Good Friday, everyone! Huge thanks to BrambleStar14 for providing us with another interlude chapter, I think you're going to like this one. As always, thank you for joining me on this grand misadventure. Enjoy!

Vortex

Written by BrambleStar14

"Darling, nobody said that it would last forever

That doesn't mean we didn't try to get there"

- Lewis Capaldi, Forever

He was a long way from the eye of the storm.

Above him, the midday sun was gone, the familiar warmth and the fire that hung in the sky, supposedly endless, eternal, always present, was gone, swallowed up by the darkness and the violent, raging clouds. There was no heat, no flames, no sunlight, nothing of the soothing, burning warmth that should have been there. Instead, it was cold and wet and miserable and completely claustrophobic in the worst way.

Despite being in the middle of the Byzantium wilderness, Ian Harper couldn't have felt more closed in, more trapped, more helpless. He wasn't supposed to feel like this, wasn't supposed to feel like there was nothing he could do, that he was utterly powerless. He was supposed to have left that in an escape pod, staring out at a second sun as it burst into being against a sea of stars.

It was almost poetic, really, that he felt just as completely and utterly desperate watching that second sun ignite as he did now at the cold absence of any suns at all.

The others had all long-since scattered, wearing the standard earpieces that they wore whenever they were in the field and not wearing their helmets. There had been no time to grab their armour, no time to try and gear up when every single second that passed put another infinite distance between them and Hunter. Between him and Jason.

At the very least, being out here put distance between him and Blizzard. Every rough stumble through the undergrowth, every uneven step over soaking, slick terrain put another few metres between Ian and Hannah Steele, kept her out of the range of his blade, out of sight and where he couldn't do anything he'd regret when the instinctive bloodlust of Blizzard made Jason hurt and needs to feel that too finally died down.

He'd very nearly attacked, back in the gym. When all that had been imprinted on green eyes was the agonised expression on Jason Shaw's face. That hadn't been the face he'd made under blade or injection or cruel, vicious words that neither of them had meant even in the moment and only said because they had no idea how to back down, to apologise, to plead for forgiveness. Because neither of them knew what to do with this, with them. Because they hadn't been prepared for each other and might never truly be ready for what it meant.

It was the look of something breaking, of hope being snuffed out and the betrayal of something inherently sacred, something that had honestly, truly mattered to the second-latest Phoenix.

Harper had realised what Blizzard was doing immediately. He'd watched Shaw enough times, as much for pleasure as to assess his field performance, to notice the way that the man seemed fixated on wild rhythms, on beats and melodies and leitmotifs that could be translated into the fluid, dance-like nature of his fighting style. It was something beautiful, just different enough from Ian's own style to be uniquely Hunter in the way that the man could manage so very easily.

But that wild rage, the lack of abandon and the desire to hurt, to punish Blizzard, to punish the entire goddamned galaxy and make it bleed for his injustices? That was all Ian Harper.

When Blizzard had begun to lead Jason across the gym to her own rhythm, asserting a pattern that his partner had fallen into so very easily, a dance known only to the two of them, Ian hadn't missed it. There was no way he could have missed it.

He'd recognised the music itself, too, not from his personal tastes, but for a multitude of reasons. Ian recognised it because it was the one song in the playlist that Jason had for the two of them that he'd never actually played whenever he'd given the headphones to Ian. They'd used every other song on there to communicate without words, when they couldn't actually say words to one another but could offer the datapad and the headphones with a single piece of music selected to say what they couldn't.

I'm sorry.

I'm an idiot.

Forgive me.

I lo-

A bolt of lightning tore the sky open up above, splitting through the thoughts that had, just for a moment, crystallised inside Ian's mind and once again, that familiar panic shattered his thoughts, sending his mind tumbling into the well-known nightmare of disorganised, rambling, chaotic violence. Only this time, the familiar panic was accompanied by the lance-like pain through an empty ribcage where that flame should have been, where the fire that he'd so carefully helped stoke no longer burned. It was gone, absent, its comfortable warmth gone. It was the only thing that he could feel any more, and it was gone.

Ian knew the song. That was what had mattered in that moment. He'd never known what it meant to Jason or when exactly the man had planned on sharing it with him. Patience was a foreign concept for him, but when it came to Jason Shaw, he'd wait as long as he had to.

Except tonight. Tonight he just wanted to see him again. Just once. To know that he wasn't… that the pouring rain didn't become gasoline, that the flame inside his chest wasn't used to burn away the sins of Maverick and Blizzard in some isolated ditch where nobody would ever come looking, a quiet and charred grave that they'd begun digging when they excavated Hannah Steele from that warthog.

