(A/N) Hey guys, coming at you with an update for Phase Two: Betrayal, even though I technically should be studying, and am violating my warning that there wouldn't be any more updates until my exams were over. Why? Well I'm glad you asked! Today, the 8th of January, 2014, is The Freelancer Collaboration's first one-year anniversary, and we wanted to celebrate a little, even if it means distracting myself from my exams. So here you go, introducing another of our new Freelancers, but this one is, however, no OC, but Project Freelancer's very own Agent Utah! Written by the incredible Warg, here is a little something to thank you, the reader, for making our collaboration the success that it has been. This one is for you guys!
Also, to further celebrate our anniversary, I'm proud to announce that, with the help of the fantastic Bushtuckapenguin, we've set up our own website! It's still pretty rough, but everything you want to know about the collab and more can be found here, and, if not, then we have a thread in the forum looking for suggestions to improve the site, so feel free to post there - www,thefreelancercollaboration,weebly,com
(Just change the , to . )
Enjoy!
Chapter Twenty-Two – Moving Mountains
Agent Utah
Written by WargishBoromirFan
"Gump! What is your sole purpose in this army?"
"To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant."
"Goddamnit, Gump, you're a goddamn genius."
- Forrest Gump
It was rather easy to forget how big Utah was. The white armour blended into the background, easily confused with Wyoming's or Cal's or Sota's from a distance. He was, if not the youngest Freelancer in the Project - the newly twenty-one-year-old hadn't asked the others' ages - at least one of younger members of the latest wave, soft-spoken when not prone to sudden outbursts of glee or frustration and awkward with a breathy accent that was slightly too high to be emerging from that massive a body with its gawky hands and coltish legs and broad shoulders that he seemed to carry like pauldrons three sizes too large for him.
Then he walked into the training room with Maine and didn't quite look him evenly in the eye. Not because he stood more than a few inches shorter than the senior agent, but because Utah had been taught not to hold a feral animal's stare.
Maine went immediately to a weight bench and started putting fifty pounders on either end, racking them up with a casual indifference that belied how the whole bench might threaten to tip over if he ended up with anything uneven.
"Need a spotter there, son?" Florida asked. Honestly, if it were anyone else, he'd probably need two. Florida didn't look built for the job, though at least he was wise enough to know it was needed.
"I can do it!" Utah volunteered. Maine ignored him and began silently counting reps.
"Maybe I'd better take the other end," North spoke up, eyeing Maine's tightened fingers apprehensively, as if he assumed he'd have more luck picking up the whole bench, Maine included, than prying the steel from his hands.
Well, lifting team members with their equipment could come in handy in the field someday. "Hey, North? How heavy are you in armour?" Utah decided to test his theory on the larger of the two Freelancers not currently moving solid steel through the air with furious intensity, bouncing the tall blond a few inches off the ground like he was testing a melon at the supermarket.
"Utah! Personal space! A little warning and personal space!" North's hands snapped to Utah's wrists, causing the dangled six-and-a-half foot solider to rock precariously out of balance. Utah gingerly angled back until North was once again more or less vertical, and then set him back down, removing his mitts from his waist.
"Oh, sorry. Just wanted to get a basic idea." North wasn't too bad, but dead lifting just one agent was something that just about anyone in the project could do.
North shakily ran a hand through his hair and circled uneasily about his centre of balance, waving off his sister when she threatened to stand and stomp over from her own training. "It's okay; just… warn me before you do something like that," he said, stepping out of arm's length.
"Well, if you wanted to pick someone up, why didn't you just say so?" West glommed onto Utah's back from a running start, and he hooked his elbows under her knees to keep her from dangling all her weight from the arms she'd wrapped around his neck.
"West! Down!" Virginia hissed. West peered over his shoulder, trying to meet his eye, and then shrugged as she loosened her playful chokehold.
"Do I have to?" she pouted, deploying full-blast puppy eyes.
It was Utah's turn to shrug, lifting her slightly higher as he did so. "I don't know how far I would have to carry somebody out in the field, so I guess I could use the practice now."
West Virginia brightened at this, hugging his neck once more. "Yay piggyback ride!"
"Looks like Utah managed to pick up a dumbbell in the weight room. Maybe he's not the stupidest newbie here," South muttered, earning herself a glare from Virginia and a muffled snort from Nevada.
"Come on, Virginia, she did kinda leap right into that one," the hacker said, though Nev was careful to remain facing the chest press as she did so.
Maine set down his bar and sat up, paying little attention to North and Florida as they tried to make sure the hefty weight didn't clatter right back out of its niches. "Too loud," he growled, stomping for the door.
"Where're you off to, Maine?" Florida asked.
"Motor pool. Lift some tanks for Georgia, where it's quiet." Only Florida could get a full soliloquy out of the bald giant.
"Just be careful, all right?" The eldest Freelancer received a grunt in acknowledgment, but Florida still looked after the broad retreating back with some serious tension in his posture.
"Sounds like fun. Maybe I'll go, too," Utah decided. West didn't really get a chance to decide whether or not she wanted to tag along, but she made no serious effort to untangle herself from his grip as the young man trotted after the virtual lava-flow of rage Maine left in his wake.
North and Florida followed a few circumspect feet behind them.
Maine was bench-pressing the front of a Warthog when Utah got there, a pair of green and a pair of gold boots also sticking out from beneath the vehicle. "I thought we were lifting tanks," Utah said, squatting to let West down to her feet. Someone dropped a wrench, Georgia swore, and Jarvis fussed at him to watch his language.
"There're times when it's the only appropriate thing to do," the pink and green armoured Freelancer muttered, and Maine made a grunt of agreement as the engineers slid out from under the Warthog.
