legionworld

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agent north dakota

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Who| Agent North
What| Canon update
Where| Legion world
When| Just after the Game of Throne event
Warnings/Notes| Canon update to the end of the line for North, so warnings for death, violence, general bad vibes. Oh yeah, and Theta's gone.

It's the kind of thing that you couldn't ever possibly hope to describe, North will realize, sometime in the days after he wakes up in the medbay with his femur knitting back into a single uninterrupted piece and his vision still blurry at the edges. He gathers that he managed to message someone when he was dropped back onto his living room floor a mess of meat and blood inside of damaged armor, before he blacked out entirely. He's slower to really let it sink in that it's unquestionable that he was the one who made the hail, and no one else.

There's no describing the sensation of empty places carved out in the back of your head, a place that was never all-the-way you and a place that was only ever you until it was someone else entirely. There's no describing the sensation of steel-muffled nothingness that takes over once a place in your brain is hollowed out, once it's nothing but an unloaded chamber and the click-click-click of a hammer striking thin air.

He's out as soon as they let him, before the quiet and inaction can drive him crazy, and even if it's a few more days before he's cleared for harder training he's back on the range, dropping round after round through drill after drill. Like he can pull himself back into form hard enough to be the person he was a week ago.

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"I think you got reason for needing catharsis." Training until everything is honed to a painfully sharp point and the mistake that got you killed will never, ever be a problem again? He's been there. He spent his first few months there and it's not. It's not a fun place to be.

Delta flared into life with a dim echo of his usual brilliance; quiet and concerned. "Apologies are unnecessary considering the...extenuating circumstances."

Tentative as hell Taylor reaches out to rest a hand against Gabe's shoulder, bottom lip clamped between his teeth.

It's been a long time since anyone did that. Things went cool with South awhile before they went dark, not much more than a light shove, a hip-check, and elbow nudge - not that she was ever tender to begin with, but it had been going the other way all the same. And he'd told himself it was stress, preoccupation, whatever it is gnawing in his own chest that almost has him shrugging off that gesture until he realizes what a close mirror it would be and his stomach goes sour.

So he pats it instead. Brief, acknowledging, just enough to let him know he can take it back whenever he wants, thanks.

"Eyes forward, right?" No other choice. It's not as if they have anything to go back to.

It's stiff. Awkward in a way they haven't been for years- but does that count when a chunk of that time was spent running around deliberately avoiding each other so they could confuse the UNSC? This is a rougher shape of the man he knows, all lean angles and edges sharp enough to cut that doesn't fit with where Taylor is now.

Where he was when he woke up dead and with Delta? Yeah. But this...

"...you should talk to Doctor Ry'krr, maybe. She's better at walking people through this." Dealing with their own death, their fluid grasp of who they are in the face of it.

"What's the point? I know what got me here."

It wasn't bad luck. Wasn't Taylor's situation, a jammed gun and decision that shook out wrong. It was a long string of choices that drove everything sour, and being too late to try to roll any of it back once the damage was done, and most of those choices being so bone-deep and natural he can't say he wouldn't screw it up the exact same way even if he went back and tried to do it differently. Being on the run gives you time to think about that, and being locked in medical while the labcoats fix what shouldn't be fixable is just enough time to put the final polish and perspective on the truth that there isn't any fishing that disaster back out of the fire like you always told yourself you'd manage to someday.

"...what happened? Wash wouldn't ever say." He can take a guess, he can take many stabs at possible scenarios that end with Theta gone, taken, and Gabe bleeding out in the middle of nowhere. Whatever had happened at least York chose his time and place of death after a fashion.

Going in and knowing it might happen is better than it just...happening.

He drops his hand and Delta flickers out, quietly running scans on every network he's aware of just in case.

"Nothing special. The Meta found us."

With the hand off of his shoulder he can square up in his lane again, and after the first three shots, he can talk again too, muscle-memory and the sonic crack-boom diffusing some weight from his chest.

"It happened fast."

Another round, off-mark two centimeters, then a slow breath and the next into the black.

"The last I saw South she had her barrel pointed at the ground. Just . . . watching."

Next target, another one, two off-mark, before he finds a clear space in his head and it's one, two, three in a neat cluster.

