"Jaune, see if you guys can disable the missile systems."
"What? Wait, Rubes! What about you?"
"We'll stall. Just go!"
"A-alright. Got it. Pyrrha, you okay?"
"Yes, Jaune. Let's find the controls."
"You do know that none of us can tap into the mainframe."
"No need for that hacking stuff, Renny. Let's smash it to bits! Right, Syrup?"
"Team RWBY, I'll stay here with you."
"Great to have you in our corner, Velvet."
The Courier silently tracked the kids as they spread out. Already, team RWBY plus Bunny-girl occupied his flanks, obscuring his view of JNPR-plus-deathclaw. Now's the perfect opportunity. Kill 'em. Kill 'em all!
No.
Revolvers fully loaded. Carbine within reach. A bunch of teens with ridiculous hybrid weapons charging to incapacitate him. Five targets. Five bullets. Standing my ground is out of the question. I still have stitches in my ass. Dodge their attacks, exhaust them, old-school hit-and-run. Whittle them down. Watch for the nukes; them fuselages ain't exactly bulletproof. Six heard footsteps clapping against the floor. He breathed deep.
Time seemed to slow as his brain—and everything that had been sewn into it—jolted into overdrive. Incoming strike, one o'clock. He automatically deflected the first blow.
If most of his engagements were this acrobatic, then Six would have died from either a heart attack or fatigue. Or organ failure. But Courier Six was anything but a normal human being. Alas, a decade of being science's guinea pig—insane Big MT eggheads included—had reworked him into something beyond his natural physical and mental limitations.
Whether or not he wanted any of it.
That did not mean he was ungrateful for the current state of his body. Every move felt a bit mechanical. Every reflex came through nearly flawlessly. Sure, parts of him were showing the telltale signs of age. Sure, he was moving around with over a hundred pounds of gear on his person. Sure, some of his reactions were several milliseconds slower. But at least he was still alive, still energetic, and effectively wearing down the five hyperactive brats trying to knock him to the ground. And he occasionally stole glances at JNPR-S, tracking them as best he could while they bounced from console to console.
"Why. Won't. You. Stay. Still!" Blondie screamed, frustratingly blasting away her gauntlets' buckshot.
Try aiming, you bimbo. You should know better to conserve your 'irreplaceable' Dust ammunition. Six continued to run circles around them, Dust and gunpowder ripping holes up in the floor with bits of shrapnel (thankfully) bouncing harmlessly off the unshielded missile pods.
"Freezerburn!"
Mist can't hide you from me.
"Bumblebee!"
Stonewalled.
"Checkmate!"
Block, dodge, and counter.
"Ladybug!"
Parried and evaded.
"Ice Flower!"
You missed.
"Steer clear, girls!"
Not this time, Bunny-girl. Six slid across the iced floor, past a completely winded team RWBY, and, pivoting on his hip, snapped to the rabbit faunus coming down on him with a literal carbon copy of Hyper's scythe. For one, she was fast. Then again, she was also predictable. With solid replicas of the brats' different weapons, he guessed that it came with the same strategies they used. Dodge here, slide there, block, evade.
Opening, three o'clock. The Courier forwarded a tightly clenched fist as Velvet charged at him again. This time, he felt something crack against his knuckles and in that momentous second, he caught the sudden shock in her eyes when her face passed over his shoulder. Then her body flashed a bright glow.
His arm arced sideways, throwing her back, and he skated back around to watch her tumble and roll along the floor. The glow flickered and disintegrated, like a lightbulb squeezing out its final kilowatts before bursting into flakes. Her Aura was gone. She twisted in pain, her arms wrapping around her midriff.
Her ribs. Velvet cried out when her body slammed to a stop against the barrister lining the perimeter. I broke her ribs. Her pained sobbing reached his ears and triggered something that made his lip twitch. I broke her ribs...I hurt her.
"Velvet!"
"Are you okay!?"
"Her Aura's gone!"
"I'll get her to safety!"
I nearly killed her. Six found himself pacing over. There were no breaks to the adrenaline pumping through him.
"I warned you, kids," he snarled. "You should've just left."
Hyper glared at him with determined rage. "Stop, Six! Just stop! Stop Samson! That's all we ever wanted!"
"You don't understand the hell we all live in," the Courier declared. They're tired enough. Time to get the other four. Sparta could be tearing through the console right now.
