Click.
"Move and he dies."
Instantly, everyone froze. Simmons, Tucker and Grif stopped screaming, Sarge quit yelling that someone had stolen his shotgun. Carolina paused, the trigger she held halfway down. Caboose took a deep breath and held it, muscles trembling as he struggled to stay absolutely still.
"Drop the gun, Carolina."
She hesitated, glancing down at Wash. He lay on his back, struggling upwards against the weight pressed down on his chest. But the cold metal of the shotgun pressed to his forehead squashed any hopes he might harbor of getting away.
"I said, drop it!" South snarled. Carolina dropped the pistol, and held up her palms.
She barreled up the hill, her swaggering walk turning swiftly into an all-out sprint. Burning hate and anger swirled darkly inside her chest, but it was eclipsed by the desire for revenge that roared in her blood. Agent Washington would pay for what he had done to her. He and the Director would suffer before she killed them.
"That's better, isn't it?" South grinned menacingly at Carolina, who got the message. Try to shoot me and I'll blow his brains out.
"South…" Carolina's voice trembled the tiniest bit. "You're meant to be dead." The confusion was evident in her voice.
"According to Command, I am," South agreed in a growl. Her gaze traveled downwards to lock with Wash's. She leant a little more weight onto the foot that was pinning him down by the chest. "Officially, I was KIA."
Killed In Action… Wash's throat turned dry, and his heart squeezed guiltily in his chest. South continued to search his gaze for a minute. Her eyes were blank, devoid of emotion. No, Wash realized. Not empty, but guarded. Yes, that was the right word. The walls that had kept South separate from the world were up again, and this time he couldn't see through them. The realization was bittersweet.
A quick flick of her wrist had sent the small sphere soaring through the air. The soldiers on top of the hill glanced at it, drawing their weapons. South, very purposefully, watched her feet as the she tore up the desert dune.
BANG!
"But… but…" Carolina hated her facts being proved wrong. She hated being confused. She hated not knowing what was going on. She also hated South. "But, you're dead. Wash killed you."
South said nothing. Her gaze remained locked with Wash's. His chest burned, aflame in anger and betrayal. He hated her. Absolutely hated her. She had betrayed everything and everyone, for no one's sake but her own. And yet, he was forced to feel pity for her. South was only what the Director had made her.
"Apparently not," Wash muttered. The moment, whatever it had been, was gone. South smirked down at him, and then looked away.
"You killed her?" Tucker asked, agape. His head moved from South to Wash, to Carolina and back again. "Wait, what? How is that even possible?"
"It's not," South answered. "Because I'm not dead." She shifted the shotgun to her left hand. "But for official purposes, I suppose that I am."
A flash of white light, and South looked up. The flash-bang had exploded, destroying the soldiers' vision temporarily and filling their ears with a deafening ringing. South reached the top of the hill, and slammed into two of the soldiers. They wore the rank-and-file armour, nothing of the Freelancer quality. They were orange and maroon, and went down screaming. Next, she twisted, and reached up to grab the helmet of a bright-red soldier. Her own forehead slammed into it, sending him to the ground. She ripped the shotgun out of his hands as he fell.
"Are you here to help us?" Tucker asked eagerly. "Because we could use another chick on the team."
"Shut up, Tucker!" Epsilon-Church said, eyeing South. "She's not going to go for you, either."
South started, surprised. The shotgun nearly fell out of her hands as the A.I. materialized. "Alpha?" she whispered. But then her mouth twisted into a bitter, mocking smile. "Epsilon."
"Wait, you two know each other?" Simmons, the maroon soldier, spoke up. South and Epsilon-Church glanced at each other. She gritted her teeth.
"Unfortunately," they both said, at the same time. South immediately rolled her eyes.
The shotgun was unfamiliar in her hands, but South decided that she liked the weapon. Smooth and polished, the owner clearly took good care of it. She grinned maliciously, and whirled into the air. The heavy shotgun slammed into the back of the aquamarine soldier's helmet. They crumpled, and South leapt over the fallen soldier.
"Why are you here, South?" Carolina was still surprised, and angry over South's violent reappearance, but she hid it all beneath a calm and determined voice. She had always been good at taking the lead.
The shotgun pressed a little less forcefully into Wash's forehead as South seemed to realize the hypocrisy of her next words. "I'm here to help," she growled.
"With what?" The disbelief in Carolina's voice rose a little too quickly for her to stop. "Yeah," agreed the orange soldier, Grif. "Beating the fuck out of us doesn't really qualify as helping."
"Oh really?" South smirked. "I suppose that rule never applied to Tex."
"Don't talk about her like that!" Epsilon-Church snapped. "And don't change the subject."
Tucker shrugged. "It's true, though," he admitted. "But Tex is in a whole different category."
"She always was," Carolina muttered bitterly. Quiet as the statement was, South heard it. She smirked mockingly.