Now, he knew why Jason felt so attached to the song, why he couldn't ever let it go, no matter what else he attached it to. There was the ghost of somebody else in Jason Shaw's soul the entire time that he'd been here, something he couldn't quite bring himself to forget or let go of.

He'd let it happen, let them have their dance. He could have stepped in so easily, if he'd wanted to, could have thrown accusations and alerted his Jay to what Blizzard was doing, but that wouldn't have been fair to either of them. Every time he'd opened his mouth to speak up, breaking away from his fight with Mike to watch the others with open mouths and alarmed expressions at the sheer ferocity of the fight and ignoring the way that they kept throwing glances his way at Hunter and Blizzard's synchronicity, he'd fallen silent instead.

That song was sacred to Jason. He let them have that, at least.

Just in case.

And the man had felt betrayed, manipulated, used. Harper hadn't been expecting the sheer backlash that had boiled up inside of him. Truthfully, he'd been expecting a violent outburst, another one of their fights, and then they'd be back to where they always were. An icy silence between the latest two Phoenixes and frostbite scars on Jason that he'd try to heal over when they were alone with lips and words that he couldn't ever quite figure out, that came clumsily to a normally silver tongue.

It was how things were supposed to go. It was how they usually went between him and Jason and it was how things had been going between Hunter and Blizzard. He might have hated the parallel, but it was better than the alternative. Nothing permanent. Everything left unspoken.

Now, everything was shattered, broken, possibly beyond repair. They'd been so close to finding some kind of normal, some kind of fragile peace. Instead, what had been beneath the surface had been unearthed, a festering wound hidden beneath bandages that the three of them had all applied together finally infecting the rest of the organism that made up Phoenix and leaving them scrambling to recover. Before they had to amputate.

Searching through the mud and the wild undergrowth was better than the alternative. Better than tracking down Blizzard and doing to her what she'd done to Jason, to feed her vicious words and cruel emotions until she was driven back to that rooftop, to leave her broken and bleeding in a trophy that even in his bitter hate, he knew Jason would kill him for offering.

He wouldn't drive the rest of them away, wouldn't give any more Phoenixes a reason to hate him, even her, because he knew that they would, if he did even a fraction of what he wanted to do to Blizzard. He'd corrupted them, driven them down a path that they couldn't go back from, whispered into their ears like a poisonous serpent and offered them brutal, bloody revenge at the cost of their souls.

Ian Harper knew that he should have gone after Sharpe and Crane alone. Some twisted sense of justice, of his team, of his family had made him invite them along. But he shouldn't have made them take the same plunge as him. They should have had more choice than obligation and twisted grief. But they'd followed him and now he wouldn't drive them away. He couldn't drive them away.

It'd kill him worse than anything else might have. Almost anything else.

"Where are you, you bloody idiot?" It was a hiss that was drowned out by the sheer downpour of rain, that long hated sound booming out overhead and earning a flinch as he ducked back from the fluorescent flash, that bright, cruel white-blue streak burning its way across the sky and piercing his eyes, along with over twenty years worth of memory, as it always did.

For just a moment, Harper paused, taking a long, deep, steadying breath. His fists curled and then uncurled. He held no weapons, had no defences against the storm, or Jason's wrath, should he find the man intending to attack. Anything to get him back. Even if it was only briefly. Even if it killed him.

Maybe hoping it would, if it would help fix this somehow.

Opening his eyes again, he took in his surroundings. He'd chosen to take Phoenix's old campsite, in the hopes that Jason might have retraced his steps, come to familiar ground, found the river that was a potential gravesite, thought abandoned but instead perhaps only set aside for later. The trees around him were barely visible through the thick, pouring deluge, the eye of the storm a long, long way away. The air itself was grey, his hair plastered to his head and water dripping down his eyes and cheeks in small rivers, visibility reduced to nearly nothing in the darkness of the shattered day.

The emptiness around him felt like nothing compared to the sheer abyss at his side where a silhouette could almost be tangibly felt, that icy cold absence burning far more painfully than the usual inferno that resided there.

He hadn't panicked when they'd been searching the base. Of course Shaw would have been there somewhere, waiting. A little battered and bloodied on the inside, but he'd recover, as he always did. So when he hadn't been in the Phoenix quarters, in the room that he shared with Ian or the so-very-rarely-used room for the nights when the two of them, as they so often did, clashed badly, Ian still hadn't panicked. He might be in the mess hall, threatening some grunts with the violence that he'd been forced to abandon delivering to Blizzard.