Ruby charged at him via her Semblance. Six swept to the right, then suddenly pulled back left, leaving his right arm stretched firmly outward. Her chest collided with his bicep. Perfect clothesline. And her momentum dragged his body along with her. Damn physics!
The both of them flew briefly, their weapons flying out of their grasp, then landed apart from each other. The Courier was the first to get back up.
"Hyper," he called out to the fifteen-year-old girl writhing on the floor. Just like Velvet, her Aura sputtered and died. "Enough! Stand down!"
"I won't...let you...kill innocent...people," she wheezed.
Fucking moralist. "Stubborn little shit... Too young to put two and two together."
"I...am not...a child!"
Six paused. Did her eyes just flicker? He swore her pupils glimmered for a second there. It was weird enough that she had silver irises but them suddenly flashing like molten nickels? There was not that much light reflecting off her face. Was it her Aura? Probably his own creeping exhaustion.
He retrieved his revolver and checked to see half the chamber unspent. Don't make me shoot you.
Ruby crawled over to her scythe which she used push herself up. "Six... Major Vickers... Theodore..."
"Don't use my name," he hissed.
"Why...? Why are you doing this? If anything, please, tell me why." Her legs wobbled as she propped herself up with her weapon. "I want to know why... I'm asking you now for the truth. What you see, what you hear, what you know that leads to this... I want to hear it...from you. I want to know...why..."
Something warm and soft tugged at his chest. The Courier grit his teeth. He had lost too much patience to argue. "You want to understand? You want to really understand, Ruby?"
A few yards back, past a collapsed section of the ceiling, Cat-girl laid Bunny-girl down against a cannibalized control box to recuperate.
He tried not to raise his pistol at her head, his finger rubbing the trigger guard. On the other hand, her mechanical scythe had the reach to rip open his stomach from where she stood.
"Be honest with me, Six..."
"Were you part of a team? Y'know, with Raul? Did you have a team? Like us?"
"... Please."
"Ruby, I'll tell you another time. For now, get some rest."
The Courier saw Blondie and Snowball skidding to a halt right behind her. Hyper, despite the pain she was in, held up a clenched fist: a clear order to stand down.
"I want to understand..."
"Trust your teammates. Trust your friends."
Her silver pupils searched him. "Help me to..."
"They may give you hell but in the end, when you think everyone's left you..."
"... So I, we, can help you."
"...they're going to be the only people in this godforsaken world who'd run up out of the blue and take the hit for you when the shit hits the fan."
Major Theodore Vickers shut his eyes to shutter the memory. "Goddamn it, you are so stubborn."
Yang and Weiss inched closer to Ruby, their stances slacking when he lowered his revolver.
"Please," Ruby pleaded. "Please..."
Damn you, Ruby. Damn you, you naive girl. Six breathed. One. Two. Three.
"Samson isn't just a weapon," he finally intoned. "It's more than that. There're strings attached to these cards. When you have a sword that can cut through anything, a magic bullet that can kill anything, a card that ends the game... You have a weapon that's not only tactical but strategic on a global scale."
"What do you mean?" prodded Hyper.
Damn you, Vickers! Damn you for bein' soft! Damn you for caring for these kids! "There's a diplomatic principle that governed the nuclear states before the Great War. Samson was one of thousands that were built to serve that purpose."
Weiss gasped. "Th-thousands?"
"Why...overkill," Yang breathed.
"That was over two hundred years ago," the Courier continued morosely. "These birds have aged passed their heyday. They can still flatten cities but it doesn't have as much of a punch as it used to. The best Samson can do now is act as a de—"
Six felt his breath hitch in his throat. Not because of the emotions rising from the past. But because of the sudden blaring of the alarms; klaxons started flashing in and around the silo. When he finally found his voice, his head whipped to the elevated platform upon which sat the central control terminal. Team JNPR-S was frantic and fumbling around it. Up and down the complex, the silo doors hissed open.
Dear sweet Lord, no! "Ah, shit!"
"What happened!?"
"What's going on!?"
"Is Samson...?"
Knight-boy hollered over the noise. "Uh, guys! Something went wrong!"
Shaolin backed into him and they both tumbled down the steps of the platform. Steam burst through the grills and filled each launch pad so much that the missiles themselves were partially visible.
Just as Six feared, the dreaded automated voice echoed over the entire complex.
"[Systems breached]"—static—"[Interference detected]"—static—"[Emergency protocol initiated]"—static—"[Warning, warning, warning]"—static ringing.
"Dear God, no! No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!"
"[Launch sequence initiated. Tee minus sixty seconds. Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight...]"
