assassin after that.
The two of them hadn't said much to one another. There wasn't any particular need to; it wasn't how either of them operated, really. Agent Alaska was an interrogator, of course. It was in his file, noted down to be one of the skillsets that Director Leonard Church had made use of during his time as Alaska's commanding officer. He knew how to make people talk through both physical and vocal 'encouragement', but those were only tools in his arsenal. No, he was similar to Geist in many ways, speaking only when he needed to and endlessly watching the people around him. They both, the two of them, took their time to analyse their surroundings. Knowing your enemy was half of the battle.
The other half was knowing the battlefield and being able to pick it appropriately. It was why each of them hadn't needed to speak to the other. They understood one another. Geist had been able to tell exactly what kind of man Alaska was even if he hadn't read his file along with the other Phoenixes during a particularly slow afternoon on the Mother of Invention. He'd struck a lazily casual posture during the briefing, almost disaffected in his own way, his attention only half on his surroundings, but it had all been an illusion.
Alaska had been ready to spring at a moment's notice, whether at one of the Phoenixes he was sharing the room with, or by verbally unleashing whatever barbed comments he'd slowly been storing inside of him like ammunition. The assassin had no doubt that much as his team had been carefully assessing the Freelancers' files and the team that Harper and the Director had assembled between the two of them, the smarter Freelancers had been trying to do the same. Whatever they'd found that ONI hadn't scrubbed would be limited at best…
Which was why Alaska had been studying them in as casual an environment as he could. His eyes had trailed over each of them in turn, the threads that kept them connected to one another. Every interaction was just another weapon to the man that Harper had spoken of upon his return from his imprisonment with Freelancer. The blonde hadn't been particularly impressed with the red-armoured man's technique in a cell, but he'd warned them all the same of just how perceptive Alaska could be.
It was why he'd made such a show of approaching the Freelancers unseen when he'd needed to. It was easier to throw them off of their game when all they could focus on was wondering where he was at any given time, and trying to discern what they could from him when they caught sight of him.
Really, it was startlingly easy to stand out amidst the flashier members of the team when he really tried to. He wasn't prone to clumsy and pointless demonstrations of his own talents. When they saw him, he wanted them to. It meant that they saw less of the others when they were constantly tracking him and when they inevitably tried to read Geist's file… there would be nothing prior to Fireteam Phoenix. As there shouldn't be. Whatever, whoever, he'd been before Phoenix, Geist had spent his time ensuring that it was wiped clean, that he'd cleanly and neatly severed himself from it.
If there was a living soul alive that knew a thing about him, they weren't saying.
"I know why Harper put us together," Alaska had said when they'd first reached the floor of the base that was being utilised as a barracks for the Crimson Sun forces occupying it. Here, the rooms had been turned into makeshift quarters for squads, each containing a series of bunks, limited personal effects and scattered uniforms. Those soldiers not currently on-shift had been either sleeping or taking their time to unwind between what had previously been boring rotations doing absolutely nothing save for protecting one of Arkansas' aces.
It had meant that the two of them had caught the Insurrectionists completely unaware, still in the middle of hastily pulling on armour and stumbling into their team formations after hearing the chaos erupting below. There hadn't been any flashy entrances or loud proclamations. Geist had simply vanished from sight and waited for Alaska to walk into the room and begin opening fire with precise shot after shot. Then, the Frenchman simply materialised back into being behind their backs and began to cut them down as cleanly and as efficiently as he could.
Geist didn't particularly enjoy these kind of bloodbaths. Even on the assignments when he was sent elsewhere to remain unseen and invisible until he struck, he didn't find pleasure in it. He was a traditionalist, preferring the simplicity and efficiency of blade against blade, the kind that the others could have scoffed at if they'd chosen to, if each of them hadn't each held their own vices and quirks and codes. Yes, he could utilise any number of weapons. Yes, he'd received all manner of hand-to-hand training including more archaic techniques and blunter, harsher, more brutal styles. But only out of necessity, or in a rare case, indulgence.
He didn't use the weapon or methods that he did because of any particular flashiness. It was simply who he was, a man who remained unseen when it was needed and was visible only when he needed to be. His own flames burned just as fiercely as the rest of them, his wounds just as deep and old and painful.
But it meant that he could remain comfortable in the shadow of brighter fires.
"I know." It was all he needed to say, withdrawing his blade from the only soldier still standing in the set of quarters that they were currently working their way through and dispassionately turning away as the corpse fell to the floor, already working at cleaning the sword. Of course Alaska knew. It didn't make a difference either way.
"There's no point in me trying to dissect you, either." Alaska didn't sound disappointed or particularly excited. His tone was flat, emotionless, expressionless. This was the man when he needed to present no front, not to a Director, or to teammates, or to enemies. He chose to wear no mask now because whatever he'd have chosen would have told Geist far more than this current emptiness behind.
What did it matter if they each acknowledged the fact that the other wore the same masks, that they were mirrors of whatever the people around them needed to see? Phoenix knew what he was, who he was now. They accepted his desire for the shadows they cast. Alaska knowing meant nothing when he could do nothing with it, when it was who he was in turn.
"No." It was quiet agreement, his accent curling the words in a certain way without any true emotion. Alaska nodded to himself as the two of them moved to another corridor. For being in such enclosed quarters, Geist wore remarkably little Crimson Sun blood on his armour. If there was any on Alaska, it was completely invisible atop the paint of his armour.
"You have things that you care about." It was statement, not question. Some small truth that Geist hadn't been afraid to utilise as shield for the rest. Of course Alaska had noticed.
"Yes." He didn't turn his head in Alaska's direction, but his senses were focused on the other man as well. "As do you."
They each had their vices, their weaknesses, their proteges and found family and drives. Those small cracks in the mirror, the fault lines in the glass, the imperfections that gave them a semblance of something that was theirs and uniquely theirs alone.
The Freelancer allowed a few seconds to trickle by, before turning his head to Geist, voice carrying a certain note of concession to it. "...yes. I suppose we've reached an impasse."
It was an offer of truce, of forgoing their current duel of raised barriers and instincts coiled to spring. Neither of them would move on the other here, on this mission. Whatever insights they held for one another were for them alone.
"J'accepte." He said no more, sensing the nod of Alaska's head; he carefully used the hand on the hilt of his sword to slide it fully back into its sheath, having been semi-drawn at all times, even when alone with the interrogation specialist. Even so, he remained alert for any possible threats, his attention eternally on both the Phoenix team channel that he kept himself tuned into at all times, as well as his more personal one-to-one channel that he'd gotten Circuit's assurances could never be hacked.
Alaska drew up abruptly short, his enhancement keeping the two of them appraised of any threats even now. "One in the corridor ahead," he said simply, rifle at the ready. Geist eyed the double doors ahead, not even fully dematerialised before letting out a nearly silent exhale at the sight of the IFF tag on his HUD.
"Friendly." He released the hilt of the blade, pushing the doors open as they drew level with them, allowing both himself and Alaska entry to whatever awaited them beyond. "Mostly."
"I'm hurt." There wasn't even a single note of derision or humour in Maverick's voice. Geist's team leader was leaning back against one of the corridor walls, arms folded, one hand idly tapping his infamous blade against his other arm's plating. His head lazily turned in their direction as they approached; Geist noted that a sliver of tension that returned to Alaska's form now that they were alone. "You look nervous, Alaska. Not being able to ask your questions must put you on-edge, I'm sure."
The other man recovered so smoothly that the tension might as well have never been there. "Why not go back to the cell and we can pick up where we left off? I know that you didn't want me on this mission, Harper. Surely you aren't scared of me, after last time."
A dry chuckle left Maverick's throat, a harsh rasp rather than the usual boundless delight he found in the mayhem that he carried in his wake like debris from a hurricane. "Of the things in the universe that could scare me, you aren't one of them, Alaska. If I recall correctly, you couldn't get a word out of me that I didn't want you to."
"I'd settle for adding more scars." The crimson Agent stopped in front of Harper, watching him from up-close with no small degree of spite in his words. It didn't stop Ian's head from tilting to one side, pushing himself away from the wall to stand at his full height, the two experts in every kind of pain in the universe watching each other in a silent clash. Geist could practically feel the tension in the air around them, waiting for the inevitable detonation that would erupt if they let it.
"What's a few scars between friends, Alaska?" Harper's tone was soft, a serpent's whisper, one hand coming up as though to brush imaginary dust from Alaska's shoulder. When the other man's hand snapped up to catch his wrist, Geist could practically see the smirk on Harper's face as his head tilted in the other direction, tutting aloud. "There's no need to be scared of me, Alaska. Yet. You owe me a certain blood debt, but I won't collect it just yet."
