[ You and Rodriguez, Ephemera almost says, have the worst taste. It was true once. How many times did Ephemera or one of the others have to intervene in the middle of a bar fight make sure that nobody actually ended up dead. Rodriguez was the one who got them kicked out of parties but Gates - Felix - always kept it interesting. Sometimes it was fun. Like a game.
Less so now. It's just a habit. And Rodriguez is long dead. So he doesn't say it. He just exhales through his teeth and eyes the alley with practiced suspicion.
He wants his armor back. The sooner they get back to it, the better. ]
( ephemera, really. he has opinions on everything.
but he clocks his tension. almost painful how easy of a read ephemera is out of armor, same shit he used to be called out for repeatedly, same shit that he could never scrub. felix gets it, he does, except they can't be rigged up all the time because that shit just isn't fucking practical on a day-to-day. so, he takes point. he never took point with ortez unless he was baiting a target into the open, but he takes point with ephemera. naturally. doesn't even think about it.
flexible in a multitude of ways, apparently. )
Not strong enough. ( through the alley they go, cutting across a busy road to the other side of the street. ) I like it best when I can feel the acid eating away at my insides. The real gnarly shit you can only get outdoors.
( the market is a short walk away. felix rounds to the nearest food cart, lightly touching ephemera's elbow to check him beside him. crepes and croissants and coffee. carb city. perfect.
two coffees for both him and ephemera and a crossiant in a greasy napkin later, they continue their trek through the market. felix picks at his croissant gingerly, juggling his coffee into the cradle of his elbow. )
Take your pick, dude. Then we'll find your paranoid ass a good solid wall.
[ Ephemera, by contrast, will drink whatever he can get for the caffeine hit but prefers things obnoxiously sweet. The others used to tease him about that one, but Barrows made hot chocolate sometimes and he'd melt real chocolate into it and somehow even the shitty, waxy crap that came with their MREs tasted pretty damn good. He misses Barrows's cooking. Misses how it felt to sit shoulder to shoulder with the others after a drop and hork down greasy, space station noodles because fuck, they were still alive and how else are you supposed to celebrate that?
Don't go there. Just don't.
Ephemera twitches. He doesn't go there.
The coffee helps. A little. It gives him something to focus on, anyway. Ephemera spots a cart selling breakfast sandwiches - something obscenely greasy and packed with thick bacon and possibly even real eggs and not that powdered shit. Dare to dream. He orders and the vendor only startles at his scars for a moment. ]
felix barely makes a dent in his croissant before he gives up, binning it in the nearest trash. ephemera orders his food, and felix steps between him and the cart to pay – and to distract the vendor with a velvet smile, sliding him a few crumpled bills as he sets to work on ephemera's food.
one last stop at another food cart, to wordlessly purchase ephemera a small square of fudge wrapped in wax paper, then felix leads the way through the end of the market. the noise dies off, fewer people milling around aimlessly. they're mostly alone, and felix almost prefers the crowd. higher risk, maybe, but he can field risk easier than he can field the quiet. makes everything so much louder everywhere else.
he stands on the edge of the street as ephemera settles against a wall with his food. )
Can you imagine living here? ( he squints up at the sun through his glasses. talking to talk. with ortez, it was partially to annoy him, partially to ground him. with ephemera, it's more of the latter. ) Muggy as shit. God, I'd expire immediately.
[ Like before, Felix covers Ephemera's blindspot. It's just a thing that happens now. They never discussed it, never had to. Some things have changed - Ephemera's entire fighting style, for one - but unit cohesion like theirs bleeds through. They know how to move around each other, how to control the space. There's no Rodriguez to cover them from a distance, no sergeant and no Crow to charge in and destroy up close, but -
Don't. Just don't.
Ephemera twitches. He puts his back to the wall and he eats his goddamn food and he doesn't say a word about the fudge, whether it's a bribe or a kindness or something else. It's here, they're not getting shot at, so just breathe.