It took a moment for the details to sink in. For the pieces to slide and click in place to paint a horrible picture. Why? How- It doesn't fit, didn't fit, but the last time he'd seen South, actually seen her awake and moving, she'd been angry. Bitter. Tangled up in whatever lie the Director spun, frustrated with a lack of her own AI. Played by the Project in the worst kind of way just like the rest of them.

Was this what they'd wanted the whole time?

He opens his mouth to say she wouldn't, but she did. Wants to offer something more than this stilted silence between gunshots, ears ringing, full body flinching in a way that'd been trained out of him a long time ago. "...shit."

He finishes out his target and clears the lane, giving a one-shouldered shrug. "That's how it goes. I screwed up in Freelancer and nothing on the run was going to make it better."

Simple, tidy, closed-book. You fuck up, you pay for it, and since there's nothing else to do after that you do whatever you're still good for. And even broken down to component parts, he knows how to be boots on the ground and rounds in the target.

"You didn't- we were all taken for a ride in the Project, Gabe. You know that. You- that's why you went AWOL." Should've gone with him, should've tried to check in more, should've gotten them all further away from ground zero-

Delta flares in the back of his mind for a moment, attempting to help him settle. Divert some of that manic thought into something useful. "We're here now, right? We make the best of things here."

It's all they can do, really.

"There's being taken for a ride, and then there's putting the top down and really enjoying it."

None of the target selections make sense. They never had to, he was never the one keeping track of his performance to the tenth decimal, never the one with the precise documentation instantly at-hand for which drill honed which specific skillsets in which percentage and he swipes through them aimlessly, eyes narrowing at the acceptable target of concentration and not caring how much spillover frustration lands on his own head. It's becoming the normal background noise, something that at least kind of fits that empty space.

"Do you know how I got her to come with me when the ship was going to go down? I fired on her, York." His voice is paced carefully but still tense beneath it to have to even skim over a truth he's been sitting on as long as he's been in the Legion. Sure she was armed too. But he was the one with the shield and the AI, just like he was the one so puffed-up proud and drunk on being right that he didn't think twice about just dragging her along in his wake.

"Is it enjoying the ride if you don't know you're on one? None of us knew." That'd been the point, the whole fucking point, keeping them in the dark, poking around in their brains and playing. Seeing what happened. Scientific AI and Social experimentation with untested tech and-

Old resentments rise up like bile and are swallowed down just as quickly; he's got no time for that.

The bit about the firefight- he'd heard. Vague nonsense mentions, Tex said something at one time on the way out but he'd been deep in the engine room by the, elbow deep in systems, trying to make a mess. A distraction. Trying to secure their exit in every underhanded way he could possibly think of and in the end not a lick of it mattered. None of it had.

Not a goddamn thing.

"Gabe-" What do you say to that? What does he say to this? "Come back to your habitat, okay? Rest up. It's safe here."

Taylor stops trying to defend him. He stops trying to make this something good. And there's enough relief in that for North to slow his sightless scrolling until he stops, and releases a breath, and shuts the lane down.

He'd been planning on staying here until he started falling asleep or until they cut off his ammunition supply. And a dug-in part of him is growling that this is where he needs to stay, training or eating or sleeping until he can break himself down and come back together as something better.

But he knows Taylor, too. And this is the kind of thing where he digs in his heels.

"Your place?" He doesn't want to go back to his habitat. There might still be blood on the floor, and even if there isn't, there's a pile of small clothes and a few miniscule skateboards and a well-used loaner chassis that he's not thinking about with everything in him.

"Yeah. I've got beer and food and a comfortable sofa." No hammock, no birdsong and waterfall but it's got bits of him, of North, of Sombra and Connie and Locus and Parker's bear still tucked up against the mantle. Bits of everyone that's reached in and helped haul him out of the whole. Bits of the life he's built here because he's not going to get anything else and now-

Now Gabriel knows that feeling for himself.

It's not one he'd ever wanted to share. Quiet and careful he sidles up like he used to, bumping against Gabe's shoulder gently. Years. It's been years for Gabe and he's- he's in the place York had been when North swung in with a smirk and a shield, saving his ass. "I think I've got some bitterballen in the freezer."

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