Now it was Alaska's turn to scoff. "You claim 'water under the bridge' and then claim I owe you?"
"Well." Harper's other hand, the one holding the knife, came up. The bloodstained and dripping metal caught the light as he tilted his hand from side to side. "You don't owe me, specifically. But I'll collect all the same, when the time comes. Before I send you on your way to kill Pennsylvania, of course."
The Freelancer stared, seemingly astonished at the sheer audacity of the idea. "You must be delusional to think that I'm killing Penn for you."
"Alaska…" It was crooned, a secret between friends. "Of course you are. You're doing it for me, for the Director, for Massachusetts… you're doing it for all of the people around you. Now Penn, he has something to prove. But you're being guided. Carefully aimed. Strung along. Now that's a good way to put it, isn't it? A puppet on strings."
Alaska leaned closer, his visor inches away from Harper's, helmet turned just enough so that he could practically speak into the blonde's ear. "This might work on the others. It won't work on me, Ian. That's why Church ordered me along. And soon enough, we won't need you anymore. By the time I get to Penn, you'll be long dead."
"Well, obviously." Harper tugged his hand free of Alaska's grip, stepping around him with mocking caution, before half-bowing, arms spreading wide again, knife drawing the eye, silver and red wrapped in a double-helix that caught the light. "I know it won't work on you. I haven't offered you Moi, after all."
The jolt to Alaska was enough to send Geist back to full alertness, the man in ODST armour swivelling to face Harper, blade drawn from its sheath and held tightly enough to be swung in less than a second, if needed to.
"What do you know about-?" It was a rush, one that Harper cut short with a raised hand.
"Good question, isn't it? It's one you should be asking about your Director though, don't you think? Right now, Alaska, he needs you. He needs you to kill Penn. It's why he hasn't told you and you know it. You're just desperate enough for the truth that it doesn't matter. But when it's done and you aren't needed anymore, how much worth do you think you'll have to him? What do you think he'll do to you if you don't like the answer you get? This road you're on right now, we both know where it leads."
He retreated back towards the double doors that they'd entered through, never turning away from them as he walked backwards. Alaska's voice, when he spoke again, was darker, mutated with an edge of growing violence to it that reminded Geist in many ways of Ian's very own darkest days.
"You're not invincible, Harper. You have weaknesses on our ship. I can hurt you, if I tried."
Maverick paused at the threshold, head tilting to the side like a particularly interested canine, though one with claws drenched in red and wings of empty, all-consuming black. A tiny hum escaped him and then a nod, settling on whatever he'd been going to say.
"I'll see you on the ride back, Alaska. I'm going to go speak to your protege now."
And then he was gone, the doors swinging shut in his wake. Silence reigned. Alaska stared at the place where Harper had vanished.
Geist silently decided that, no matter what truce the two of them had agreed, he wasn't stowing the sword again as long as they were in the same room. He knew the signs of a man that was too wrapped in masks, who'd lied to himself for too long. If Alaska snapped, Geist wouldn't be seeing anything he didn't recognise.
"Honestly, that doesn't leave too many options left. Falcon's going to be mainly keeping an eye on our overwatch and if they somehow get an alert out, he'll be our air support and exfil. But since my boy Circuit's too good to let them get said signal off and the rest of us are far too good to let them know we're coming-" Harper's perfectly rational words were cut short by the snort directly to his side as Hunter's head shook in derision, his partner's face twisted into entertained mockery.
"We get it. We're good. Falcon's doing overwatch. Get on with it." Cal's hand rolled to move things along, meeting Harper's scowl with a beatific smile that projected the kind of false innocence that made Harper's instincts sing with an urge to pounce, for a whole myriad of reasons.
It was a true effort to force his attention away from Shaw and back to the briefing at hand, deliberately ignoring the smirks that several members of his team were wearing and deliberately catching Minnesota's eye when he saw the grimace that the other man was sending in his and Jason's directions.
"That kind of backwards attitude is very twentieth century, Minnesota." His voice was deliberately placid, letting the words linger in the air for several seconds, watching for the exact moment that the Freelancer realised exactly what he was implying, when 'Sota's eyes widened and his mouth opened in outrage. Of all of the Freelancers (save for perhaps Colorado, rageful hellcat that she was), Minnesota had the most reason to detest him and it was perhaps for that reason that he so enjoyed playing with the other man, allowing him to dance at the end of strings that Harper only had to tug for an entire routine to play out just for him.
"You know full well that's not why-"
"Smashing." He took a leaf from the Director's book, steamrolling over the indignant cry and continuing as though nothing had happened save for him making a very salient and profound point. "As I was saying. Falcon's gonna be on overwatch, but I'm going to have him support you, Nebraska, should you need it. You're going to be clearing the western wing. Beautiful views of the sunset and a lot of windows should you need the covering fire."
Nebraska sent his second and pilot a doubtful look. Rather than getting visibly offended, Falcon offered him a small, helpless smile. It was the kind of expression that said quite plainly that he was just as along for the ride as any of the Freelancers were, his tone calm enough to be very deliberately attempting to keep the Agents at ease.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to put you at any risk."
Harper didn't think Nebraska looked too reassured by that, but his shoulders came up in a deliberately casual shrug, all previous hesitation and consternation swept away far too smoothly for it to be anything but deliberate. Watching the mask slip into place was utterly fascinating. He wondered how obvious it was to the others. Alaska, he thought, probably would have noticed. The rest? Their hatred of him and his flock was too singular.
"Which leaves-"
"You, me, an' Minnesota, Firecracker!" Firefly practically sang it, pointing at Colorado eagerly, grin broad and eyes aglow with enthusiasm. Harper wasn't surprised; Shaw had been practically encouraging her to spar with the redhead since they'd gotten onboard. He wondered whether it was because Jason saw in her what Harper himself did, if it was some sense of kinship for one of the only Freelancers who could share in that unique kind of dark flame that they shared in, or if she'd just somehow become one of Cal's few remaining friends, close enough to cling to even now.
Either way, Firefly had taken her… prickly nature as a challenge, a hurdle to be overcome. She didn't look particularly pleased to be paired with the bombastic pyromaniac, pointing in Falcon's direction.
"It's not too late for me to swap with Neb," she pointed out.
"Hey!" Now Aaron looked downright offended, both hands coming up, spread wide. "The fuck?! I'm way more fun than Falcon!"
"Cheers," said pilot put in from nearby rather dryly, as Geist coughed rather pointedly. Firefly grimaced.
"No offence meant, Phil, but, like… the fuck, Colorado? We've been bonding!"
Her expression could have fused glass with how much venomous heat she put behind the glare.
"I'll bond my fist to your damn nose."
He beamed. "Sounds like sparring to me!"
Minnesota decided, much to Harper's disappointment, to cut across the show, gesturing in Cal's direction and speaking not to any Phoenix, but to the Director, his voice tight and unhappy. "So who's going with Cal? I'd rather keep an eye on him-"
There was a choked growl from Ian's left, the kind of sound that was blackened and twisted and scorched from the laugh that it had started at. It went from California's incredulous rage, to Hunter's mocking wrath, to something else altogether. "Bet you would."
The Director turned the full weight of his stare upon Minnesota. "California has decided that for this mission, he will not be representing Project Freelancer. He and Lieutenant Harper agreed that to make the…deployment numbers of this operation even, he will be representing Fireteam Phoenix. Therefore, he shall be working alongside-"
"Yours truly." Harper's arm was thrown around Jason's shoulders, pulling the former Freelancer close to his side and smirking in the direction of Cal's roommate. "Relax, Freelancers. We're all professionals here. This is gonna be fun."
It was obvious to Falcon that Nebraska was far more comfortable as a solo operator than as part of a team. They'd encountered one another before; it was inevitable really for each of the Phoenixes to have encountered each and every Freelancer when they'd been in conflict for as long as they'd had. During those previous showdowns, Nebraska had been more of an anonymous member of the units he was deployed with.
Falcon made it a habit of memorising as much as he could from each of the team's post-mission reports. He'd kind of had to, when Firefly barely ever turned his in and Harper had the incredible ability to veer wildly between hardly offering even the slightest detail in his after-action reports and offering stories that were so grandiose and extravagant in detail that Phil was convinced that he turned on 'text to speech' and narrated to his datapad for twenty minutes.
Beta reading each and every one of Fireteam Phoenix's reports was practically its own exercise in patience. If he'd ever managed to settle down into civilian life (an opportunity that had looked virtually impossible once Harper and Jason had reached their agreement to bring Phoenix onboard the Mother of Invention), he could have put that on his CV and gotten pretty much any job he wanted. It was like herding cats if the cats were all deathly afraid of doing their damn paperwork.