Breathe, soldier. ]
Been in worse. It's nice seeing the sun.
[ It's said a little wistfully. He grew up on Eremus, where 90% of the population was stuck underground. They had fake skies and all kinds of vitamin D pills so it worked out in the end, but there's something about the real thing. Especially when Felix is hungover and Ephemera gets to rag on him for it.
( sometimes felix catches sparse, fleeting glances of the kid he used to know, years ago. never one to bitch about the sun or the heat even as felix withered away beside him because almost 18 years with tribute's mild climate spoiled him. he's used to the heat now. used to the cold now, too. nothing will ever feel quite as painfully rigid as the exact moment before the brain submits to cryo, or the first few seconds while waking, body flushed with epinephrine to jump-start the heart. the kind of cold you can feel in your bones, that lingers. corpse-cold.
he lifts his coffee to his mouth, blowing lightly over the surface. )
Nah.
( just a pitstop. felix needed to decompress, find his bearings. drink and fuck himself stupid. chorus isn't so far away that they're both not still feeling the emotional resonance of its consequences. locus is still out there. the freelancers are still out there. ephemera eats, and felix watches him from over the rim of his paper cup.
he almost blew him out a fucking airlock. wouldn't have even known until later, when checking the records. a moment to reconcile it, to compartmentalize it, and then he'd have been collateral damage with everything else he's torn to shreds following his fall from grace. another body. another consequence. another reason to drink.
ugly way to meet after years apart. it doesn't phase him anymore. the universe is full of horrors; he's just one of them.
he lowers his lashes and stares at the sunlight reflected in the shimmering surface of his coffee. )
Got us a job, next system over. ( something easy, not complicated. shit to keep them busy, to keep ephemera busy without overloading him. back to basics. ) Tiny little planet glassed back when the Outer Colonies were getting royally fucked, around 2530ish. It's being mined for silicates now, owned by some fucked up corporate family, but they're having a little trouble with another corporation encroaching on their territory. Rat problem, I guess.
[ It's what they used to do back in the day, or one of the things they used to do. There were other words for it, each cleaner and more clinical than the last, but Ephemera knows the score. He knows what it means. All that nightmarish shit that command didn't want to admit they were doing. Clean house, kill 'em all. Didn't matter if they were Covenant or something more human. Line 'em up and run them down. Death from above. All that bullshit, the ODST way. And oh, they were good at it. Only had a few rules. No kids, no torture, no turning on each other. They managed all but one.
It held for a while. Right up until it didn't. When he was younger, he used to try and quantify it. Call it doing a good thing because it was all for the greater good, the war effort. That didn't last. Now, he doesn't care at all.
Ephemera eats his goddamn sandwich. Doesn't matter. Job's a job. Gives him something to focus on. ]
( yeah. unsurprising that that's where ephemera's mind goes first.
if chorus hadn't happened, maybe that's how this would have gone. cleaning house. burn it all to the fucking ground, just like old times, when shit started getting all irreparably twisted. ephemera lost most of that fragile wistfulness somewhere along the way, and gates just became – more. or less. right now they don't have the manpower or the resources to pull off a job like that. it's just the two of them, spiraling through the vast black of space, alone. )
No, ( felix says, almost carefully. he studies ephemera shrewdly. ) These people hold grudges. Real mafia shit. Nasty motherfuckers that make me look like a fucking saint. Their fattest rat made a run for it, back to territory our pleasant little corporate family can't touch. We just gotta run him down and bring him back.
( a pause, then: )
It's just a bounty, T. That's it. Nothing crazy.
( it's not like that, is what he doesn't say. it could be like that so easily, but it's not. )
[ Ephemera twitches, fighting down the urge to snap and ask if Felix is holding back for his sake. Going for a softer job because -
What? What does it fucking matter?
Suddenly, he isn’t hungry anymore. Ephemera twitches again, then wraps his sandwich up. Tucks it away. He drinks his coffee instead. Tries to focus on the taste, the heat of it. Let it settle him.