And when that too was a bust, Ian had felt flickers of unease, checking the cells, even Mark Shaw's. The wrong blue eyes had met green and for a moment, Ian rather felt like Jason's older brother might have seen too much, sitting up a little straighter, his brow furrowing. He'd had no time for his prisoner, in the end.

Leaving Mark behind had been hard simply because the familiar shade of blue was hypnotising in a way that very little was. Harper could find himself distracted by the simplest of things, but nothing quite caught his soul like Jason's gaze, the smirk, even those very few, very rare softer grins.

When he'd almost burst onto the roof with growing anxiety and a pressing feeling against his chest, emerging into the pouring rain and managing to ignore the familiar shaking in his fingers, the way his breathing was left ragged, uneasy, just as broken as Jason had looked, he found nothing.

Then, and only then, he'd panicked, sprinting through the corridors to find the rest of them and quite literally colliding with Mike. He'd barely gotten the words out, blended together and twisted, dripping terror in the same way that rainwater poured from his body, gasping out "he'sgoneMikehe'soutthereit'sseriousit'srealhelppleasehelpme" when the sniper's hands had found his shoulders, his voice cutting across Ian's desperate rambling, his eyes making sure to keep panicked green from slipping any further into the deep end.

"We're going to find him, Ian. Come on."

They'd all come with him, of course. They all had their own fears with his unnatural absence from the base, their own anxieties after seeing the look on his face when he'd stalked away from Blizzard. None of them wanted to admit it, especially not in front of Ian, but he saw the array of nervous expressions sent his way, a sense of uneasiness in the group, a sense of tension and a silence that was far too loaded. None of them wanted to pull that particular trigger, to talk about the fact that having two absences in the team felt so very wrong.

Ian didn't want to admit that he felt it too, that having both Hunter and Blizzard very obviously not there didn't feel right, but at the same time, having Blizzard there wouldn't have felt right either, after she'd tried to ensnare Jason with Errera and Starlight and memories.

He knew that he wasn't the only furious one. He knew that there was an undercurrent of bitter disappointment running through the rest of them, that Aaron's unnaturally sombre mood was fuelled by shock, that Lucas's downcast eyes was the guilt of giving a friend the silent treatment and wondering if he might have pushed Blizzard closer to a precipice in her regret. He knew that Geist disapproved heavily of what she'd done, that Mike would have advised against it with everything he had, telling her not to do that in such a public setting and that Phil could already see the way that the situation was doomed to fall apart if events had transpired exactly as they had.

They'd all come with him, all of them searching for their missing wingmate, for that other broken bird that the rest of the galaxy had left for dead.

Hannah Steele had stayed behind. Perhaps she didn't even know that Jason had abandoned the base, abandoned Phoenix, abandoned Harper. And abandoned her. She'd tried so very hard to sever that link between them that Harper had viewed with something close to wistfulness; it seemed only fitting that she was unable to tell that Jason had run from them all.

Harper didn't want to think about the fact that if it had just been the two of them, Jason and Hannah, then the song might have worked. Without an audience, without airing that deeply personal bond and flaunting it to the rest of the galaxy, she might have had a chance and that single opportunity hurt.

If Hannah had played the song... but it had been Blizzard. Just enough to tip the scales. But with the damage done to Jason... maybe it should have been Hannah.

Blizzard had been warned off of Hunter so many times. She'd received his scorn, she'd been witness to Ian's attempts to keep Shaw from falling apart, to his tentative and hopeful effort to follow Phil's riverside advice and just… be something that Jason could anchor himself to, so that he wouldn't just fall apart. He'd thought that he'd been able to give Shaw what he needed.

Perhaps the ease with which Blizzard had shattered Jay told Ian all he needed to know about what exactly his place as Shaw's anchor was worth.

Now, abandoned in the storm, left behind and alone and soaked, cold and wanting only the familiar warmth and that feeling of understanding, of not being so very solitary, so very isolated, Ian couldn't resist that small sound that caught in his throat, a ragged, broken call, half-canine in nature, a desperate and hopeful croon.

It wasn't like he wasn't going to get an answer and nobody else would ever hear just how soul-deep it was, truly.

If Jason came back, frostbitten beyond anything Ian had ever done to him, scars extending to his face where emotions would bleed through unabated, eyes swimming with too much to ever say, Ian would have to piece him back together, if Jay would let him. He wasn't used to being the person that reconstructed a person, that put the pieces back together. Once somebody shattered at their very core, they were never the same. The fragments of their soul could fit back together, but the cracks themselves… tiny pieces were forever lost, small parts that made up the whole that would never be recovered, could never be found.