Even with all of that, he'd gotten enough information from each of those reports to cross-reference them, to glean exactly what kind of role Nebraska usually played within those team structures. He was a general jack-of-all-trades, a rifleman that plugged the gaps in his teams, fulfilling the needs that were required of him without any real specialisation of his own. He was a man who played whatever role he had to, inside and out.
Which was why it was so enlightening to see him work through the west wing of Kestrel Site practically single-handed, abandoning the cautious attitude he usually adopted when he was covering his team's weaknesses and instead falling into cold, clinical efficiency. The Phoenix second was watching it all through the cockpit window of his Pelican every time he looped around the building, one eye constantly on his long-range scanners even as he adjusted the VTOL jets to keep the transport hovering at the right height to keep track of Nebraska's progress.
Truly, he didn't particularly mind having this role. There was something comforting about this, about watching his team's back and being able to keep track of each of their locations. Here, he didn't have to worry about the rush of combat that he personally found distasteful even at the best of times. It was too easy to get caught up in it all, for sense to be swept away and replaced with something a lot colder and yet burned a lot hotter.
He'd seen enough how it brought out an aspect of cruelty in most of the others that he did his best to temper and hone and… not so much cage, but instead focus. It was better that they didn't burn themselves out along with everything else they touched.
No, here, it was just him, the sky, the finely trained movements at the controls that kept him soaring through the air and the rush of freedom that came with it. He was their lifeline, their exit strategy, the thing that would get them out of the fire safely and douse their flames if they burned too out of control.
So watching Nebraska at Harper's own request didn't particularly bother him in the slightest. Intelligence gathering was just another part of the job, one he felt far more suited to than violence or, even worse, infiltration. A shudder ran down his spine, a memory of pain and screamed rage and despair and a voice that so rarely offered even an acknowledgement of being at fault speaking apologies into the nearly broken friendship between himself and his team leader.
'Never again, Ian.'
He twisted the joystick harshly, the rush of the Pelican ascending to another floor of the building to track Nebraska shaking the memories from his mind, the adrenaline that surged through his system at the swooping sensation doing its job.
Nebraska was a different person now. Without having to cover gaps in his team, he was moving at a blistering pace, utilising his rifle with brutal efficiency until it ran out of ammunition, before casting it aside and drawing his magnum. Then, he began to target joints and the gaps between armour plates, marksmanship with multiple weapons on display that he'd normally been holding back. When his enemies fell, the ones that were still moving were finished with clean, quick headshots. Ammunition was conserved until even his magnum supplies ran dry.
Illuminated in the setting sun, collecting the weapons of his fallen foes and putting them to work against their former masters, Nebraska was his own kind of artist. He hardly even looked like a Freelancer now. Not that Falcon was surprised. He of all people recognised that kind of training. He knew where the man had been taught.
"Well, Falcon. How's our Church-assigned comrade doing?" Ian's voice rang out over the radio channel assigned for both himself and Nebraska and to the man's credit, he didn't so much as pause in his gradual campaign through the Crimson Sun soldiers. "Living up to expectations?"
He clicked open the frequency in turn, voice calm, casual, like giving a moderately interesting weather report. It was harder for people to latch onto him as a source of anger when he smoothed over the more provocative ways that some of the others approached the world around them. "Better than expected, as it happened. Nothing like what we saw before."
"Mm. I thought so."
Nebraska sounded, when he spoke, mildly irritated at best. The emotional range was drained from his voice, leaving only clinical precision coupled with the occasional grunts of exertion over the mic. "I'm right here, you know."
"Are you?" Ian sounded genuinely taken by surprise, his voice carrying a near-offended tone and Falcon could imagine the hand clutched to his chest. "Is that you, Nebraska? Or just whoever you're choosing to show us today?"
A note of what sounded like uncertainty crept into that tone now, concern mingling with confusion. Falcon would have genuinely believed it, if he hadn't read the man's file. "I don't know what you mean-"
"Ah, come on, we're all allies here, Nebraska. It's just you and us Phoenixes on the line now. I've read your file and I'm sure you've read your file. There's no Colorado here, no Freelancers, no Church. Just us. So. Come on. Is this Nebraska that I'm talking to?" It was like Harper was waving the red flag for the charging bull. He was obsessed with what he could get away with, what buttons he could press, how much damage he could cause, whether to the world around him or just to himself.
And it was always Falcon that had to pick up the pieces.
"...yeah. It's me. Just me." Nebraska sounded, now, far less confused or anxious or uncertain. Now, there was just a note of irritation and perhaps a touch of frustration. "What do you want, Harper?"
"Oh, I just got it." Indeed, Ian sounded like his Christmas had come early, a blissful sigh echoing over the microphone. "I mean, I figured you were more than you showed everyone else, that emotional control in the briefing was way too clean, but really… wow. Wild. You're smooth, Nebraska. Really, really smooth."
Nebraska chose not to comment. Harper took it as the invitation that it probably wasn't and pressed on.
"Do any of the others know? I mean, Alaska does, right? He's a man in need of a pet project. I mean, talk about ripping me off, right?"
"Ian." It was a blunt interruption from Falcon, a single word that carried far too much warning, a tone that he'd had to practise so many times over the years of working with Harper.
"Ah. Right. Yes. That was rude of me." Well. He could at least sound conciliatory when he needed to. "Anyone else know how good you really are, though? 'Rado know, Nebraska?"
Another hesitation, a pause that felt far longer over the microphone, the hiss of static lingering on the channel. If it wasn't for the fact that Falcon could physically see Nebraska through the glass of the building, his head turned to watch the setting sun in consideration, he might have thought that the man had taken a stray bullet.
"...no. It's not something easily explained."
"What, wearing so many masks over the years that you can't figure out which is the real you? Or if there even ever was a real you? That you can't figure out if anything you've shown the people around you is real? Kid, let me tell you something that Alaska probably hasn't yet." Harper's voice was as casual as ever, but there was a weight to the words now that hadn't been there before.
Falcon wasn't surprised. It wasn't like Ian wasn't speaking from experience.
"It doesn't matter. If any of it feels real, and you can't tell otherwise, then what's the difference? The trick is just… deciding what you want to be real. What mask you want to be real. And burning the old ones."
"Why are you giving me advice? You didn't want me on this mission, Lieutenant. I'm not one of your chosen few, so why bother?" Even with the lack of emotion in Nebraska's voice, his curiosity was evident. Even Falcon found himself caught in mild interest. He was generally able to read Harper, better than anyone alive save for Jason Shaw and Isaac Harper (and wasn't it still such a rush of delight to be able to include the latter amongst the living again?), but even he found himself adrift at times amidst his team leader's sporadic whirlwind of ideas and intentions.
"Mostly? To mess with Alaska. I like the idea that I taught his student something he couldn't. Twist you in a direction he can't undo, but just work with. And that's me being honest." He let the words sit with Nebraska for a moment, before continuing. "But, between us, you're far too interesting to just become another Alaska. To let yourself be led around by Church on a leash. I know where your training comes from. And I'll never miss a chance to one-up those bastards."
Nebraska had no words, even as he ascended the staircase to the next floor, his dark armour practically glowing magma-white under the sunset, surrounded by the navy and purple reflections of the darkening sky.
"Be who you want to be. Whatever that freedom involves. Whatever the cost. Whatever it does to anyone else. Spread those wings and fly and most importantly, don't ever look back. Or you'll always be wondering."
"Wondering what?" Two words, barely carrying any inflection and yet carrying so many different questions within them.
"What else you could have been."
There was a click as Harper disconnected himself from the channel, leaving just Nebraska and Falcon once again. The pilot was struck, as he always was, with that strange sense of sadness on behalf of a man that would have been infuriated to know it. Harper could have been so many things, if so many different paths had been taken. So many different things had been done to him, to all of them, but ultimately… they'd made their choices. What was done was done.
Falcon was the man holding the team together in body, but it was Harper's inexorable drive onwards, his gravitational pull, his sheer force of will as he burned through the universe like a black hole made meteorite, that kept them moving onwards.
All that was left was the inevitable collision.
"Falcon!" It was a sharp cry over the comm channel, the panic in Nebraska's voice not remotely faked now. The Phoenix second snapped back into the moment, spotting Nebraska at the top of the stairs to the next floor, staring down an ambush of Crimson Sun soldiers, all with their weapons aimed directly at him. He had no cover, he was completely exposed, and he was between Falcon's Pelican and the enemies-
"Just do it!"