Just a bounty. Fine. ]
So. No flamethrower?
[ His voice is very even. He doesn’t ask when they’re going after the Freelancers. He’s afraid the answer is never and then what would they fucking do? Split up again?
felix rubs his thumb along the side of his nose, hooking under his glasses to pinch his bridge. fuck. this headache, and ephemera, and everything left unsaid between them. he doesn't know how to do this anymore. it was different with ortez. both simpler and more complicated in so many ways because felix loathed and loved him in equal measure. ephemera and the others tried and failed to find their redemption, and gates left because there was no coming back for him, ever. he knew what he was. he knows what he is.
maybe he should've patched him up, dumped him on a planet somewhere far away from the fucking freelancers, rural enough he couldn't hitch the first ship out of atmosphere and drive himself straight into an early grave. maybe this was a mistake. ephemera isn't his. )
I'll leave the executive decision up to you. ( he keeps his voice light, but there's something sharp and barbed there, writhing restlessly beneath the surface. ) If you have something to say to me, say it. By all means. I wanna fucking hear it.
[ Since they’re fucking going there. Ephemera thumps his head back against the wall. Hard. ]
Fine. Why are we here? Why aren’t we hunting them?
[ It’s a mistake. He knows it as soon as the words are out. There’s too much they have not, cannot, say out loud. And the moment the words are out in the air is the moment everything goes sharp, the noise of the distant crowd suddenly much louder, and Ephemera has the urge to just turn around and slam his head into the wall until it just goes quiet again.
He doesn’t. Because that would be fucking insane. ]
Because you're gonna get yourself fucking killed over people that aren't even goddamn here anymore.
( out of his mouth like shrapnel from a bullet, just as quick and molten-sharp. felix hisses through his teeth, dumping his coffee in the street and crumpling the cup in his hand as he chucks it aside. bad place to lay shit out. would've been worse in space. silver linings. )
You know what I thought when you stopped responding on comms? ( the worst. slow, trickling terror, something he hasn't felt in a long time. ortez felt it move through him like an aftershock, told him to focus. ) You think Ortez and I didn't try to fucking put her down? Double-teamed her ass. Didn't make a bit of difference. We weren't just fiddling with our fucking dicks out the whole goddamn time, Ephemera.
( fuck. he forks his thumbs into his eyes, pressing deep in the sockets. his head is going to explode. )
[ It comes out sharp, too loud. Too fucking loud. Ephemera rocks back on his heels, digging his nails into the flimsy, disposable coffee cup. He’s twitching. People are going to notice. ]
She killed me years ago, with all our people, and you weren’t fucking there!
[ He’s shaking. He drops the cup and doesn’t hear it spill. Doesn’t hear anything but his pulse pounding in his hears and the voice in his head that’s screaming at him to kill them all. Wreck the world, make them burn.
Ephemera screws his good eye closed. And then he does slam his head back. Just cracks it back into the wall like he’s going against an enemy.
The world goes white. And for a moment, there’s blissful fucking quiet. ]
felix has fielded this shit maybe once before from ephemera, immediately after he came at him with his helmet. violence turned inward, directed like a knife at his heart. he wasn't prepared for it the first time, brain muddied and fogged following ortez's betrayal and his crippling failure on chorus, but his reflexes are sharp now. he cuts the distance in a blink and latches onto his bicep, swinging ephemera's weight off the wall toward the ground.
he crouches over him, knee hooked into his side. his hand slides under his skull, pulls away wet and shiny with blood. fucking ephemera. on the street next to them, a passerby stops. felix doesn't hear anything she says. he smoothly draws his sidearm with his free hand, angled toward the trajectory of her voice with an icy keep walking, bitch. )
Stop it. ( his knee moves to ephemera's chest, weighing him down on the concrete. he wasn't there. he knows. ) I know. Terrence. I left you. It's fucked up, and I left you. It wasn't fair. I know.