Seeing somebody shatter Shaw so completely from the outside, watching in, left him apocalyptically vicious in a way that he hadn't expected. It was like watching a fucked-up horror show, an out of body experience that left him acutely uncomfortable watching.

He'd had to question exactly what was happening to him; he'd thought Byzantium had changed Shaw, changed Steele. He hadn't ever considered that he might have been so viscerally altered himself. Had he left a chrysalis that he'd never even noticed forming around him? Was he still the same Ian Harper as before? He felt the same.

And then he thought about the frostbitten emptiness at his side, a frozen absence in the shape of what should have been a person, a part of himself. And when his fingers curled into fists and his breath caught in his throat, escaping into the storm as a frozen mist... He was spiralling. Out of control. Beyond help. Terrified. But it was far too late to ever go back, now.

He was beyond the event horizon. Caught in the gravity well and crushed relentlessly beneath its insurmountable, inevitable force.

Once a Phoenix spread new wings, the ashes of its old self burned away. This was who he was now. Trapped in a new form of his own making. His wings tangled with Jason's. And with Blizzard's.

A burst of violent, forking lightning flared up overhead and he flinched back to reality, quite literally shaken back into the moment, biting back the instinctive cry of alarm that threatened to rise in his throat. It so effortlessly carved through the sky, through his mind, illuminating him where he stood, casting such a bright light on him that even his flames were rendered invisible, illusory, powerless. He loathed storms, truly and utterly despised them as he did very few things. They brought back memories of weakness, hours of isolation and terror, a wall of sound and a night of flashing lights and bitter cold. They reminded him of when he'd been most scared, most filled with true, unadulterated, scarring terror. And now he was putting himself through playback after playback of that memory to find Shaw, but losing his Jay…

That wasn't terror. That was quite literally what he'd staked his non-existent soul on. Without Jason Shaw, without the wager of unspoken words and something… he had nothing left. He might as well give himself back over to the monster that his father had, that Ian himself had, for a very long time.

Water was rushing against his ankles, the familiar river pouring past his body, having risen several inches up the banks nearby with the sheer downpour from above. A rather broken, empty laugh left him as he fell to his knees, remembering the way that his perfect dark twin had done the same those few weeks ago, the way that blue eyes had seemed so hesitant, so very scared to stare down at his reflection.

He felt no such fear as he turned his eyes down on himself, only some bitter numbness as he took in the emptiness in his eyes. There was no single flame burning away inside them, just a gnawing absence eating away at him, a hunger that he couldn't satiate.

Ian Harper looked incomplete.

There was another bright flash above and suddenly, the monster beneath him in the water, warped by the rushing power of the water, was gone. In his place, a boy stared back up at Ian, so very small and so very young, innocent in a way that Harper could never manage again. Green met green, lips twisted into the same sad nostalgia that Ian wore for just a very brief moment.

The boy was everything he wasn't. He was younger, innocent, at peace, satisfied, content. He was alive.

What did that make him, now?

"Ian?" It was a soft, careful voice from behind him, somebody trying not to startle a predator at peace with itself for just a few seconds. Harper blinked, just the once, longer and slower than usual and when his eyes opened, the afterimage of the lightning had stopped burning in the water to illuminate it silver. The boy was gone.

Slowly, resignedly, he clambered back to his feet, half-turning in the water to warp his silhouette, gazing back at Phil as his second watched him cautiously, approaching him like he'd approached the other man what felt like so very long ago when he'd detached himself from the treeline, cloaked in shadows. He already knew what the man would say and decided to head him off, his smile so very bitter, so very cold, so very empty.

"He's not here. Thought maybe he'd come back. That he might want to be found." He knew what the report would be. Jason hadn't been found. He didn't want to be found. Ian wasn't surprised. Part of him had always known that he wouldn't find Jay out here. Perhaps even if Shaw returned to the base, Ian still wouldn't ever see his Jay again.

Perhaps Shaw would blame him just as much as he blamed Hannah. For driving him to this point, for continuing that twisted rivalry, for allowing his bitter hate for what Jason Shaw and Hannah Steele still had to fester and twist the atmosphere of Phoenix into something untenable.

Ian wouldn't blame him. He already blamed himself as much as he blamed Blizzard. But he had enough self-loathing to last him a lifetime and he'd always been so very good at turning that rage outwards when keeping it internalised had always been impossible for a creature like him.