He didn't hesitate, pressing the trigger on his control systems. The Pelican's own turrets spun into life, reaching maximum speed in less than a second and sending a hail of gunfire scything through the windows, the glass punctured over and over again until it shattered into a thousand pieces, the tracer rounds lighting up the corridor within like flashbangs, each of Falcon's shots flooding the entire chamber.
And Nebraska… Nebraska flickered out of existence, his silhouette visible but the colours within fading away to a lighter greyscale. Each and every single one of the vehicle-grade bullets passed directly through him, continuing onwards until they found the Crimson Sun soldiers further up the corridor. Nebraska himself was left untouched.
By the time that Falcon stopped firing, there wasn't much left of the Insurrectionists left untouched.
He released the trigger, the guns of his bird falling silent, smoke drifting from the white-hot chambers in the wind at the top of the mountain. He watched as Nebraska stared at the bodies before him, before his silhouette snapped abruptly back into full colour, the Freelancer falling to one knee with a groan, clutching at his chest and painful panting audible over the comm channel.
"Are you okay, Nebraska?" Falcon watched as he was offered a thumbs up, the man slowly forcing himself to his unsteady feet, leaning against the window frame of shattered glass, staring at the cockpit of the Pelican and meeting the Phoenix's gaze. "...isn't your armour Class A? Recommended for use only with the Command Server?"
Nebraska managed a shrug with the shoulder not keeping him balanced on the edge of a fatal drop, a pained hiss escaping him that turned into a dry coughing fit of a chuckle. "I'm not dead. Worth it."
Falcon resisted the urge to let his head fall forwards and press his face into the controls of his ship.
He was always stuck with the crazy ones. Every single time.
Firefly was having far too much fun with this mission. What was it Harper had called it? Operation Abbadon? It sounded like the kind of poetic, overly symbolic bullshit that he'd swing for at any given opportunity. Ever since the crazy bastard had vanished into the depths of Kestrel Site in pursuit of whatever twisted things gave him any semblance of joy, Aaron had been left with the two Freelancers he'd been… well, he couldn't stay 'stuck with' in the case of Colorado. Maybe in the case of Minnesota.
It wasn't anything personal, truly. It was moreso just that after everything that Hunter had said about his roommate, about how little the man had done when Shaw had been on the verge of mental collapse and with nowhere to turn… okay, yeah, it was personal. Minnesota had, intentionally or otherwise, hurt Hunter. Firefly wasn't really one to discern between 'intentions' and 'actions'. What had happened? Well, it had happened. That was all there was to it, in his eyes.
So yeah, maybe he was synchronising his attacks with Colorado's a little more than he was with Minnesota, leaving the other Freelancer to fend for himself a touch more than necessary. Sue him. He wasn't sticking his neck out for 'Sota. Besides, it looked like the man was still capable of covering his own back as the three of them worked through several of the lower levels of the base. It looked like these were mostly devoted to backup power systems, cabling running through the walls, across the ceiling overhead and several of the rooms that they'd cleared containing generator, just in case the entire base was hit by some kind of freak power surge.
Not that it had really helped them much against Circuit's work on their antenna systems.
"You know, I was really hoping for more Sun forces down here. Like, these are their power systems. They're basically screaming to be attacked and there's barely anybody here to defend them." Firefly's lament was not the first time he'd voiced such an opinion, but each time he said it, it drew the kind of sigh from Minnesota that was just… asking to be drawn back out all over again.
"You seriously can't be wishing for more people to be attacking us," the Freelancer in white muttered, his rifle aimed up the corridor despite the lack of company that they'd had for the past few minutes now.
Firefly turned to him. "Why can't I? Look at this place. Boring white walls. Boring office building aesthetic. ONI is boring. Therefore and forthwith-"
"Did you seriously just say 'forthwith'?"
"...I'm bored. She's definitely bored. You're bored, right, spitfire?" He gestured at Colorado. He could feel the raised eyebrow behind her visor, could sense the maths in her head as she decided whether or not to make an attempt on his life.
"Neither of us are going to indulge you-" 'Sota caught sight of the way that Colorado most definitely wasn't looking in his direction, stopping on the spot and shaking his head in disbelief. "Seriously?"
The smaller Freelancer didn't even have the grace to look abashed, standing her ground and turning her chin up. "It's pretty boring," she agreed with only a touch of reluctance, before turning to jab a finger into Firefly's chest. "And never call me that again."
"Right. Not spitfire then." He bounced back easily from the threat. "How about 'thorn'?"
"No."
"...maelstrom?"
"Better." The answer was instinctive, before her chin turned up defiantly. "But still no."
"Huh. Okay…" He thought for a moment, before clicking his fingers and pointing directly at her, voice suddenly ecstatic. "I've got it! How about Na-?"
Gunfire erupted up the corridor, leaving his suggestion unsaid and causing the three of them to flinch in shock as they sought any form of cover through the doors open to either side of them, diving into side-rooms that provided no escape, but respite from the deafening and lethal barrage of bullets.
"Now this is more like it!" He called above the roar of bullets, glee spilling into his voice uncontrollably. He'd been hoping that he'd be getting a touch more action when he'd been paired with notorious Insurrectionist-hating, Harper-cellmate Colorado. Until now, he'd been pretty let down but at long last… "Things are looking up!"
"You're an unhinged, violent lunatic! You actually just casually asked for this!" 'Sota's voice was a howl of frustration as the man emerged from cover, a single burst of bullets fired from his battle rifle and dropping one of the Crimson Sun. He ducked behind cover as they focused on him, giving Firefly his chance, plugging one of the tubes that ran through his armour into the large barrel set into his unique rifle below the one chambered for explosive rounds.
"Casual? Minnesota, for shame!" He called back over the melody of heated, vicious combat. "Don't let casual violence be a part of your life! Go competitive!"
(If he heard Colorado's whispered "fuckin'... why do they have to be Innies?!", he ignored it.)
Spinning from cover, he pulled the trigger of his weapon and with a dragon's roar and a flare of dancing white-orange light, fire erupted up the length of the corridor as the flamethrower surged into life. He could hear the laughter of joy that bubbled up within him, swelling in time with the delighted gleam in his eyes as he heard the scream of the Crimson Sun soldiers scattered under the blaze, caught out of position and out of cover by the gunfire of the two Freelancers stepping up behind him.
Firefly was a combat addict in his own right, bound by his own eagerness for the clash of fist on flesh and the knowledge that he was giving an opponent his all, holding nothing back, locked against them in a test of everything he had, but fire… fire was his element, moreso than perhaps any other Phoenix.
He'd been a damn Hellbringer in a former life, a previous career. Before Phoenix, before ONI, before months without purpose save for providing for a ruined unit just to keep them alive in the aftermath of an honourable discharge on medical grounds. Burns littered his body almost as much as ink did, wrapped around him in a twin set of chains that he'd etched into his very being, pain and memories forever binding him to who he truly was at his core.
Aaron was fire that raged and roiled beneath the silhouette of human flesh, contained within a body that could barely contain it. Rarely was he able to let himself free as he did so now, but it was moments like these that he lived for.
If, when the last of the Crimson Sun bodies hit the floor under Minnesota and Colorado's gunfire, he kept the flames going for just a touch longer than necessary, he wasn't going to let anyone judge him for it. The flames died away, the gun hissing like a particularly satisfied fire-breathing lizard, the barrel glowing and the smell of smoke tangible even through the filtration systems of his helmet. Fire continued to burn ahead of them, the floor and walls quite literally scorched black, charred and twisted, pieces fragmenting and falling away. Whatever cables had stretched down the corridor were long since gone.
Firefly turned around with a grin, only for Colorado's palm to collide with his chest, sending him staggering backwards a few steps in aghast shock.
"Hey, what the fuck-!?"
"No more fire!" It was far more than the aggressive hiss he'd heard before. Her voice was wild, frenzied, her breathing out of control, her posture manic as she gripped her rifle so tightly that he was surprised that the metal didn't warp in her hands. "Don't fucking use that thing again!"
He blinked, trying to work out exactly what he'd done to set her off so badly. Even Minnesota seemed shaken, taking a hesitant step over to her, his hand coming down onto her shoulder. "...'Rado?"
It was a whisper, barely audible as, overhead, there was a sudden hiss. The fire suppression systems finally kicked into life, divulging an entire downpour onto their heads. It was enough to shake her from whatever trance she'd fallen into, her shoulder violently shrugging his hand from her body, sending a spray of water in Firefly's direction, armour already glistening. "...I'm fine. Fucking… forget it. Let's just keep moving. No more fire."
Both of Firefly's hands came up in mock surrender, before he easily disengaged the tubes from his weapon, sealing them back in place onto his armour and walking backwards up the corridor to still watch the two of them. "If the lady insists. You're going to have to tell me the story behind that sooner or later, you know."