( ephemera didn't know that gates was long gone before he actually left, mourning a ghost of a person who felix strangled and buried with his own fucking hands. how could he know that? none of them knew. they just saw what gates wanted them to see except in the moments when he slipped, when that vile ugliness peeked through the curtain. overflow. he couldn't hold it all in, burning down a wick to an explosion that would've eviscerated everything in the surrounding area.
a mercy, he thought at the time. i'm doing you a favor, rookie.
he exhales slowly, loosely circling his bloodied hand around ephemera's throat. his thumb presses into his pulse. )
[ What does that matter? Ephemera wants to ask, staring up at Felix as the world blurs around them. What’s that fucking matter with all we’ve lost? They weren’t all orphans like Ephemera but most of them were, most of them knew what it felt like to lose family or never had it in the first place. Water under the bridge, he’d thought, because we’ve got each other now and what’s it matter what came before when we’ve got this now?
It didn’t last. Sometimes he thinks that’s karma for all the evil shit they did in the war. Sometimes he thinks about that and sketches out their corpses until he screams. Felix doesn’t know about that. Ephemera’s been careful. He’s been so careful not to let that piece slip away from him.
He stares back at Felix and the sky above and feels blood ticking through his hair. Soaking into the ground. He thinks about glassing and what it smells like after a planet dies. And he thinks about their people, armor sundered, buried in pieces, and he thinks he’d scream if he could catch his breath. But Felix knocked the wind out of him and maybe the fight too, and this -
It twists. It’s too much. And Felix’s voice is too goddamn calm and Ephemera grabs weakly at his wrist, uncoordinated and slow. For a moment, he wonders if Felix is going to snap his neck. A stranger would. And aren’t they strangers to each other? ]
felix stays steady over him, unmoving even as ephemera latches onto his wrist, asks him permission in a voice close to begging. like he's a kid again. gates was twenty-one when they met for the first time. ephemera was bigger than him even then, but he was still the baby, the youngest, took his punches and rolled with every single one thrown at him regardless of the odds. and he survived. out of everyone. little open book ephemera, the rookie, the kid gates used to sneak whiskey before he was old enough to drink. he made it to the end.
to his own detriment. the freelancers tore into him. felix has his scars, but despite the years spread between them, he's mostly physically unchanged, left intact, a mirror image of the man that left ephemera behind so long ago. fantastic genetics, he thinks again, dully. maybe it would've been better if he was unrecognizable. made the pain less raw. maybe ephemera wouldn't see gates as he stares up at felix now.
he shifts his weight over him, turning his wrist in his hand. his gun clatters to the concrete as his fingers twine with ephemera's. he guides ephemera's hand over his own throat, to feel felix's pulse, then leans down and presses their foreheads together. that's unfair, too. beyond cruel. felix isn't gates, but he'll pretend. )
No. ( softly. request denied. he strokes his thumb into his throat. no. he won't. not like this, not when he knows how that story ends, and ephemera can hate him for it. that's fine. he knows what to do with hatred. he can hate him more later when felix rips open the freelancers himself. )
[ Ephemera makes a strangled noise and screws his good eye closed even as Felix guides his hand to his throat. Thumb over his pulse. Proof of life. And then he presses their foreheads together and it's like the old days, something instinctive. Something coded deep. Felix's hand on his throat, Ephemera's hand on his. Mirrored. They could hurt each other.
Could. Probably will, by the end. Ephemera tried to beat him to death once. That wasn't so long ago. And even now, he can't say why he stopped. It just happened and then there was a moment in the middle where the ground shifted. And then it was over.
He shudders, good eye still closed. The world feels too fucking loud. Screaming at him. And he shifts his grip to cup the back of Felix's neck instead. Shield the implant. ]
Please. I can't - Isaac, I can't.
