(A/N) Hey guys, time for another update, and this one has been written by the fantastic WargishBoromirFan, and we return to Agent Utah as he deals with the…trauma...of having been captured by the enemy. I love this chapter right here, Warg really nails it, and I hope you guys all will as well! Back in college now, which explains the lack of updates over the last few days, but hopefully I won't be too busy this term - at the very least, updates shouldn't face too much of a delay, so don't get worried if there's a few days of silence.

Just in case you haven't noticed, we're looking for writers for Agent Connecticut at the moment, so if you're interested head on over to our forum – The Freelancer Collaboration – and fill out an application, or PM me for more details.

Enjoy!

Chapter Eighty-One – The Inexorable Train

Agent Utah

Written by WargishBoromirFan

"Wow, no one ever comes to ME for information! Usually my short attention span keeps me from providing any I never beat a Super Mario without warping! I only know the warp levels! What if they only made the warp levels?

– Wonderita, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella

"Did we ever take the time to really discover how little we know about each other?" – Less Than Jake, All My Friends Are Metalheads

"Hodor!" – Walder of the Stark Household

When he'd first signed up for the army, his recruiter had emphasized how much he could learn from the experience. He'd been told how well the military could hone his skills and improve his quality. As the only man in his mother's life who'd never disappointed her, (or so she'd always said,) Utah had been eager to be the absolute best he could.

The high-school recruiter hadn't mentioned the great psychiatric care, oddly enough. He'd talked about leadership and job skills and honesty and strength – all good things, some of which he might even bring in with him – but he hadn't made much about what the army might do for his mind. And this wasn't the first time that Utah had been brought in to talk about how to feel better. He'd learned a lot from those sessions – about how to think about things, when not to think about things, what sort of things were not really anyone's fault and which could be blamed upon the enemy, or someone else in the unit, and how to get past the sorts of things that might even be Utah's fault.

Like the last time he'd been sent to counselling for a very long time, he'd been assured that this wasn't really his fault. It was an accident. And they could work past it. Those sessions had been during the end of basic, just before his boot camp class had been assigned to their units. Before most of them had been assigned to units, anyway. There was always going to be one or two washouts - at one point, he was afraid that he'd be one of them - and then there had been that other private.

He had decided, with the help of the therapist from those first sessions, that it wasn't really good to focus too much thought on that other private. He just needed to be aware of his surroundings and recognize the sound of gunfire so he'd know when to duck or run or just not go that way under most circumstances. There were times when it might be worth going in front of the bullet, and the first therapist had assured him that he'd know them when he came to them, and he had, once or twice, after he got out of counselling, but what that other private had done hadn't been one of them.

All Utah had been shooting at was a target, after all. Just a practice dummy.

"Nev wasn't a practice dummy," he blurted, and the Counselor raised a curious eyebrow. "I mean... I don't know why she went where she was not supposed to go. I don't know what they did to her. They hurt 'Rado... hurt her bad. I didn't like them."

"What happened to Agent Colorado was most unfortunate," the Counselor agreed. "Fortunately, there was little lasting physical harm done to her that cannot be repaired or compensated around, and we shall make sure she has all the time she needs to recover. That is why we are setting up these sessions for all of you who were captured by the Crimson Sun."

"Oh, being captured wasn't that bad for me," Utah reassured him. By comparison, that round of captivity had been rather calming. Sure, he'd been confined to a small room, stripped of his armour, and wasn't allowed to talk to anyone except his captors – and those conversations had been rather circular; Utah had known "stranger danger" well before being indoctrinated to serial number and code-name – but that wasn't all that different than spending time alone during the end of boot camp.

Arkansas, at least, had been relatively pleasant, unlike the people who had captured his first assigned unit back on Rauken. Those people had been more like Pennsylvania, not really caring if their lower-ranked captives died or not, as long as the Insurrection got the information out of at least one of them. There, the imprisoned UNSC soldiers had been chained, wrist to wrist, and the chains had not come off until Utah had used them to pull all his squad members out of there, from the fellow greenhorn rookie next to him, who'd voiced concerns about his plan, to their sergeant, who had never gotten the chance. "I didn't have to wear anyone else's arms, or anything."

"That is... a good thing," the Counselor allowed, reaching blindly for his data-pad. He gripped it without looking, as if he needed something normal to hold onto, a security blanket when the world went sideways. Utah knew the feeling. The first time he'd been captured, everyone had gotten pulled out together, but not all of them left those chains alive. This time... all of the agents were alive, even Rado. Even Nevada.

"Why would that not be a good thing?" he asked himself. 'Rado might not be his favourite Freelancer, with the way she snapped at the other members of her wave and held herself above them, but that hardly deserved the loss of a finger. "I guess she could really be that Hobbit from North's movies, now."

"I suppose so," the Counselor allowed hesitantly, clearly not following what little logic Utah had voiced. "What did they do to you, Utah? Do you remember any questions they might have asked?"

"You think you can hide behind two words and a blank expression, rookie? You think that's gonna keep me from killing anyone else? We already know your name. We already know where your friends plan to strike. You're not going to be their obedient little meathead battering ram any longer. You've got one choice left, and only because Ark's willing to train you up, because Harper needs replacing, because you look like you might be a half-decent bout before I rip you in two. So tell me, kid, is there anything going on in that brain of yours that you can see your only chance at survival, or should I go ahead and spread it across the wall? Either way, I'll break you easily enough. There's no one left to control you but me."

