Self Soothing
Prompt from @imagentmi: Imagine Wash frequently waking up confused and disoriented on Chorus, thinking he is back on the MOI. Epsilon, who monitors all the rebels’ computers, security and communication systems, calms Wash and talks him back into bed. Epsilon never tells anyone, not even Carolina.
When Wash wakes up confused and disoriented on Chorus, sometimes Church is the one who talks him down. It’s kind of a self-soothing thing.
***
Even on a military base that’s fully staffed at all times, life for an AI gets really, really boring in the middle of the night. Church likes to fill the graveyard shift with housekeeping in the civil grid, because he’s just a fucking humanitarian like that. He’s hard at work on recalibrating a filter that’s been letting contaminants into the water system when his feelers in the comm network get pinged.
He’s got flags on all the guys—if Carolina counts as a guy—because one or another of them tries their hardest to die at least once a week. This one isn’t anything like that, though. It’s just Wash’s voice, saying, “Epsilon?” Which in its own quiet, private way, is almost as bad.
Fuck it, the army won’t come down with lead poisoning in a single day.
Having nightmares isn’t special around here. PTSD is the primary cultural export of Chorus these days. But most of their nightmares aren’t about, like, Church’s ex-girlfriend and having their brains torn apart by an implantation of yours truly gone horribly awry. It’s sort of personal.
“I’m here,” he says through the comm speaker before the ring of Wash’s voice has faded from the walls of his room. “It’s okay, man, I’m here.” Wash is on his knees next to his bed, and not in a graceful way. It looks like he fell. The covers are half pulled off and still kind of tangled around him. “How’d you get down there?”
Wash, who is a shaking nonverbal wreck, folds over to push his face against his knees and makes this small hurt noise.
The noise is a Freelancer thing. Church can remember all of them making it when they were hurt, probably because the Director took points off for showing distress like a fucking normal person. They’d make this little hurt noise for, like, broken bones and the death of their beloved puppy and shit that’d have anybody else a howling drippy mess on the floor.
It was kind of goddamned horrible. That hasn’t changed any.
Without really thinking about it, Church projects himself and reaches out to stroke Wash’s hair. His hand’s just a hologram, but Wash leans into it like he can feel it. Maybe he sort of can. Who the fuck knows? It’s not like they ever talk about…you know.
“Epsilon,” he whispers, with a rawness that makes Church glitch. Like Church of all godforsaken assholes can somehow ground him.
Here’s a secret neither Church nor Wash has ever told anybody: they can’t stand each other. They can keep it professional in public, but when it’s just the two of them, when it’s personal? Church would rather de-rez himself than have to spend time alone with Wash, and the feeling is mutual.
The thing is, even when Wash can’t remember his own fucking name or where he is, he still knows Epsilon. He always knows Epsilon. And somewhere, so deep in his head that all the shit he’s been through hasn’t managed to rip it out, he actually trusts Epsilon.
Just thinking about it makes Church want to shove Wash over and run for it. Instead he hunches down till he’s speaking right into Wash’s ear. “Listen to me, dude. You’re okay. I know you feel like shit right now and nothing makes sense, but I promise you, this’ll pass.”
Wash turns toward him, moves like he wants to lean into him and shit, Church’d let him if he could. Thankfully the universe has decreed against cuddling. He just hovers close till Wash pulls himself together. Maybe he pets his hair a bit more. Nobody can prove anything.
After a little while, Wash manages to uncurl from his fetal position and push himself up. “We’re…not on the Mother, are we?”
Church sighs. “No. Not for a long time. Look, just do me a favor and don’t think about it too hard? It’ll come back to you if you just give it time.” Fight not your memories lest they own your pathetic ass; it’s hard-earned wisdom he’s tried dropping on Wash before, but the stubborn bitch has yet to internalize it. “What did you dream about?”
Wash props his shoulders against the edge of his bed and lets his head fall back. “They kept dying.” He doesn’t seem to notice when he reaches to wrap a hand around Church’s intangible wrist. Then again, he might have forgotten Church isn’t actually real to him these days. “I couldn’t save them. I was supposed to figure out how to—”
“Shh.” The motherfucking simulations. Yeah, no, they’re not talking about that. “They weren’t real. You know that. They were just dreams.”
Wash rolls his head back and forth against the mattress. “Not those. This was…”
Church waits for a moment before he catches on to where that was going. “Don’t.”
They both devote a lot of their lives to frantically trying to keep the stupid bastards they love alive in defiance of the odds and their own idiocy. It’s not really so different from the dickbag’s simulations, if you think about it. At least if you think about it at 0347 in a darkened room on too little sleep. Which Church wasn’t, till now.
“Listen to me.” He leans down over Wash until they’re nose to nose. Close enough to be weird. Close enough to really drill this into that thick Freelancer skull. “They’re all fine. You and me, we’re not gonna let anything happen. They’re all fine and they’re going to stay that way, if it takes me pulling off some kind of superhuman bullshit stunt to make sure of it. And so will you, you heroic asshole. So you dream whatever fucked up shit you need to, buddy, but it’s not real. You got that?”
Should it work, talking like that to a guy who’s caught halfway in flashbacks and dissociative fuckery? Probably not. But Church is magic. It’s not that Wash isn’t annoyed by it, but, well, maybe he’s too annoyed to be anything else. Or hell, maybe he’s actually just paying attention for fucking once, because after a moment he nods. Church is a fucking Wash-whisperer.
“Good.” Church sits back. “You are just a bag of brain cactus, aren’t you? If I asked you if you had some warm milk before bed, it’d probably trigger something.”
Wash rubs his hands over his face. “York used to drink that stuff. It was disgusting.”
“Goddamn you.”
Wash huffs something that might be a laugh, might be another shudder. But his eyes are slanted toward Church, and looking a little less wild and glassy than they were, so. Win.
Being this close to him, seeing him like this, talking to him like this… Sometimes it’s like the ghost of Alpha wraps around them both and it starts feeling like Wash is just a displaced piece of himself. Sometimes it still feels like they’re one being that’s been split in two but Epsilon can’t even fucking touch him without jumping into his mind and body, and honestly, no. But here they are, looking at each other. It’s enough to make a dude wonder what might have been if it’d all gone down differently.
…Eh.
“You gonna get back into bed any fucking time soon?” he asks. “What,
am I your babysitter now?” He starts singing a lullaby while Wash
grumbles his way back up and under the covers.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1TjRDYz