A snort left Colorado, her chin coming up defiantly. "Not a fucking chance- duck!"
He wasn't quite sure how to describe the way she moved. When Ian or Shaw dove into combat, they practically merged with the fight itself, becoming some blend of elegant blur of blades and brutal, uncaged monsters. But he could still track their movements. Mostly. When Colorado blurred into action, she quite literally blurred down the corridor towards him, what looked like literal jet engines burning into life at key points across her armour.
She might have been a Freelancer. He might have been a Phoenix. But there was enough… mutual understanding there that when she called for him to move, Firefly fucking moved, hitting the deck as she kicked off from the ground the next time that her foot hit the floor, launching herself into the air and flying over his head, a glint of silver trailing after her like stardust-
Colorado hit the floor behind him, falling into a roll that carried her back up to her feet in a running stop. Between Firefly and her, a soldier bearing the insignia of Arkansas' forces remained standing for all of three seconds, before falling to the ground, crimson cascading down his body from the fresh slice through the side of his throat. In 'Rado's hands, a beautiful blade gleamed, dripping from the sprinkler systems and the fresh blood alike.
"Holy shit," Firefly gasped out, practically kicking himself back to his feet. "You almost took my head off!"
Her head tilted up in what had to be the haughtiest glare he would never see behind her visor. "That's the best you have? I just saved your damn life!"
"Well, to his credit, he did have to duck quite far down for you to get over his head." It was the sly tone that Aaron's boss used so often, but in entirely the wrong voice. Through the steam thrown into the air, Hunter emerged, armour painted slightly more red than usual, running down the plates in trails. "How're we all doing? 'Rado, you look like you're having fun. Told you that you would."
"You keep saying these things." She sounded, as always, like she didn't believe the Phoenix turned Freelancer turned Phoenix again. He seemed entirely unaffected by her disbelief as he drew level with her, patting her on the shoulder. She didn't pull away from this particular touch.
"And I'll keep saying them 'till you believe them."
Firefly raised a hand. "I'm pretty sure that's gaslighting." Both Colorado and California flipped him off in unison and he puffed up in pride. Mission accomplished.
"How have you all not killed each other yet?" Minnesota's voice was a quiet lament, and Firefly turned to him with enough dramatic flair for an entire damn fireteam.
"Good question!" He clicked open the communication channel. "Hey, guys? 'Sota wants to know how none of us have killed each other yet!"
"With mine and Crosshair's infinite patience." Ah. There was Falcon. Even though… wait, someone was missing!
"What about Geist?"
"Oh, Geist's on special assignment." Wait, that was Crosshair now! "Dealing exclusively with your bullshit."
"...thanks, guys. And fuck you too." He clicked the channel off, shrugging in Minnesota's direction. "And there you have it."
Whatever Minnesota was about to say was lost in the sudden slap of wet boots against a wet surface and as all four of them turned around to see a Crimson Sun soldier burst through the smoke and steam, assault rifle already aimed in their direction. Each of them twisted in unison, whether to seek cover or to throw themselves at the man that had gotten the drop on them out of nowhere, when suddenly, drifting through the steam, came a sound that froze them in their tracks, even the man who'd been on the verge of squeezing the trigger.
A whistle. It was haunting, echoing, rhythmic, a tune that Firefly recognised in seconds. He could tell by the way that Hunter's head tilted to the side that the other man had recognised it too. Indeed, the grin was audible in Shaw's voice as he practically crooned the words over an open channel in unison with the whistling.
"I look inside myself and see my heart is black…"
The Insurrectionist in front of them turned around in hesitant confusion, only to catch the knife blade across the face.
There was really no other way to describe it. One moment, there was just a shadow behind him and then the sharp edge was stabbed horizontally through the downpour of water to shatter the visor of his helmet. The owner of said knife had a hold of the back of his head in his right hand, his left clutching the hilt of the blade, but as Ian Harper emerged fully into the light, still whistling, he released the man and his knife.
His right hand took a hold of the handle of the weapon, the angel of death planting his feet, tensing his torso, before twisting his entire upper body in a fluid motion. There was a scream of metal servos within his artificial right arm jamming in protest, before his swing carried the blade all the way through the skull of the soldier in front of him.
Without even looking back, Harper kept walking to catch up to the other four of them, turning his knife over under the sprinklers to wash the fresh red clean.
"So, how're we all doing? 'Rado, you look like you're having fun-"
"I've already done it," Cal put in as Harper drew up to his side, leaning to his right to avoid the idle swipe of a hand at the back of his head.
"Aw, you bastard! We agreed that was my line!"
"Well, maybe if you spent less time on your 'art', you'd get here quick enough to say it." Cal deliberately ignored the way that Harper coughed something that sounded rather like "hypocrite" under his breath.
"I mean, he's not wrong, Boss. That was starting to look like a Jackson Pollock by the time you were done." Firefly gestured with a shoulder over Harper's shoulder at the particularly mangled corpse that he'd left in his wake. Harper's head turned to face him fully, astonishment visible in his posture and the way that he leaned back on his feet.
"Since when do you merit such highbrow comments?"
Firefly drew himself up to his full height, doing his best Colorado impression as he tilted his chin up with haughty defiance, ignoring the choked sound that she made and the chuckle from Hunter.
"Bitch, I speak French. Everything I say can be highbrow."
"I have literally known you for years!"
"And I stand by my words."
Harper's head shook, offended astonishment visible in every line of his body. "Since when do you give me shit for stabbing someone? I can see the scorch marks. You literally just set the place on fire. What makes that better than what I did?"
Firefly turned to the room at large, humming in thought. "Fellas, is stabbing someone immoral?"
Colorado didn't hesitate. "Depends on who you're stabbing."
"Not if they consent to it." That was Hunter. Of course it was Hunter.
"...yes?!" Ah, there was Minnesota, astonished at the byplay happening in front of him.
"And that is why Colorado is my favourite Freelancer here," Harper retorted on the spot, ignoring Cal's overly-wounded gasp and offering a conspiratorial aside-glance to the woman in front of him. "No hard feelings, right?"
If her helmet was off, he rather thought that she might have been gaping at him. "No hard… you cut my fucking finger off!" Nearby, Jason winced, ducking his head and casting his gaze aside. Harper nodded slowly, unable to deny the charge.
"I mean, yeah, I did. And you've slaughtered how many Insurrectionists by now? We can do this over and over again, keeping the wheel spinning, turn, turn, turn, but I'm not gonna give you the sales pitch. I'll just say that you came out the other side far stronger than you ever were before. I mean, just look at you. Look at what you're capable of, if you try." She didn't seem particularly convinced and Harper was left with no option other than to groan. "Ah, c'mon, 'Rado, what's a finger or two?! You have more! What say you, water under the bridge, all in the past, fresh start?"
She levelled a middle finger his way, with the hand holding her blade. "Fuck you and your spiritual bullshit."
There was a snort of muffled laughter from Hunter nearby and Harper sighed, not exactly surprised. "Ah, forget it. Maybe you'll feel differently once this is all over. The world's your pyre and you're the match, Colorado. All you've gotta do is light it up." Behind him, Firefly offered her a double thumbs up, which she resolutely ignored. Harper spun on his heel to face the rest of them this time. "Right. I'm about done here, so I'm gonna go cross one of those bridges and secure the server farm. The rest of you are on cleanup duty. Try not to enjoy yourselves too much without me, or I'll wonder why I'm even here."
He stepped over to Shaw, catching his wrist and tugging it so that he could place his signature blade in Jason's hand almost reverently, carefully closing the other man's fingers around it.
"Hold onto this for me, would you?" Harper leaned just a touch closer still, the whisper for Cal, Hunter, for Shaw, and only Shaw. "I'll see you at the finish line."
As he always would.
Without another word, Harper spun around and vanished off into the steam, leaving them all standing there as though caught in the aftermath of a meteor strike. California was particularly still, unnaturally so, staring down at the weapon clutched in his hand, turning that small piece of Harper over and over in his line of sight, that blade that was synonymous with the man himself, handed over to him, entrusted to him. It was promise and beckon all in one.
"Hunter." It was rather pointed, cutting into his reverie, jolting his head up to stare at Firefly, who just flicked his chin in the direction of the smoke. "Go on. Don't stay with us for our sakes, man."
There was a hesitation, where he glanced at Colorado. She could have protested, tried to hold him back. She said nothing, just lifting her shoulders. His gaze moved to Minnesota, watched the man shake his head silently. And then his eyes passed to the figure standing behind 'Sota, that ghostly copy of himself, chin resting on the Freelancer's shoulder, seeing his own eyebrows raise at him, a pointed little smirk twisting his lips.
