OMG I LIVE!
We should credit "X-Men: First Class" for the fact that I'm writing again. RL, including but not limited to marriage, divorce, and losing my dad made writing lose its luster for years awhile. But it's completely impossible to watch First Class and not find your wheels spinning, and this was a happy side-effect.
That said, I realized in writing this that I sort of live within my own canon, where everything happens in a psuedo-"Roll of Thunder"-verse, so while this is in no way affiliated with ROT itself... I may pretend that some of the stand-alone stories apply. Mainly in referece to Kurz. Like, "Beer and Nuts."
(Can't wait to rework my own fiction good Lord.)
050
Kurtz noticed one significant thing about their maximum-security target as they crouched on a brushy hillside 1500 meters away: it was not, in fact, maximum security.
He fiddled with his scope and glared suspiciously at the man beside him. "I thought you said this place was a fortress," he muttered.
"No," was the delicate reply. "I said the R and D lab-slash-prison he was being held in was a fortress. This isn't a lab or a detention center; it's a glorified filing cabinet."
"And so why isn't this the lab?" Kurtz demanded.
"Oh, that. Someone started a nasty rumor about them trying to enrich uranium in that facility... naturally, China has their noses all up in that nonsense," Gauron said vaguely, with all the innocence of Charles Manson. "This has been their fallback facility for decades."
"You..." Kurtz's mouth fell open. "You planned that."
"And when would I have time to do that?" he asked, too distracted by some indecipherable contraption that he was constructing one piece at a time. "I've been too busy skull-fucking puppies, or haven't you heard?"
Kurz stared at him. "I. Um. Look, why the fuck are you doing this? I literally can't figure this out."
"Well, then thank God I didn't bring you along for your brains," he replied absently.
"Goddamn it, I'm not joking!" Kurz exploded, the volume of his voice causing the terrorist/kidnapper/sociopath to lunge at him - "shut up, you fucking -" followed by a brief scuffle and Kurz repeating, "Jesus, okay, I get it!", reluctant in the knowledge that he could either cry uncle or probably get beaten to death, literally.
"My goddamn point is that I don't understand why you're even bothering," he hissed. "Do you just want to make sure you're the only one who can ever kill him? That no one else can hurt him?- because you have that in spades," he said viciously. "I just don't know what you're trying to achieve here..."
Frozen gray eyes pinned him to the spot. "You don't actully know anything, Blondie. I promise you, you don't even know Kashim."
"Then why did you contact me?" he demanded helplessly. "I - he's dead. I want him back - but if I'm only some tool that lets you keep torturing him -"
The other man's gaze was scornful. "You know you're not raising him from the dead, don't you? He's alive. Still. You're a complete and utter tool, yes, but you're a fair shot. Best I could get on short notice." He dug in his bag a little deeper, gesturing with one hand at the compound beyond them. "Your only job for the next five minutes is to shoot anything that moves, and isn't me. The truck is where it is because we'll have to get out of here fucking fast, and I can't afford the added time it would take to get Kashim much farther than that. I don't know what kind of shape he's going to be in, so I'm just going to assume the worst. So just... I don't know, do whatever it is you do." He settled the duffel bag on his shoulder and jammed a spike of some sort into the ground, twisted a knob, and studied it suspiciously.
Kurz glared through his scope and ground his teeth. "Don't mind me, then. I'll just start shooting people when they show up, how's that?"
Gauron reached into his bag one last time with a wild grin. "Good thing you're ready, then. Have fun."
And, with a quick flick of his wrist, he tossed a flare out in front of them, clapped him on the shoulder, and disappeared into the foliage gleefully.
About five seconds later, he had things to shoot at. He contemplated, fleetingly, shooting Gauron and solving all of his problems with one bullet, but the promise of Sousuke stayed his trigger finger -
He sighed and went back to the task at hand. When he thought about it later on, he'd be glad that security was light and their location isolated.
At the moment, however, he could only think that this was incredibly - unspeakably - stupid, and if he lived, he was never going to tell anyone about it.
050
A brush of something familiar touched Souske's mind, cold and impartial to him - but alive, in some funny way. His mind struggled to place it, but there were suddenly more important things going on. It had been... God, how long had it been?
It didn't even matter that it was Gauron at this point, because after who knew how long without Mithril able to find him, there were only a few other things worse than death.
He didn't really know where it ranked, though.
He watched the other man through heavy-lidded eyes, tracking the swift assembly of a device that he pulled out of his bag one piece at a time - flipping a switch here, balancing a circuit board on his knee as he wired it to another piece, using what looked like a sonic screwdriver to attach what could have been the tiniest toothpick in the world to some hunk of metal -
That touch in his mind again, that strange suggestion that he'd felt it before, that he'd connected to it the way he might have done with his Lamda driver -
Without thinking, he swiped at the contraption weakly. "You don't understand," he began, "that thing -"
"Kashim," the other man gritted, "I swear, when I want your opinion on technology, I will ask you. We'll be out of here in a minute, tops, so do you mind not getting us killed before then? Your blond Barbie friend can only run interference for so much longer -"
His reaction was swift and a little painful, his weakened muscles screaming as he pushed himself up. "Kurz is here?" he demanded breathlessly, his arms barely supporting his weight and the rest of him regretting the move instantly.
