(A/N) Hey all, hope you're all ready for this update, coming only a day after the last one, just as I promised, so I would advise you all to check and make sure that you caught the last one! This chapter was written by the sensational Warg, and, while a bit shorter than the last one, delivers just as much! We'll have six more straight updates after this one, so keep an eye out for them!

Enjoy!

Chapter Sixty-One – Bad Penny Friends

Agent Utah

Written by WargishBoromirFan

"Tell me how it's gonna be, George!" – Lennie Small, Of Mice and Men.

"You're killing me, Smalls!" –The Sandlot

He'd barrelled his way into a visitation rather than been invited or technically even allowed into the recovery room of the medbay, but no one was hurt and as long as Utah practiced what Maine had taught him, nobody asked him to leave, so it was all right. Kent had given him a moon-eyed aside glance as the boombringer argued with the doctors, and then Kentucky had decided to put off his own visit when the giant in white shoved his way through the waiting room. Before his pupils retracted, Kent ended up cutting himself off in the middle of a smart retort, stepping back from the harassed medic, and motioning Utah ahead.

The doctors didn't try to stop him, either.

It was a relief to drop into the chair by Georgia's bedside, though. Utah did not know how Maine could keep his fists so tight for so long. It gave him too much stiffness in his arms and neck to hold them that way. Georgia had jumped as Utah blew through the door, did a double-take as he claimed a seat, and let his head fall back against the lumpy little foam pillow at Utah's greeting. "Hi, Georgia!"

"Hey, Utah." He sounded resigned. The match with California had taken a lot out of him.

"So what were we fighting about, again?" Well, Utah did it mostly to end it, but he didn't really understand just what he'd been ending.

"Cal and I have different views on Arkansas, most lately of the Crimson Sun," Georgia spoke slowly. Utah wasn't sure if he was frustrated, tired, embarrassed, angry, or all of the above, really. The tone was gentler than what the engineer generally used when the big man tripped over one of his works in progress, but it sure didn't sound happy. "Cal has always seen him as a thorn in his side, and I... I used to be real close to Ark, and not just as his roommate."

"So…Ark is kind of like your boyfriend." Utah fumbled through his thoughts aloud. Cal had gotten angry when someone had said something about a girlfriend he'd once had, and Georgia had really started throwing punches when Cal badmouthed Ark. Well, Utah wouldn't hold it against his roommate. His mother had always said that you couldn't rightly judge a person by their exes, no matter how horrible the man might have been. His father had said that a bad ex made for a smarter second time around.

Georgia ran a hand over his swollen nose, his lips cracking open again in something between a grimace and an involuntary laugh. "No. Just... no. Guess if I'd ever wanted to experiment that way, he'd be the first and only man I'd ask, but I'm praying that he hasn't gotten any lessons on that subject from Harper..." he trailed off into a mumble. "What I miss about Ark isn't so much concerning physical intimacy. He ain't much of a hugger, wasn't even while we were roommates."

"I can give hugs," Utah offered, holding out his arms. He wasn't going to get in the way of a lost love, but he was going to be the best roommate ever and Georgia would quit offering to trade with Nebraska or North. The senior agent might have just been joking, but it was the principle of the thing.

The injured Freelancer waved him off. "That's okay," he forestalled Utah, "I can respect a little personal space." His storage methods suggested otherwise, but at least as far as body contact was concerned, Georgia left him a good-sized bubble. "What I miss the most about Ark was the mental intimacy; the sense that even if we didn't agree with each other or even understand, we were willing to listen, because there was trust there, respect, simple caring about what the other was thinking. Now... I really don't know what he's thinking. Haven't since we got back from taking down General Allen, no matter how much I or the Director or the others might wish I did, if for different reasons."

"You supported him against Cal anyway," Utah noted. He didn't know what to think of Georgia's defence of an unrepentant traitor, but Utah had only known the man as a murderer, not as a friend. It seemed easier.

"Well of course I did. I don't understand, but I still care enough to want to." Georgia shrugged as if that explained everything. "I don't know what things are like out in the colonies-" he started in a softer tone, trapped between injuries and the big man's unrelenting gaze.

"It is pretty nice. You should come visit," Utah, proud citizen of suburban Perro Nigra, Europa interrupted.

"- But my grandpa was a big history buff, familial and local, and could correlate the two back nearly seven hundred years, as long as you count most of the southeastern U.S. as local and can accept some mighty tall tales as family history," Georgia continued dauntlessly, not appearing to be making any immediate vacation plans.

"That is twice as long as Europa has had people, so it's probably all right, then." Utah wasn't sure where this tangent was headed, but that was all right. He forgot what he'd been meaning to say and rambled on anyway sometimes, too.

"I was never that into the whole history thing so much as what futures could come from it myself, and I think he made up at least a quarter of it just to scare my brothers and me, but you go back to what records survived the dark ages and there were people accused of crimes and hanged in front of a mob on trumped up evidence just because people were scared and angry; no jury, judge, or justice required. No real peace gained, at least not as I see it, what when both sides feel like that gives 'em the right to hit harder and leave blood for fifty years and boiling anger for the next three hundred. But then I'd rather leave lynchings buried as deep in exaggerated legends as the mule Grandpa Jacobs insisted came with our first plot of family land."