California turned and sprinted off after Harper, leaving the three of them together, as they'd started.
Firefly's voice broke the oppressive silence when it grew too much to bear. "...should we kickbox now?"
The sun was practically over the horizon by the time that Harper finally burst out onto one of the bridges between the two halves of Kestrel Site. The orange glow was practically non-existent, the pink and purple glow fading altogether to a darker navy. If he looked through the glass to either side of him, Harper would have seen the stars high above, scattered throughout the eternal, endless, lethal abyss of space.
No more burning sun. It was gone, consumed, had offered all it could and finally succumbed to the darkness. There was something poetic in that, he mused to himself, making his way down the length of that empty bridge, being lost in the night after the fire, drifting aimlessly, not quite sure of what came next. Without faith or any consideration for redemption…
"This is ground control to Major Tom…" It was a fraction of one of the songs that he'd found on one of Hunter's many playlists on the datapad that he'd left behind after fleeing the URF so very long ago now. He'd listened to them so many times since then that the battered and worn-down datapad had become one of the only relics that he carried with him anymore, along with those weapons, the last remaining relics of the pain and suffering that had gone into his own rebirth.
Just another little thing that was impossible for him to let go of.
A shout from ahead drew him from the simplicity of the song and the near-dead sunlight, leading his attention to the Crimson Sun soldier who'd been left standing guard. He must have been one of the last remaining members of Arkansas' forces in the entire base and the unfortunate man just happened to be one of the last obstacles between Harper and his goal.
His hand moved down to his belt, to the sheath at his hip, ready to draw his knife, as he did so often before taking another being's death into his own hands that it was practically a ritual in its own right by now… only for Harper to find an absence instead of the extension of himself that he was so familiar with, that part of his sense of self that was devoted entirely to the task that he'd willingly plunged himself into, submerged until there was nothing of him left above water, or even able to find the surface if he tried.
Ah. Right. He'd given it to Jay.
It might have been problematic… if he wasn't what he was. He didn't need a blade to tear the other man to pieces, to rip his soul from his body and cast it down to whatever came next, to simply beat his wings and cast a shadow across the bridge that swallowed the life of anything that couldn't withstand it.
His lips pulled up into a jackal's grin that was all fangs, stalking towards the enemy soldier even as he raised his weapon to point at Harper, ready for the feast-
The blonde flinched as the window directly to his left cracked, punctured by a single bullet, whipping past his helmet to bury itself into the visor of the Insurrectionist with enough force to take him solidly from his feet and send him spiralling backwards in a spray of red. It was only once the corpse's feet had left the floor that the boom of the sniper rifle echoed out over the near silence of the bridge, leaving Harper to stare down at his stolen kill in indignation… and genuine surprise.
"Mmm. I thought so." It wasn't Mike, wasn't the reassuring presence of the sniper that had saved his life on so many occasions, instead the colder, accented tone of Agent Wyoming. Lying in wait. Waiting for him. He had zero doubts that the weapon was trained, in that exact moment, on his skull. He was fast, but even he couldn't move faster than the velocity of a sniper rifle bullet.
"How long have you been waiting there?" He couldn't help but let the incredulous laughter seep into his tone, shaking his head in disbelief, but appreciation bleeding into it at the same time. He really should have just assigned Wyoming and Minnesota together, with the benefit of hindsight. But even then… Church would never have permitted him to run freely.
Wyoming was, ultimately, always going to be waiting here. His own personal assassin. He was almost impressed at the daring that the man had, to try and take possession of Harper's death, to take a hold of that thread as though he had even the slightest chance of cutting it.
No, he felt no such rush now, no surge from his wings, no tremor down his spine and no shadow passing over the world as the mantle of death was claimed. It was as he'd always said, a simple and fundamental truth that made up every part of who he was, something that he'd been saying for so long now that it couldn't ever be taken away from him.
Harper decided when and how he died. Nobody else.
"As soon as you ran. I knew that eventually, you'd come here. You have to be at the centre of everything. You wouldn't miss out on the climax."
He wasn't sure if he should be offended or not, humming into the communication channel. "Well, look at that. Has Church decided to rescind his little offer after all?"
"Oh, the Director has nothing to do with this. I'm just weighing up my options, after all of the trouble you've given us." The sheer calculation in Wyoming's voice was obvious enough that Harper could practically imagine the man smoothing his fingers through his moustache as he spoke, eyes narrowed in consideration.
"Well, Wyoming, I'm not going to lie to you and say that if I could change it, I would." Harper's head half-turned, making no sudden movements, but giving the other man an even better angle on his helmeted skull.
Then, after a moment of consideration, he reached up with steady hands, depressurising the helmet and lifting it free altogether to dangle loosely from one set of fingers. Wyoming had a clean shot, no armour to offer the slightest bit of protection, no visor to keep his face hidden and offer any pretence that this would be anything other than personal. "I am what I am. You can do what you want."
"Brave of you." There was a smile in Wyoming's voice that carried no real truth to it, no genuine emotion beyond the facade that he wore, silently weighing if he was going to pull the trigger or not. Harper let him think, let him see whether or not he was even capable of trying to take death from the hands of the creature that had worn it for so long as a second skin.
The last of the sun vanished over the mountaintops in the far distance at long last, plunging them into the dark abyss of night.
Finally, Wyoming spoke.
"You're in luck." Harper would have snorted if he didn't possess enough foresight to know exactly how the sniper would have taken it. "As much as I don't like it, you're still useful." The implication of what exactly lay in the future for Harper and the rest of his flock dripped from every word. Down the mic, he heard the metallic drag of the rifle's slide, the click of the safety.
"...knock knock." And just like that, the smile in Wyoming's words had switched back to something more genuine. Somehow, Harper still didn't believe it for a second. With his head slightly turned, the Freelancer could most definitely see the empty smirk that split his expression open, dripping venom in its own right.
"Who's there?" He'd indulge him. Just this once. He was, in that moment, rather high on life. Quite literally.
"June."
Ah. He already knew where this was going. Both shoulders came up in a half shrug, feeling his wings settle back into place behind him. They were his, the darkness and the end that it carried within it belonging to him and only to him. He'd spent too long honing them and ensuring that they were refined enough to be used against him at the right time for some upstart Freelancer to take that from him.
"'June know any good knock-knock jokes, Harper'?" He took a stab in the dark (a favourite pastime of his, really) and finished the joke before Wyoming could, listening to the silence that answered him over the channel. Perhaps Wyoming was considering taking the shot after all.
"...well, now you've taken all the fun out of it." The English accent was sullen, disappointed enough that Harper couldn't help the bark of laughter that spilled from him in answer, lingering and echoing beneath the endless dark overhead.
"You know, I don't think that anybody's ever accused me of doing that before, Wyoming."
"I'm delighted to be the first." It was dry, casual enough that for a moment, it didn't feel like they were mortal enemies, on different ends of a battlefield, each responsible for the deaths of so many of the other's forces. They weren't predator and prey, assassin and target. Truly, it was in the battlefield that Harper got to see them all as they truly were. He hadn't asked for Wyoming… but he couldn't say that he was particularly upset at his presence.
"Well. If there's nothing else, I'll finish the job, shall I?"
He'd taken a single step when the Freelancer spoke again. This time, his voice was arctic enough to cast the entire world into the same deathly white as his armour.
"Harper. The only reason I let you live is that we need you to get to Pennsylvania. I weighed your sins against his. The scales were heavier on your side… but what Penn did? His death matters more. So you're still alive until then. After that…"
Harper remained where he stood, head tilting slightly to one side, staring out into the night, at the gap between those stars, at the emptiness between the light, at the constellations that he could drink and devour and consume until there was nothing left and still never have enough to satiate whatever hole was inside of him.
Nothing except the flames of his fellow Phoenixes was quite capable of that, of providing any such comfort against the raging storm that had surrounded him since he was a child, that he'd never quite found his way out of.
He wasn't fixable. He never would be, and he didn't want to be. Not this close to the end. He was too far gone to attempt the surgery on himself necessary to even be capable of stepping onto a different path.
But there was one scar that he could set at ease. One sin that could go punished. The memory of silver eyes, dark hair, an arrogant grin, black and white armour, all flashed behind his eyes as he turned slowly on the spot to face Wyoming, a speck of white at a window several floors up in the building that he'd emerged from.
From where he stood and where Wyoming was perched, the spiderweb in the glass from the impact of the sniper round cast a sea of cracks across the right side of Harper's face.