He'd responded as he always had to the bigger second-in-command of the Crimson Sun, anticipating the violence, redirecting it towards a blow he could handle, countering only enough to remind Pennsylvania of the security forces outside the door, saving energy for when Utah could apply it towards freeing the other members of his wave.

"You like pain, kid? You want to live to see hers?"

"Oh, they asked a lot of things. Pennsylvania's questions were very rude and didn't make a lot of sense, but the only thing I could tell him was my serial number, since we were trained to only give that and our names if we were captured and my mom told me to never give my name to anyone I didn't think I could trust."

Arkansas had tired of hearing "Foxtrot Nineteen" very quickly. Utah briefly considered mentioning Foxtrot Five missed him, but he remembered what had happened to the other captives on his chain after they gave information that first time he'd been caught behind enemy lines. Especially information that their captors didn't like. No response could get them tortured, but if the Innies thought they had everything they wanted to know from them... Penn was fighting the urge to kill him when Ark wanted the rookie Freelancers unharmed. If the situations had been reversed, Utah wouldn't want to keep Penn around, either.

"He's not a very good host."

The Counselor either chose to sidestep the vague response or come at it from a different angle. "Did they offer you anything in particular? Did you hear any gossip or leads as to their next goal?"

"They fed us and kept the rooms clean," Utah summarized. "The guards on mine would sometimes say they must have been put on punishment detail and would like another mission instead, but they always stopped talking when anyone thought about asking Penn for a transfer to the rainbow cupcake factory job. That sounded like a much better job than guarding me with that sort of code name, so Penn must be saving that one for his favourites."

"A factory raid," the Counselor parroted, turning the concept over as if unsure whether it might be useful information or merely sarcasm that had flown well above six foot eight. "That... might be useful to know. They never gave any hint as to when it could happen?"

Utah shook his head. "They kept talking like it would be the next day, or the day after that... Could have been a regular thing that they did all the time... except for the guys on guard duty. That was probably why they weren't nice to us."

The Counselor just nodded and let his eyes flicker to the data-pad. "And they never used strong physical force on you?"

"No." He would recognize that. "I don't know what happened to Colorado, but when I heard that scream, it wasn't just my guards that got scared. They knocked me out with some sort of dart before I could pull at the bars too much, but I heard a whole bunch of people moving towards the scream." It had taken more than one tranquilizer dose to put him under; his adrenaline had already been pounding into his system with that scream and the sight of the gun made him lose any restraint he might have possessed in his efforts to bend open the metal bars. The first shot barely even made him dizzy; he felt the sharp jab of the needle worse than any effects of the drug as he reached through the bars and pulled the tranq rifleman into the metal headfirst. Drugs were bad news. There was no telling what they'd do to him while he was asleep. There was no telling what he'd say.

He still didn't know what he'd said. All they appeared to have done was remove the fallen rifle and spent injectors, scrubbing the blood from the bars and leaving him on the floor, but Utah didn't know if the inner mantra of nineteen, nineteen, nineteen had been all that emerged from his mouth.

"They talked like they were a little afraid of what Ark would do if he found that they'd knocked me out, but they acted about the same later after he walked by my room. Harper never visited me. I usually saw Penn, when I saw anyone besides my guards. Like I said, it was not the worst time I've ever been captured, but I wouldn't like to be captured again by them." Everyone was still alive, after all. Even Colorado. Even Nevada.

That was better than dragging dead soldiers' chains between cannon-fodder grunts who had never been expected to survive. There were no new sores on his wrists, no stink of bodies cooking in broken armour lingering upon him, nothing dried on his own clothes. He didn't see off the rest of his surviving unit back to a therapist's office while he transferred away to a new project, a new team, a new identity, promoted for being "the finest fuck-up I've ever had the pleasure of sending out to the vanguard," according to his old C.O.

How come it had to have been 'Rado that was mean to him, because she thought he was dumb, and Nevada who thanked him for teaching her things?

"We certainly hope not. Did you have anything you wished to ask me, Agent Utah?" The Counselor wanted to wrap this up. There was too little for him to think about with the Crimson Sun, too many unsaid things for him to think about on other topics. And Utah made it hard for him to deliberate upon any subject when the young giant didn't want to think about much of anything right now, himself. He had talked with someone for counselling before, and they had decided that that subject wasn't something to be thought too much about, and Nevada and Colorado seemed too close to that. So he didn't think.

"Is it okay if I go then? I need to go figure out what I say in my sleep." Utah stood from the chair before the Counselor officially granted him leave. "Does being drugged make a difference?" he asked, under his breath, as his mind strayed into the realm of the forbidden.

"I begin to wonder that myself, Agent. You may leave for now; perhaps we can discuss these matters at another time when you have had a chance to sort out your thoughts." The Counselor remained as soft-spoken and reasonable as possible, but there were some things from which reason fled out of sheer logical fear.

"Okay, talk to you later, then?" Utah waved. The Counselor was only trying to be nice, even if he didn't know how to not-think about things.

"Yes," the older man maintained as much as he could of that vague, calmly composed half-smile. He suddenly looked at once very old and not nearly experienced enough for this sort of thing to Utah. "We'll continue our discussion much later, Agent Utah." Now he was getting the right idea. That was one of the ways to say he never wanted to talk about it without saying he'd never talk about it. Utah was good at listening for those sorts of phrases. Sometimes they had to be ignored, but right now, the feeling was mutual.