Marching back towards Phil, wading through water that slowly fell lower and lower down his jeans, shrugging to himself, he held up empty hands, still wearing that twisted mockery of his usual grin. "Don't worry. No weapons. No knives. Just seeing if I could see what he saw in the river. Thought he might have been waiting here." Waiting for Ian. Again. "He wasn't. Have the others-?"

"No." He'd known before Falcon had spoken, before he'd even arrived, if he was truly honest with himself. It didn't stop his bitterness from threatening to drown him all over again. "We can't stay out here, Ian. The storm will continue for hours and there's not a chance we'll find him. It's getting darker and darker. If we go back, he'll come back eventually." Falcon sounded like he believed it, but Ian couldn't leave things to chance.

Not after what had happened when he'd let Blizzard play that song and watched to see what Jason would do.

"I want to stay. I want to keep looking." Drawing up alongside Falcon, he already knew that it sounded weak, feeble, could see the grimace behind Phil's eyes as the man shook his head.

"You already know it's pointless. You're barely holding it together even without the storm. Come on, Ian. Let's get back to base and see if he's shown up." It was logical, careful, the words so very precisely chosen and a flare of rage suddenly burned inside of him.

"Yeah. Let's get back then." It felt good to burn for a moment, to feel like a little part of Jay was with him. "Then I can actually get the chance to kill her-!"

In a heartbeat, his back was to a tree, the air driven from his lungs, an arm to his throat. Brown eyes glared at his from an inch away, Falcon's face contorted in absolute rage as Ian tried to blink the stars in his vision away.

"Absolutely fucking not, Ian." It was cold, but vicious and for a moment, Ian could see just a hint of the man that he'd sent to infiltrate the UNSC, to form attachments that they both knew Philip Blake would have to burn in the end, that had cost him more than either of them had ever expected. He realised quite suddenly that Falcon's careful words hadn't come close to show just how livid the man was. With Ian, with Hannah, with Jason, with all of it.

And above all else, Falcon looked exhausted.

"It's gone on long enough. It needs to stop. You and Jason and Hannah. When he comes back, and he will come back, this needs to be fixed. We need you. All of you. I'm not going to have you drive her away because you and Jason can't have a serious conversation where you talk about how you feel."

Indignant fury rose up in him against his better judgement. "I don't-"

"Enough, Ian." He shut up immediately at the forceful fury that only Falcon could send his way to stop him in his tracks. "We don't say anything as long as it doesn't hurt the team. Now, it's hurting the team. I know you don't 'do feelings'," he quoted it with resignation, "but whatever you and Jason are to one another… sort it out. Because this is eating you up inside. It's been eating you up inside for weeks. Having Jason here with us, with you? It's been good for you. You've been closer to the Ian I knew. The Ian that I followed no matter the personal cost."

Harper's breath failed him despite the loosening arm across his throat when Phil continued. "It's been good to have you back, Ian. I don't want to lose you and Phoenix because of this. Don't do that to me. Please." For just a moment, Phil looked so very utterly exhausted, his arm slipping away from Ian's neck and his head leaning forwards to press to Ian's chest, a muffled, achingly tired and hopeless "please" mumbled into Ian's body.

Before Ian could raise his arms to even try and comfort the other man, he'd pulled free, any sense of fury and exhaustion wiped from his features as he looked Ian up and down, at the stricken expression on the blonde's face, at the rainwater pouring from his hair, down his face, through his eyes and tracking down his cheeks in twin trails, at the way that he looked so pale and deathly without the warmth at his side like a burning shadow, at the way his mouth was open so very slightly, trying to form words, unable to find what he wanted to say.

"Let's get the others and get back, yeah? I don't want to lose anybody else in this storm." Without another word, Falcon turned and walked away, leaving the stunned form of Ian Harper staring after him.

The blonde didn't know what to say to make things right with them, with any of them. He didn't know how to even begin, didn't know what he'd say if Shaw was there when they got back, or if he saw Blizzard again.

He didn't know how to be human anymore. He tried, so very hard, just for them, just for Jason, but it felt like a slippery slope. His own anchor was gone and even with that cornerstone of his existence, he could barely manage a few shaky steps without relapsing.

But Phoenix… Phoenix was something he couldn't risk. Not now. Not ever. Somehow, he'd fix this.

Turning his head back down to the very edge of the water, he stared down at the warped reflection, imagining green eyes as blue, messy blonde hair as spiky dark hair, his twisted, grieving, lost expression as a grin that was pleased to see him

"Don't leave me lost here forever, Jay," Ian Harper breathed into the storm.