"I can get started, then," Utah offered as the others greeted West Virginia with a little more composure now that they were out from under the vehicle and able to see who had arrived. Maine didn't look particularly glad to see either of them, or Florida and North when the two men just happened to pass by the motor pool just before Utah lifted the Scorpion.
It was only the front treads, and it was only a few inches, but he heard West dash off to get the others as North Dakota and Florida moved in to pull Utah away, obviously concerned that he would hurt himself. Maine set down the Warthog and walked over to the tank next to the one Utah was lifting. He yanked the front off the ground, pulling the treads higher than Utah had, and turned the orange dome of his helmet sardonically in the younger man's direction. Utah lifted his higher, grunting as he twitched North away.
With a kick to the undercarriage, Maine knocked the Scorpion higher and changed his grip to the treads, not quite setting the several-ton armoured vehicle on its end. Utah attempted to keep up, but managed to inflict more pain to his foot than vertical air to the tank.
This was going to take some serious focus. How had his drill sergeant put it again? He just had to remember who he was and what his goal was. If he didn't already have the means to accomplish his goal, the army would beat it into him. He'd come so far already, and they'd always said that he had plenty of raw power lurking in there; it was just a matter of bringing it to bear upon the task at hand. No better way to focus that than the good old fashioned war cry.
"My name is Freelancer Agent Utah and I. LIKE. TANKS!"
With that roar, he hitched the dropped Scorpion back up. It flew over Utah's head and hovered there for the long space between heartbeats. He positioned his hands to catch the axles as they came back down and braced for impact.
The Scorpion landed in his hands, and then drove them down. The tank was not hitting the level of acceleration that gravity would enforce were it unimpeded when the undercarriage cracked against his skull, but the next thing Utah remembered seeing was Sergeant Killian Jay, caustic medic ever on duty, reluctantly tugging off his white helmet and shining a penlight at his pupils. Surrounding the doctor, alongside the ghostly afterimages of the light, was a ring of Freelancers.
"Are you sure we ought to move him even this much? Head injuries can be deadly. He might look fine now and then go to sleep and just not wake up." West was here, returned from rounding up as many agents as she could on short notice, and sounded ruffled.
"Eh, I don't think there was that much in there to worry with, anyway." Colorado was a little less so. "At least his skull's pretty thick."
"Still, I've set off bombs that didn't put a tank in the air so fast." Kent mimed the trajectory of the Scorpion's front end with his hand, bringing it back to his open palm with a smack that made Utah flinch under Dr Jay's examination. "Well, they can't all be winners," Kentucky defended his skills from Jersey's silent look.
Utah's roommate stood just behind Kent, only his comparative lack of height and differently-shaped helmet assuring Utah that the second green figure wasn't a product of double, partially inverted-colour vision. "Jesus, kid," Georgia choked incredulously. Utah thought about correcting his pronunciation, but it seemed too much effort to line up his thoughts with his mouth. "I do have a tire jack."
"I know the feeling," Florida said in sympathy to the bomb-maker's shrug, then knelt in to get a better view of their patient. "Hey! Look who's back at 'em! You feeling okay there, champ?"
"Maine obviously won," 'Rado grumbled mutinously, but Jersey put a hand to her shoulder.
"Maybe we ought to give him a little space, Florida," the redhead in orange suggested, trying to calm a fretful West with a look from across the circle. Virginia patted her younger sister on the back, eyebrows raised as she silently watched Utah struggle back to consciousness.
"Yeah, it'd be nice if all the expert killers could back up and let me do my job." Dr. Jay made for a very angry snowflake. "Damn stupid rookie…" he muttered under his breath.
"You are lucky you were wearing your helmet." Carolina was as crisply brusque as if she were dressing him down in the debriefing room instead of standing in front of Utah as he laid flat on the floor of the motor pool. "I don't care how strong you are; if you'd managed to cost us a team member out of sheer stupid rivalry, I would find a way to hurt you beyond the grave, if necessary."
"She'd do it. Don't ask me how, but she would," York stage-whispered from her side, earning the brunet an elbow in the solar plexus. Cal just nodded fiercely in agreement from behind them.
"Still, if we do need stuff taken down, I guess Plan 'Throw Maine at It' can be amended to Plan 'Throw Maine and Utah at It Until It Stops Moving,'" Kentucky decided. "Which should cut the time required by half, at least."
"As long as they are aimed in the proper direction," Alaska drawled.
Dr. Jay snapped his fingers in front of Utah's face. "Hey, dumb newbie. I need you to focus for a second. You still in there?"
"I think so," Utah replied, his tongue suddenly as slow and heavy as the tank.
"I need your codename and designation," the doctor told him.
"And then name all seven dwarfs," Nev added from the back.
"Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful, - no, wait, Agent Utah, Private First Class, Foxtrot-19…" he didn't realize he'd been vaguely half-gesturing at the other Freelancers as he went through the list, but a couple of them seemed amused as he went through, " - Oh yeah, and Sleepy. That'd be me right now," he finished with a yawn.
"Stay awake until I can get you to the med bay, Dopey," Dr. Jay insisted, working a hand under his shoulder. "Little help here, Maine?"
The bald man nodded, then lifted Utah to his feet, punching the younger Freelancer in the shoulder to keep him awake, with West, North, Nev, and Florida following after them that Utah could tell, pretty much all the agents in the motor pool and watching their exit. "Not bad, kid," Maine told him, flowery praise indeed.
Utah could live with that.
The Director
"I told you these things have a way of working themselves out," said the paler figure watching from the far end of the lot, hands folded behind his back and eyes hidden behind thick, shining lenses. "We simply need to insure that the right people are in the right place."
The Counselor didn't look up from his data pad.