"Good. Send him down to hell. To me." One hand came up, snapping into the kind of salute that he offered only on the rarest of occasions, the words meant for Wyoming and only for Wyoming. "Feet first, Wyoming?"
An incredulous little chuckle answered him, before Wyoming replied, voice a little thicker than before.
"Feet first, Harper."
His lip curled up, a flash of fangs visible under the cosmic light above. Harper didn't say another word, didn't need to. They'd exchanged all the words that they'd needed to. The blonde simply turned on the spot and continued on his way, stepping carefully over the corpse in front of him without another word, vanishing into the darkness of the server farm, leaving the Freelancers in the shadow that he cast in his wake.
Now, the walls around him were painted a darker colour, the lights a dim blood red, the walls all running with cables that split off in a thousand different directions, vanishing into the various rooms that filled the building with rows and rows of server, an endless storage space for the data wiretapped from an area that damn near covered the entire Outer Colonies and a good percentage of the Inner Colonies too. The sheer processing power that had gone into Kestrel Site must have been phenomenal. In fact, he knew that it was because Lucas hadn't stopped talking about it when they'd first visited the base so long ago to clear it of any occupying forces for Allen. Now, he hadn't been listening enough to remember any of the details, but he could certainly remember how excited the engineer had been about the place.
And honestly, if there was technology that could suitably impress Circuit, then it was probably impressive in its own right. All the same, ONI and the CAA had used this place to spy on the very colonies that they were in the process of gathering. It was just another one of the UNSC's skeletons hidden away. With the sheer amount of content Allen had stored on his black box, it was less a closet that the UNSC had filled, and more an entire damn mausoleum.
This place was everything that Allen had hated, that Arkansas hated. Even then, just as the General of the URF had before him, Arkansas had realised the necessary evil of this place when waging his own personal war against unpunished evil itself.
By now, it seemed that they'd practically cleared the entire place out. All of the Crimson Sun's defenders had been sent across the bridges to hold back the flood and been washed away to drown at sea. There was nobody left here to stop him. Nobody left breathing for him to cast his own personal judgement upon.
His footsteps were automatic by this point; he knew the layout of the base, knew every twist and turn, knew every single identical corridor cast under the bloody hues of the lights above. Room after room of servers sifting through stolen information, down set of stairs after set of stairs, encountering no resistance as he went. Harper didn't even need to paint the place at this point. It was already cast in its own hellish ambience.
It didn't stop him from carrying brimstone in his wake, his wings stretched out to their absolute limit, occupying the entire corridor to drink in the atmosphere, to feel it sink into his bloodstream, never enough to satiate, just providing more anticipation for the next sparks he used to light himself ablaze and do it all over again.
So really, with how he could have navigated the structure with his eyes closed, it was a genuine surprise to be drawn up short on the precipice of the main control room by a blast door that most certainly hadn't been there the last time that he'd taken a tour of the facility. Oh, he was certain that it had been there, but it certainly hadn't been deployed, barring his progress altogether. It was a thick, reinforced steel all the way up to his shoulders, before becoming blast-proof glass, thick enough that even a breaching charge wouldn't have been able to do as much as scratch it.
"I'd seen you on the cameras, but I'd really hoped that it wasn't true." The voice was familiar enough for him to move his affronted gaze from the obstacle in front of him to peer through the glass into the red-tinted chamber beyond. It was lined with rows of computer consoles, devoid of windows to provide the least amount of access points possible. Only the central terminal seemed to be active, lines and lines of code scrawling themselves across the surface even as Harper watched, before an error message flashed across the screen. After a moment, the code erased itself until there was nothing left, only to start the process all over again.
Standing in front of the console was a man wearing what looked to be an officer's uniform. He would have been hard to pick out of a lineup, his face bland and without any real distinguishing features, eyes that Harper knew were a dark brown tinted red beneath the lights overhead and head shaved completely. A magnum sat at his hip, not even drawn.
"Well, I'll be damned." He had to grin even as he said the words, his killing gaze locked onto the man on the other side of the door. "Standish. Arkansas posted you here, did he? Can't say I'm shocked. You always liked to play the numbers game." Every single word was drawn out into a serpentine hiss, the sound of a cobra rearing up to strike.
"He felt I could offer the most to the Sun from here." The officer shrugged one shoulder casually, leaning back against the console behind him with a casualness that was undercut by the tension running through his body, the anxiousness bleeding into his gaze as he tried to stoically stare back at the devil on the other side of the glass. "I never figured you as one to run back to the UNSC. What did they offer you?"
The grin turned positively lethal, dripping enough poison that Harper felt like if he'd tried, he could have melted straight through the obstacle between them.
"They didn't make the offer. Don't try to understand me or why I do what I do, Standish. You were never very good at it."
Standish inclined his head, the sweat on his brow catching the crimson lights. "I can certainly tell why you're here. Our communications went down and we didn't see you coming, so it's not really a demolitions job, is it? You want to know what Arkansas has here, what he's seen, what he might have heard. It's why you're still jamming our frequencies. Circuit's work, right?"
Harper chose not to answer him and Standish took the point where he could, continuing. "It's efficient. But it's not infallible. You see this code right here? It's a little gift from Arkansas. It sifts through ghost data until it compiles the command code that remote infiltrators use to overwrite our commands, and then replicates them to grant us access back to our own systems. Once it's finished, it'll certainly be enough to get a message out to him." He shook his head and let out a long whistle of appreciation. "We could have used talents like his at ONI."
Blonde hair that was painted with streaks of crimson beneath the lights overhead shifted as Harper's head tilted. He wasn't particularly interested in the reunion; he'd never like the other man and Standish had, in return, loathed him. They'd been kept far away from one another for a reason under Allen's command.
He'd raised a gauntleted hand to test the integrity of the blast door when the other man tutted, a smirk passing over his face. "I wouldn't, if I were you. That door's charged. Carrying enough volts to go clean through your armour and put a stop to whatever you have instead of a heart. Actually, with a little bit of hindsight," he considered with mock-thoughtfulness, "go right ahead. It'd pass the time before I get this signal sent out."
Standish wasn't wrong. As Harper leaned closer to the door, he caught the faint but constant hum of an electrical current passing through the surface. Given that this was a former ONI facility, he couldn't imagine that they'd spared any expenses on the backup generators set up explicitly for the purpose of killing any intruders that got this far.
Well, that was detrimental.
The other Insurrectionist caught even the faintest hint of his frustration like a dog on a scent, that smirk opening into full, delighted glee.
"You really don't know what to do here, do you, Harper? You're so close, but when there's not a problem you can throw yourself at, you've got nothing. I always thought that Crane wasted too much of his time with all of you, but it's still so satisfying to see you come up short. Allen put too much faith in you." The officer glanced over his shoulder to take a glance at the code still writing itself into life on the screen behind him. Whatever he saw was enough to leave him with a satisfied smile. "Time's almost up. And you've accomplished nothing."
Green eyes flashed in the shadows, Harper opening his mouth to retort, to spit the venom back in Standish's face, to give him a particularly concentrated dose of what he'd been pouring into the Freelancer's ears over the course of the mission, when his wings shuddered at his back, his senses suddenly singing with an eagerness, a magnetic pull that threatened to tug him away from the blast door and into the darkness behind him.
He could practically taste death in the air, the smoke carrying it created by a particularly out of control hellfire.
Harper closed his mouth, reconsidered, before starting again. "Tobias Standish. Former ONI logistics operator."
Standish blinked, his triumphant expression falling away to be replaced by confusion. "What- what are you-?"
The Phoenix ploughed on relentlessly. "The operations approved by Standish carried one of the highest mass casualty rates for the forces he deployed. He defected once a declassified ONI memo leaked with the statistics for the missions he oversaw and the casualty numbers couldn't be ignored. He doesn't see soldiers as people. Just figures on a spreadsheet. Information is a game to him. War is a game for him."
"What is this? Harper, what the hell are you-?"
The grin that split Harper's face was carnivorous, hungry, lethal in his own right. "In particular, Standish was in charge of overseeing a large number of ODST deployments onto hostile battlefields. I believe his after-action summaries listed their deaths, every time, as… 'acceptable casualties'."
"Harper," the former ONI officer began, just a hint of nervousness entering his voice now, his palm drifting in the direction of his magnum despite his previous self-assurance in his own safety. "What the fuck is this?"
A whistle rang out in the darkness behind Harper, the tune that he recognised, that called to him, answering him in kind, the words unspoken, but enough to leave his wings shivering in eager, desperate need.
