Prompt from @goodluckdetective: Wash or Carolina dealing with the aftermath of their ai related brain damage years later
They’re passing a bottle of the second-worst tequila Wash has ever had the misfortune to experience, and playing some kind of weird Red and Blue question game whose rules, so far as Wash can tell, are to prove who’s the biggest armored asshole present by asking the most invasive personal questions possible.
It’s not really their fault. Bad tequila does this to people.
Simmons accepts the bottle, sips daintily like maybe it won’t be so bad if he just avoids making the tequila angry, and asks, “What’s your real name?”
It takes Wash a moment to realize that’s aimed at him because one: he wouldn’t have guessed Simmons had the balls and two: he’d thought the Freelancers were off limits for this game on account of being either too easy or too dangerous, depending on your perspective.
Then it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually know the answer.
“It’s Wash,” he says after waiting too long, mostly just to avoid making things awkward. But he hears Tucker sigh, “Shit” in a resigned tone that lets him know they recognized his freeze for the sign of fucked up Freelancer headspace that it was. The Freelancers go back to being off limits.
It’s not sulking, he doesn’t care what Tucker says. It’s just that…he doesn’t know when it started. But how can he not know when this started? Once upon a time, there was this kid named David. He was the only boy in a house full of women; he used to have his hair petted by his mother while she hummed millennia-old Earth songs under her breath; his first crush was a girl named Kim, followed immediately by a boy named Imari. He was hell on wheels with a gun in his hands, and he died on a prison transport headed to Earth when it was attacked by the Covenant.
What did his mother look like? She didn’t have green eyes. PFC Everett, who had twitched his fingers, fantasizing about David pulling the trigger on the rifled aimed at their sergeant, had not sounded anything like York. Wash would have sworn he would remember the swampy humid-mildew-sweaty socks smell of the boy’s locker room in 6th grade for the rest of his life, but when he tries to call it up now, it’s machine oil, adult sweat, blood and ionized recycled air.
One night he lies down on his back and watches the stars wheel while he tries to recall verbatim the conversation with the guidance counselor that led to him enlisting. On the screen of his memory, the counselor solicitously suggests that as well as he’s done in school, he’d be best off not being too ambitious in choosing a career. “There’s your record, and your family’s status…”
He remembers the choking rage in his throat, the swallowing-hot-coals sense of being trapped in a life that would eventually kill him. He remembers hating that man and everyone like him who were the reason a kid like him could never be successful enough to be free of them.
But he doesn’t feel it, except in distant impersonal pity. It’s like a kid named David told him the story of that time a self-righteous asshole painted a picture for him of how no one would give him a chance to do anything but die killing aliens in space.
He feels it for a different self-righteous asshole, staring down at him through a fisheye lens and telling him in a voice that doesn’t even try to mask the lie, “It’s not your fault, Alpha.”
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1oX3ZxH