The kids paled. Syrup emerged from a hole under the main platform and swallowed a whole bundle of ripped copper wires.
The Courier screamed in horror. "You goddamn IDIOTS!"
"Six, wait!"
"[Fifty-five...]"
"He's going for the launch controls!"
"[Fifty-two...]"
Ruby darted after him, her Semblance sputtering. She could hear Yang, Weiss, and Blake huffing to catch up with her. "Six!"
"Sis, hold up!"
"[Forty-nine...]"
Jaune and Ren tried to intercept him. Six kicked up a dislocated piece of bent metal and hurled it against them, knocking them both down. Nora ran towards him but he shoved her aside, almost pushing her off the railing. Syrup dove in for a bite only to be suddenly punted out of the way. The Courier closed the gap towards Pyrrha who stood befuddled in front of the partially dissected control pad. A mess of dislocated buttons, coils, and bolts floated around her.
"[Forty-three...]"
"Get off!" he barked.
The metal fragments coalesced into a shield. "Six, you—gah!"
"[Thirty-nine...]"
Ruby skidded to a halt a yard behind. Six forced his hands through the suspended mess of metallic bits, took hold of Pyrrha by her biceps and flung her behind him. The reaper caught the champion as she landed on top of her, bolts, screws, and the fragments of the console bouncing off them.
"[Thirty-five...]"
"Six!"
Ruby had to act fast. As far as she knew, the missiles—refueled and re-calibrated—were going to launch, armed with their payload, and once they were in the air, they would be powerless to stop it from reducing entire cities (tens of hundreds of thousands of lives, innocent or not) to radioactive ash. Again. Panicking, she loaded her last Dust bullet into Crescent Rose and took shaky aim at his back.
"[Thirty-one. Thirty...]"
She breathed deep to steady her grip even though her team nearly bumped into her. Her mind debated over whether this was the right thing to do, even as the Courier appeared oddly alarmed while he worked furiously on what was left of the console.
"[Twenty-seven...]"
"Ruby, wait!"
She felt Blake's hand yank her shoulder. "What are you—?"
"Look! He's..."
Yang huffed. "Is he...shutting it down?"
"He's disabling it," Weiss muttered. "He's disabling Samson."
"[Twenty-two. Twenty-one...]"
"Come on, come on, you outdated cockamamie pre-war tech," Six hissed. "Don't fail me now, goddamn it!"
"[Eighteen. Seventeen...]"
"Sh-should we help?" Ruby asked.
Blake shook her head. The look on her face was resigned, forlorn, and...ashamed? "No. I think we've caused enough trouble already."
Yang's arms dropped to her sides with Weiss nearly dropping Myrtenaster.
"[Eleven. Ten. Nine...]"
"Dear God Almighty, don't do this to me!" Six pleaded, flipping a line of switches then reaching over the terminal for a lever hanging off the side.
"[Six. Five...]"
Team RWBY stood paralyzed alongside their bewildered sister team, their confused pet, and the pained faunus sophomore, watching helplessly at what they had caused.
"[Three. Two...]"
Crack!
Beep.
Silence.
The Courier slouched over the panel. Panting. Sweating. Tired. The rusted lever was down. The alarms stopped blaring leaving the klaxons lit and blaring. Then the automated voice returned.
"[Launch sequence aborted]"
Ruby let out the breath she had been holding. Did he just...? Is it over? Is Samson down? The rest of her fellow Remnant teens gathered themselves around the central platform, wondering what exactly happened.
She felt euphoric, akin to the emotions that arose in the aftermath of the Breach. A crisis averted. Lives saved. It was cathartic. She drowned in her relief. Only to be pulled back out by a cold, bitter, unforgiving hiss.
"Get out."
He still had his back to them. She reluctantly reached an arm out. "Six?"
"Get. Out."
Blake could have never felt any worse than Ruby appeared to have been. Her leader fought back tears. Her attempts at negotiation were muted by two words that kept repeating until they came out as a raging snarl. Then the Courier swiveled on his heel...
...and very nearly backhanded Ruby.
His hand hung high, stiff and ready to crash against her cheek. Yang flinched and it felt like a whole minute before Weiss tugged Ruby away.
"Get out," he repeated.
"U-um, Six?" Nora tried.
Ren reached out. "Nora, don't—"
She ignored him, inching closer to the bigger man with a plastered smile. "Six? You won't, uh, blow up the world, right? R-right, d-dad?"