'No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue…'
Behind him, Jason Shaw emerged from the darkness cast by Harper's wings, his own helmet discarded, those piercing blue eyes alight with the kind of hateful flames that he reserved for very few people. His wings were practically unfurling, the glowing, searing flames enough to beat the darkness away, to leave Harper unconsciously leaning closer to him just to feel that heat lick at him enough to leave scars all the way to his core.
The whistling didn't stop, nor did Jason's pace slow, his gaze reserved entirely for the ONI operator on the other side of the electrified blast door. He drew level with Ian, his shoulder bumping against the blonde's, their wings blending together, overlaid in that single heartbeat of shared rage and wrath turned outwards against the world.
And then his form flickered, the colours fading from the world, a figure illuminated only by the burning white flames at his back. Agent California stepped through the electrified door and into the control room, still whistling even now, Ian Harper's signature blade catching the bloody hues overhead to dye it prematurely crimson as Hunter drew it out into the light.
Tobias Standish's face fell into sudden panic, the colour leaving him as swiftly as it had left Hunter. His magnum was drawn in a flash, firing three rounds into the Freelancer-Phoenix hybrid's centre of mass. Each of the shots passed cleanly through the other man, still half-detached from reality.
"You asked what I'd accomplished, I believe." Harper's expression was enraptured, transfixed. "This is what I've accomplished."
Standish kept firing until the gun was empty. It was only when the next pull of the trigger was answered with a click of an empty chamber and the sudden, hollow realisation that he was out of ammunition that Cal quite literally lunged back into the world, bringing the blade up and plunging it into the former ONI officer's chest.
He withdrew it, before slamming it home again. And again. And again. Yells of pain became screams, before rapidly fading to gurgling. He carried with him the kind of vengeful hate that could only be tempered by the others of his kind, the firebirds that had fallen and rebuilt themselves, burning away who they'd been before to reveal whatever new creature had been growing beneath.
Once upon a time, Jason Shaw might have had other choice before him, other paths that he could have walked. His lifelines had been severed, all of his paths burned away in a single gunshot from Agent Arkansas. Whatever else he could have been, there was only one road left for him to walk.
It was the least that Harper and the rest of them could do to not let him walk it alone.
So transfixed was he on the carnage unfolding before him on the other side of that reinforced door that he didn't even hear the footsteps behind him until the barrel of the magnum was pressed to the back of his skull, his lips parting in surprise, before they twisted into a smile of pure, raw delight.
"I know what you've been doing," Minnesota hissed from behind him.
"Oh?" It was deceptively light, casual, without the sheer well of hate that existed between the two of them, the whirlpool dragging them down into its depths together, to a place that only one of them would eventually emerge from. "Just what have I been doing, Minnesota?"
"You've been whispering into their ears. I know what you do. You take people and you break them and you twist them. You change them, Harper." The gun was pressed a little more harshly against his skull. "You're trying to poison my friends. Do you really think I wasn't going to notice? After seeing what you did to Cal?"
Harper's head turned just enough to see the faintest outline of Minnesota's silhouette, without having to truly divert his attention from his protege's dance of chaos on the other side of that wall.
"What we did to Cal. Give yourself some credit, Minnesota. None of this was really possible without what you did to him." He heard the tightening of the finger, threatening to pull the trigger and a growling laugh left him, spilling into the air to accompany the orchestra on the other side of the reinforced glass. "Of course you were going to notice. But I just don't care. Truthfully, I was hoping for Virginia and Indiana too, but I had to settle for Church's additions."
He lifted his shoulders in a lazy shrug, more than content to remain at the the other end of Minnesota's gun. "Ah well. I've made do well enough."
"If you so much as look at her-" Minnesota cut himself short when he saw the shark's grin split Harper's face open. He took a deep breath, holding it for a second, before exhaling, releasing all of that momentary flash of fury until all that was left was a deep, endless well of resentment and hatred. "You're a fucking disease."
"Of course I am. That's the point, Minnesota." It was simplicity at its finest, but he'd spell it out for the other man if he had to. "I'm the sickness. I'm the symptom of everything wrong with the galaxy. I'm the sickness of discontent seeping into every disillusioned soldier. I'm what they become when the world breaks them down and leaves them to fend for themselves. I'm every broken promise ever made, every duty of care ever failed. I'm the sickness and I'm the cure. The cure for all of it. The answer. I burn away the infection and replace it with… what comes next."
His head leaned back, pressing deliberately into the barrel of the gun. "It doesn't matter if you pull the trigger or not. Things like me? We're inevitable. I'll live on in everyone who'll ever push themselves to become something more than just broken and abandoned. How many of your comrades do you think I've spoken to by now, Minnesota? How many people do you think are out there, left behind in the dark, waiting to ignite? That's the thing about fire, Minnesota. Once it's sparked, it burns and it spreads. And even the embers can burst back into life."
There was silence behind him, appalled, disgusted, stunned.
"So go ahead. Kill me. Either way, you'll be seeing me again soon enough. It's better the devil you know than the devil that you don't. And speaking of the devils that you know, 'Sota…" He nodded his head in the direction of the glass, directing Minnesota's attention in Cal's direction at last. Within the control room, the gurgling had become a melody of particularly haunting death rattles. The crimson lights bathing the room in hellish reds meant that the brutality within had been masked almost entirely.
It was impossible to discern what was blood and what wasn't.
"Cal…" It was a breathless gasp, Minnesota's gun falling to his side, his gaze locked on the creature that had been lying beneath the surface of his best friend, or had perhaps simply always been his best friend.
"I asked for the others because I had things I wanted to say to each of them, Minnesota. Dear Director Church haggled, but you? I asked for you for one reason. I brought you here to show you this."
He saw the exact moment that it registered with Minnesota that it hadn't been California who'd 'requested' him. Saw something shatter inside of him, something break, something else burn into life. Harper had to wonder exactly where Jason Shaw fell on Minnesota's list of friends and foes, now. Whether or not that cause was now forever lost in the other man's eyes.
He'd brought Minnesota here to show him what California was, deep down. What Minnesota had never acknowledged in his roommate and friend. To see what the other man did when confronted with it.
Harper saw the hollow expression on Minnesota's face. Saw just how he looked at Jason. Like he didn't recognise him anymore. Like he was scared. Scared of Jason.
He had his answer.
Minnesota had gazed into the abyss and when it had gazed back, he'd blinked. More than that, he'd flinched away from it, from the truth of what Cal was. Well, let it not be said that he hadn't given the man one final chance, just for the sake of the part of Jason that remained California. He'd offered him this moment to prove him wrong. He wasn't surprised by the outcome.
"I'm going to kill you," the Freelancer at his side whispered.
"You can certainly try." Harper's eyes never left Jason Shaw. "You'll just have to go through him first."
Mission accomplished.
"Just one more question from me." Alaska's voice cut through the final preparations, carrying above the low rumble of conversation filling the bridge, drawing all of their eyes back to him. "Why aren't you bringing your last Phoenix along? Where's Isaac in all of this?"
Fireteam Phoenix bristled, weapons sliding back into hands before the Director could call for the ceasefire again. Crosshair's concealed pistol was back in his hand, Firefly was poised to spring, Circuit's gloves were sparking, silver shone in Geist's hands, even Falcon was eyeing each of the Freelancers in turn, deciding which of them to lunge at.
Harper couldn't stop that small, destructive flame that flared within him, turning his gaze upon Alaska with the intention to… he didn't even know what he was going to do to the other man. He'd find a way to be particularly creative once he got a hold of him, he was sure.
Jason's hand landed on his shoulder, Jason's weight leaned against his back, Jason's words murmured into his ear.
"Not here. Not yet."
It took a monumental degree of self-control, the kind that he so rarely chose to exercise over himself, but at long last, Harper pulled himself back out of that instinct to hurt, to main, to kill, all in defence of his brother when he wasn't even here, when he'd proven himself to be a survivor, when he could take care of himself…
When he had made friends within Project Freelancer.
Seeing the way that Colorado had shot Alaska the kind of glare that Aaron was giving him helped, in its own way. As did Minnesota's quiet "enough."
He supposed that his other half's roommate was good for something after all.
"We'd rather not bring him along for this. All there is to it." They weren't taking risks with Isaac's life… and they weren't going to bring him along to see them at their worst. "Any more questions?"
Silence reigned.
"Very well. In which case, I officially approve this operation." Director Leonard Church gazed out at them all, Freelancers and Phoenixes alike, expression as grim as Harper had ever seen it. "I hope that none of you give me cause to regret it."
"Relax, Director. It's just gonna be me, my Phoenixes, and some of your best and brightest." Harper threw an arm around Jason's shoulders and beamed when Hunter chose not to protest. He aimed his grin around the room, locking onto each of them in turn and entirely, falsely, innocent.
"What could possibly go wrong?"