"I'm here to help you kill the Director," South growled. She seemed to have decided that the time for reminiscing about Agent Texas was over.
The grenade's effects were wearing off. South saw Carolina begin to draw her pistol, and leapt towards her. Her boot lashed out to smash into Carolina's Magnum, sending it flying. South hammered two fists into Carolina's gut before landing a round-house kick into her chest. She soared backwards, and landed next to the Magnum. Shit, South thought.
"I told you she was a mean lady!"
The shout had come from a soldier in dark-blue armour. South growled, and stalked towards him with stiff shoulders. She grabbed his throat with one hand, and lifted him off the ground. With a menacing snarl, she threw him into the three red soldiers, who had just started to get back up.
Washington raised his eyebrows.
"What makes you think that that's what we're doing?" he asked.
South snorted.
"I had hacked into the Command radio communications system to find word of your whereabouts, Wash. But then one soldier reported having seen you with a soldier in aquamarine Freelancer armour. Obviously, that was Carolina. And I knew that there was only one thing that she would need you for. Killing the Director. I decided that I wanted to kill him, too. Therefore, that made you guys my temporary allies. It was easy to find you, after that."
"How?" Carolina asked, stumped. "We can't have been that easy to find."
"Heat signatures," South answered with a smug smirk.
"In the desert?" Simmons asked, doubtful. Wash looked up at South.
"Trust me, it works," he said flatly. Simmons shrugged, unconvinced.
After a moment of angry silence, Carolina spoke again. "How, South? How are you even alive?"
The corners of South's mouth twisted bitterly. Washington watched as she spat the words out. "Wash doesn't use armour-piercing rounds in his pistols," she growled. "And that's what he shot me with."
Carolina was scrabbling in the sand. Her hands closed over the pistol, and South lurched towards her. She kicked the weapon out of her grip, again. Carolina snarled, and South laughed, kicking her ribs once. She reveled in her victory.
Click.
South turned menacingly towards the sound. She knew what it was, and a large part of her burned with satisfaction. Agent Washington was crouched on the ground, his hands wrapped around a pistol. His helmet lay in the sand beside him. When would he learn? South asked herself. Pistols – particularly his – couldn't kill her. But she didn't mention this. She stood still, and laughed. Wash looked uncomfortable, but his voice was strong when he spoke.
"Stand down, South!" he yelled.
"Oh, Washington," South giggled, the sound at odds with the burning hatred in her heart. She walked slowly towards the wide-eyed Agent. "What's the matter, Wash?" she asked. "Afraid to kill me… twice?"
Despair flooded through Wash and made him want to sink through the sand. It was true. He liked to keep one weapon on his belt that wasn't absolutely lethal. Armour-piercing rounds were expensive, and an alternative was always welcome.
But in his betrayed, all-consuming anger he had forgotten. Forgotten that his pistol wouldn't kill her. And his mistake had led them all to this.
"It penetrated," he growled in response. Now, he was just grasping at straws. He had let them all down and he knew it. "I saw it. And then I destroyed your armour."
"It penetrated, alright," South snarled. "Nearly fucking killed me."
"That was the intention," Wash snapped.
South growled. The shotgun shoved his head back even further into the sand, baring his neck. The weight on his stomach increased. "At such close range, it would have been lethal," she said, a trace of smugness coloring her tone. "But not quite. It lodged in my helmet, causing my armour to shut down."
"And then?" Wash's voice was flat. He didn't really want to hear any more of his failure. But he was also desperate to know where he had gone wrong.
He would not do so again.
"You destroyed my armour, but you didn't destroy me," South snarled. "When you left, I clawed my way out. My leg stopped bleeding and I made my way to an abandoned facility nearby. I stole a suit of armour, a radio and a medkit, and started looking for you on the Freelancer frequencies. It wasn't easy," South added. Something in her expression changed as she looked down at Wash. A new emotion sprang up behind her barriers. "But I had promised myself that I would have my revenge."
Wash adjusted his grip on the pistol, but didn't shoot. He was frozen. One look at her face, and he had known that it was really her and not just a clone. No one else was as talented as South at ripping out his heart and stomping on it. His fingers had locked, unable to tighten around his trigger.
South swaggered towards him. Wash panicked, and forced his fingers down. A round sprayed out, but they hit the sand around South. She grinned maliciously, and kicked out. Wash took the hit in the chest, and fell down into the sand. South had been holding a shotgun; she reached out with it now and positioned it against his forehead. Her foot was raised, pressing down his chest into the ground. She cocked the shotgun.
Click.
"Move and he dies," she snarled.
An uneasy silence followed her words. Even Tucker looked uncomfortable. South and Wash stared at each other, bonded by their mutual anger. Because Washington absolutely hated her. This was not the South that he wanted. This was not the South that she had been; the South that he had loved.
This was a new South. This was the Director's South.
And he would be perfectly capable of killing her.
Again.