Six snapped at her. "I'm not your fucking dad, ginger! You are not my flesh and blood so drop the act because for all I care you're nothing to me. A waste of space, waste of time, waste of effort! Never needed you, never even fucking wanted you from the beginning!"
To say that Nora shattered like glass was mildly putting it. Her smile vanished instantly. Her lips quivered. Magnhild almost slipped out of her hands. "W-w-wh-what d-did y-y-you...?"
"I'm not your 'dad,' never was your 'dad,' and never fucking will be your 'dad!' If I fucking was, then I should've just done what any sane parent would do and shoot myself to get away from the bullshit I have to put up with from you, you goddamn failed abortion!" He closed the gap until he was bearing down an arm's length from her face. "Never call me 'dad' again because you are not. My. Fucking. Daughter!"
Blake blinked hard. That was...harsh. Ren immediately stepped between them to pull Nora back. That or he almost retaliated on her behalf. In her peripheries, green molded orange away. Said orange was sniffling... Nora was in tears. Bubbly, crazy, cheerful, always jubilant Nora was downright sobbing.
"Hey!" Jaune growled back. "That was uncalled for! She was just trying to—"
Pyrrha stopped him. "Enough. Let's just go." She appeared resigned but even more so guilty than a convicted criminal in a courtroom full of witnesses. "We should leave."
The blond protested even after he was tugged away. The boys of team JNPR-S turned on their heels, throwing very contemptuous looks at the Courier who probably had a fiercer, more furious, and more unforgiving glare behind his gas mask. Ren guided a visibly shaking Nora and a mewling Syrup while Jaune shouldered Pyrrha across the complex, stopping briefly behind a disabled control box to help Velvet up.
Blake decided that the best course of action now was to follow suit. She nodded at Yang who went to assist Jaune with the two girls hanging off his arms. They were all halfway up the staircase when they heard a roar and a loud crash. Looking back, Six had practically ripped the entire control panel off the whole missile control box and hurled it halfway across the complex, shoulders heaving as he raged.
He then sat on the steps of the central platform with his head in his hands. Shaking. Trembling. His gas mask unclasped and hanging off his neck, the haunting green visor reflecting the bright red of the klaxons. Blake heard him muttering curses to himself. Though she knew better, she could not tune out some of the rambling details that reached her ears: 'wasn't supposed to happen,' 'no one to blame but yourself,' 'she won't forgive,' 'all for naught,' 'in the basement,' 'horrible husband,' 'heartless father...'
She glanced up. Velvet nodded; the sophomore heard them all too. And by the way her gaze softened, she knew more than the rest of them. The two faunus looked back when they stopped hearing words.
Six was crying.
Blake lingered on the mezzanine until she was alone, listening closely, gazing back down at the lone figure. General Hsu claimed he was a broken man. Ruby voiced the same opinion. The proof was evident now.
Six's actions disproved her assumptions about him. For all his deeds, this one act proved that the guardian that was the Desert Ranger was still alive inside the madman that was Old Green Eyes. Borrowing Yang's vocabulary, she could say that he pulled a reverse Adam (or something along those lines).
Blake continued back up to the nerve center, passed a map that flashed errors, and dragged herself to the elevator where the rest of her friends and teammates slumped idle. Ruby brought her knees up to her chin, gazing forlornly at the wall despite Yang's attempts to cheer her up. Weiss sullenly tended to Velvet's broken ribs. Jaune wordlessly kept close to Pyrrha while Ren had his arm over Nora's slouched form, Syrup worriedly lapping at her legs. Blake found her spot in the corner far from the group. No books to read, no small talk coming to mind. Just her thoughts (conscience) that tormented her.
They rode the elevator back down but they never left. Rather, they stayed there for the next hour. She knew the unspoken reason why no one had moved yet: despite all that he had said and done, they could not bring themselves to leave the Courier behind.
If there was one thing former Major Theodore Vickers would ever regret in his whole life, it was that he did not pull the trigger when he could (should) have. It was always the case regardless of the situation. And the consequences he had to deal with had taken a massive toll.
Countless times in his life he refused to pull the trigger. And the results cascaded through a domino of disasters. Because he froze on the trigger, they failed to save Arizona. Because he hesitated on the trigger, Graham lived to attack Hoover Dam. Because he refused to pull the trigger, Oliver crushed their uprising in Baja, annihilating the last of the Desert Rangers. And now that someone else had pulled the trigger...
"Really sorry you got twisted up in this scene. It's only a job, Tee. No hard feelings."