Dark fingers summoned something small and scratched from Georgia's personal belongings left at his bedside. "He always said we should keep a little reminder of our past with us so that we could learn from it, earn from it, and never be broken by it, but Ark never got much in the way of family history to hang onto. There was a time when I'd hoped we could at least offer him a future, if not a past, but he's chosen his own future, now. I know I oughta let him take it and all its consequences, but that doesn't mean I like it."

Utah just watched him silently as Georgia continued to spin the penny restlessly through his fingers, holding really still and quiet. There was a lot of processing to do from that. "Sorry... I do go on, once I get to talking. Ark's the bad guy, and I'm too crazy to let him go on being bad. Easier if you look at it from that summary. You'd get on better with Cal that way, and you might've gotten the upper hand today, but Cal carries some real ugly grudges. Some of the others do, too - Maine, South, Al, Virginia, Carolina... Best if one of us stays on their good sides. You might as well learn from my mistakes."

His eyes were more focused on the coin than Utah, but Georgia at least offered a self-mocking smile through his battered face. Utah couldn't return it as such.

"If you want to talk, I will listen. Anytime and always. I am a pretty good listener." Well, Utah didn't mean to brag, but he was. He had a good memory and everything. Especially where the important details were concerned.

"Utah... Jesus, thanks." The wounded roommate pronounced it correctly that time. "For the assist and... thanks."

They weren't really supposed to share this information, but Florida did it, so why not follow what their senior leader would do in this situation? "Jesus is my middle name. My friends call me Mic-"

The door slammed open, and South glowered in the open frame. "I thought you'd be in the ICU after all the shit California beat out of you," she told their wounded comrade, cracking her knuckles. "I'm seriously thinking about finishing the job and putting you there myself. You deserve nothing less after that stunt." Utah stood from his chair. South tracked the movement, her mouth a thin line, but continued to address the beaten man in the bed. "If you thought starting a fight you couldn't win and then siccing your pet giant idiot on the problem was going to impress me or make it go away, then you're fatally mistaken, Poindexter."

Utah felt his jaw and back stiffen. "Don't talk to him like that, South."

"Oh, you want to play, Small?" South took two swaggering steps into the recovery room. She was more than half a head shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but she held her every spot above Utah on the leaderboard like armour made of trained cobras. "I'll knock you so hard that you'll be asking 'which way did she go, George?' from the other end of the ship."

"You're going with that metaphor, boss?" The blonde woman gave Georgia a sidelong narrowed glare for ruining the mood. "I never felt like much of a poet, is all, and I'm not sure if the Director would like Of Mice and Men."

"I suppose I ought to be halfway impressed that the weakling gearhead pulled his head out of his ass long enough to pass high school English," South muttered. "But don't think you're going to distract me."

"You will not touch him, and I told you not to talk to him like that." Utah was very firm on this part, his hands slowly curling into fists.

"Utah, remember what I said about grudges? Best back off. You don't need to get on anyone's bad side; this is all between her and me," Georgia tried to talk him down, his voice a light, soothing singsong.

"What, you're worried that he could hurt me?" South snorted and took another step towards the bed, separating her hands but not yet lowering them. "Please."

The young giant answered her step with one of his own, circling between her and the bed. "My decision, Utah, my consequences, so listen to me, agent: stand down." Georgia could give a half-decent impression of being in command when he really wanted to, though even his unwanted bodyguard knew he was far out of control.

Utah turned back to face him, open features fighting betrayal and worry. "I'll respect that, but I don't have to like it."

"No, you don't have to." Georgia sat up as far as his injuries would allow him, straightening his sheets. His bruises were muted beneath the dark skin tone, but old scars contrasted all too pale against his bandaged chest as the engineer faced the future he'd made for himself with only a scratched-up penny in hand for weaponry, only an overly-starched hospital sheet as a shield.

South gave the back of Utah's head a slap while his back was turned, but otherwise allowed him to pass unmolested back out into the medbay hall. "Shut the door as you leave, rookie." Utah glared at her, but Georgia nodded, so he reluctantly shut the door. And sat outside it, listening as hard as he could to the sharp, muffled voices beyond the curtained viewing window and closed door. The quiet moments and a repressed grunt hardly made the young Freelancer feel any better. There seemed to be a brief creak of the bed-springs, like South had leaned in to deliver her threats up close and personal or had found a way to make Georgia extremely uncomfortable, but even when he heard the sharp crack of armoured glove hitting flesh, there was little Utah could do.

South had locked herself in.

Utah rammed a shoulder into the door once, twice, making his teeth rattle, and the third try left him careening into the chair he'd left when South opened the door inwards, laughing at the white-armoured Freelancer among the splinters as she walked out.

"You know, you're like a bad penny." Georgia, once Utah detangled himself from the wreckage, was sporting a rapidly swelling black eye, but was otherwise no worse than Utah had left him. At least he was smiling. "You always come back, Mick."

He shrugged and brushed himself off. "Friends do that."