"I realize that I'm incredibly talented, Kashim," was the wry whisper, "but even I take some pause before stealing a guinea pig from the North Koreans when they have home-court advantage. And if someone is making a racket outside, they won't think to worry about anything inside for about... oh, say three more minutes, give or take two."
"What are you doing here?" he whispered brokenly, unable to think further than that.
The other man's temper snapped - quickly, almost undetectable in his hushed voice, but it echoed in the small room. "I am saving your life, you fucking moron, what part of that is such a foreign concept? Would it make you feel better if I told you that if you don't shut up, I'm going to kill you? Because I absolutely will at this point."
Maybe it was exhaustion, the isolation, desparation - any or all of them, he didn't know which one, but the weakest of laughs huffed past his lips. In some distant, buried part of him that was frostbitten with neglect, he did feel almost - imperceptibly - better. On a molecular level, and no greater.
Because if he was honest with himself, really honest about everything and not just what was relevant at the moment, he had been in a lot of really, really bad places in his life. But he'd always thought of a way out of them, whether it was his own resourcefulness he turned to, or simply an unwavering trust in his team. And up until precisely then, he had always been more or less successful, in that he had managed to get out of whatever predicament he had been in mostly unscathed.
It would be inaccurate to say that he had given up hope, lying prone in the floor, exhausted from a myriad of tests of which he couldn't even conceive and eating only what he thought wouldn't kill him. He couldn't say that, because he had felt himself die more than once in his time as a man with no country, no family, no allegiance, and no fear of death. He'd allowed his mind to succumb to death many times, in situations far more painful than the one he was in now, and yet he had always emerged on the other side alive.
This, however, was new to him. Because at least three of the times he had conceded his life in utter defeat was to Gauron.
That being said, he also couldn't admit to comprehending the depths of the other man's motives. After struggling so passionately against each other for so many years, after commiting to a policy of kill at all costs, including their own lives... he was here. He had Kurz with him, or at least claimed to. Saving his life, he claimed.
If he'd had even the slightest bit of strength left in his body, he would have started banging his head against the ground. There was no point in asking the obvious questions, like "Why aren't you dead", or "Shouldn't you be strangling me now". He didn't let his own mind drift farther than that, even if it had nowhere else to go.
A click, and the cell was filled with a dim, eerie light. "Perfect," hissed a man whose definition of perfection was probably legitimately horrifying. It wasn't comforting.
And then awareness, or something mirroring it, hit him like a mack truck.
The contraption on the ground that hummed softly, that had consumed his companion's attention and seemed to be their ticket out, filled his brain completely, and he understoood -
"Turn that damned thing off!" he yelped, scrambing away from it as best his shattered body could. He barely registered Gauron telling him to shut the fuck up, again, but he couldn't.
He was pulling a small amount of C4 out of his bag now. "I don't think you get it, Kashim - we aren't just going to walk out of here. That thing is how we get out alive." Now wiring the explosives to a remote receiver. "Trust me, I stole it from some very knowledgable people."
Sousuke struggled for words, but all he had were images - impressions, mostly, nothing concrete, but words were definitely not among them. Despair crept over him as a few switches were flipped - he couldn't place it, or define it, but an ill wind swept over him -
probably just that corroded pipe
And Gauron slung the duffel over his shoulder and grabbed him, his skin so hot that it scalded at the first touch, but he was pulled flush against him, and the glow in the room grew more intense -
"I might tell you to pray," Gauron added, as his words were swallowed by something invisible, "but this isn't the time for jokes."
The walls around them - the ground - the air dissolved. His stomach dropped as thought he'd jumped off a building, the stinging cold around him died, the grimy floor beneath him vanished.
And then, with an unceremonious crash, he felt grassy earth slam into him full-force. Fresh air filled his lungs, even if it was just as damn cold as the air in his cell had been, and Kurz.
He was stammering, trying to say something more eloquent than "Sousuke - ", but he was mostly failing.
Gauron pulled him to his feet, gently, as if the day was not surreal enough, and gave Kurz a glare that promised death. "Take him," he said tightly, very obvioulsy reluctant. "Get him in the truck."
"There are still hostiles on the - " he began in protest, but was already moving to help his friend, maybe because he was alive, maybe to het him the hell away from-
"I've got that covered," was the reply, and a few more explosives were tossed onto the ground. The device, the strange, ominous piece of technology that had followed a signal -
a beacon?
The answer was yes, and the knowledge was overwhelming, and his head spun now not with technology, but with sounds and thoughts of Three minutes should be enough time, the compound is going up in thirty seconds, they'll have fun with that -
"Sergeant Weber," he said dimly. "I believe I'm about to pass out."
He was correct, almost down to the second.