"Keeping it professional, eh, Benny."
"Ring-a-ding, it's all professional. I really hate to do this to you, buddy. But it's been an eighteen-carat run of bad luck for you."
"Ain't that the truth."
"Truth, huh? Well, the truth is...the game was rigged from the start."
...he ended up nearly nuking the wasteland back to square one out of (grief) principle. He really was no different than the bastards he put down.
"Don't even suggest we're equals, Ulysses. You couldn't have done this without me bringing you what you needed."
"And you did even after you knew you were tricked, Theodore. To this day, you take pride in it."
"Pride at what I've done, yes. Joy at what's to come, no. What's done is done."
"Do you truly believe that?"
Here he sat, eyes dry, face damp. Broken and in complete conflict with himself. In the middle of Ulysses's Temple. We're not equals but we're both of the same ilk, Ulysses. Even in death, you still hound me. With a defeated sigh, he looked up at the open silo door in the ceiling, the only one that had remained open after he shut everything down. Moonlight beamed through the gap, painting the living ICBM before him with a haunting blue hue.
This all could'a gone down differently, you know, echoed Old Green Eyes. Nine bullets. That's all you needed. Nine bullets an' this all could'a done been avoided.
I couldn't do it, whimpered Vickers.
His shadow snorted. All that effort restoring Samson wasted because you put the kids first. Way to choose your priorities. You should'a pulled the damn trigger when you done had the chance. The moment they fell out o' the sky, you put the barrel to their heads. You could've ended it there and that little shit wouldn't have done fucked this all up.
His heart whinnied. Ruby was only trying to help. In her stupid, misinformed, adorable way.
Hyper was bein' a stubborn, gullible brat, Old Green Eyes snarled. Vigilantes die quick in the Wasteland.
But they didn't, Vickers protested.
Old Green Eyes roared. Because of you focused everything on them! You gave 'em everything! Doted on 'em like they were the reincarnations o' your own damn bloodline! And look at what they'd done to you. They bumped you down fifteen solid pegs. Those powerhouses are going to notice. Good luck bringing Samson back to life a third time 'fore another bullet splits open your noggin.
Vickers mewled. Samson was supposed to be a last resort.
Samson was a weapon of America. A weapon that's been always there, always waiting. An endgame. NCR was smart enough to know something was up. They used them brats to figure it all out for 'em, to sabotage you, to break the biggest gun aimed at them. Ironic that you ended up doing it for them.
I never intended to burn the world again.
Play with fire, you get burned. The Devil won this gamble, you fuck-up.
Am I really this fucked up?
Yeah, I am.
Six laid flat on his back, gazing at the clear evening sky. Full moon tonight. Lots of bright stars, too. Against the deep blue hues of the moonlight night, a pitch black dot rounded the open silo door. A dot with wings that was squawking overhead.
Lone vulture. Smelled death before it happened. Then again, I probably reek of carrion. Huh. How does that song go again?
"Black raven, circling over my head," the Courier croaked. "You won't get anything from me... I'm ain't yet dead, I ain't yet your prey..."
I wish I was you, birdie. Hogging the sky for yourself without a care in the world.
The bird didn't answer, obviously. It just continued flying circles above him, silhouetted against the lunar light, until he picked himself up and started walking. Back to New Vegas. Back to the kids. Back home.
Goddamn it, Theodore.
ORIGINALLY DRAFTED: May 19, 2018
LAST EDITED: July 10, 2023
INITIALLY UPLOADED: June 1, 2018
NOTE (June 1, 2018): I have two other drafts where this could have gone down differently. In the original, Six gasses the teens, carts them outside, and stands guard until they wake up. The other draft is another stand-off where the teens try to talk a clearly unhinged and understandably enraged Six from shooting them dead. I'm thinking about on putting them up here as sort of a 'Director's Cut' or something.
Not fond of exposition but I guess I let myself go for this one. Trying to go deep into the mind of the characters without dramatizing too much is much harder than I anticipated.
Anyway, hope you guys like it so far. Let me know what you think. :)
-~oOo~-
(June 1, 2018)
Review dude: Yeah, the surgeries conducted by those Big MT eggheads should sensibly end up leaving a screw loose somewhere. There is bound to be complications left behind with the way they handle their experiments and I think mental instability may be one of them.
Didn't expect the schizophrenia angle though.
Guest: Far enough. I think I've already stretched it. :)
-~oOo~-
I think I need a Beta.