[ A mistake. That isn't his name. This isn't who they are anymore. ]
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no subject
Less so now. It's just a habit. And Rodriguez is long dead. So he doesn't say it. He just exhales through his teeth and eyes the alley with practiced suspicion.
He wants his armor back. The sooner they get back to it, the better. ]
You have opinions on coffee?
[ It comes out in a drawl. ]
Enlighten me.
no subject
but he clocks his tension. almost painful how easy of a read ephemera is out of armor, same shit he used to be called out for repeatedly, same shit that he could never scrub. felix gets it, he does, except they can't be rigged up all the time because that shit just isn't fucking practical on a day-to-day. so, he takes point. he never took point with ortez unless he was baiting a target into the open, but he takes point with ephemera. naturally. doesn't even think about it.
flexible in a multitude of ways, apparently. )
Not strong enough. ( through the alley they go, cutting across a busy road to the other side of the street. ) I like it best when I can feel the acid eating away at my insides. The real gnarly shit you can only get outdoors.
( the market is a short walk away. felix rounds to the nearest food cart, lightly touching ephemera's elbow to check him beside him. crepes and croissants and coffee. carb city. perfect.
two coffees for both him and ephemera and a crossiant in a greasy napkin later, they continue their trek through the market. felix picks at his croissant gingerly, juggling his coffee into the cradle of his elbow. )
Take your pick, dude. Then we'll find your paranoid ass a good solid wall.
no subject
[ Ephemera, by contrast, will drink whatever he can get for the caffeine hit but prefers things obnoxiously sweet. The others used to tease him about that one, but Barrows made hot chocolate sometimes and he'd melt real chocolate into it and somehow even the shitty, waxy crap that came with their MREs tasted pretty damn good. He misses Barrows's cooking. Misses how it felt to sit shoulder to shoulder with the others after a drop and hork down greasy, space station noodles because fuck, they were still alive and how else are you supposed to celebrate that?
Don't go there. Just don't.
Ephemera twitches. He doesn't go there.
The coffee helps. A little. It gives him something to focus on, anyway. Ephemera spots a cart selling breakfast sandwiches - something obscenely greasy and packed with thick bacon and possibly even real eggs and not that powdered shit. Dare to dream. He orders and the vendor only startles at his scars for a moment. ]
Not paranoia if it's true.
no subject
felix barely makes a dent in his croissant before he gives up, binning it in the nearest trash. ephemera orders his food, and felix steps between him and the cart to pay – and to distract the vendor with a velvet smile, sliding him a few crumpled bills as he sets to work on ephemera's food.
one last stop at another food cart, to wordlessly purchase ephemera a small square of fudge wrapped in wax paper, then felix leads the way through the end of the market. the noise dies off, fewer people milling around aimlessly. they're mostly alone, and felix almost prefers the crowd. higher risk, maybe, but he can field risk easier than he can field the quiet. makes everything so much louder everywhere else.
he stands on the edge of the street as ephemera settles against a wall with his food. )
Can you imagine living here? ( he squints up at the sun through his glasses. talking to talk. with ortez, it was partially to annoy him, partially to ground him. with ephemera, it's more of the latter. ) Muggy as shit. God, I'd expire immediately.
no subject
Don't. Just don't.
Ephemera twitches. He puts his back to the wall and he eats his goddamn food and he doesn't say a word about the fudge, whether it's a bribe or a kindness or something else. It's here, they're not getting shot at, so just breathe.
Breathe, soldier. ]
Been in worse. It's nice seeing the sun.
[ It's said a little wistfully. He grew up on Eremus, where 90% of the population was stuck underground. They had fake skies and all kinds of vitamin D pills so it worked out in the end, but there's something about the real thing. Especially when Felix is hungover and Ephemera gets to rag on him for it.
But also - ]
We're not staying, right?
no subject
he lifts his coffee to his mouth, blowing lightly over the surface. )
Nah.
( just a pitstop. felix needed to decompress, find his bearings. drink and fuck himself stupid. chorus isn't so far away that they're both not still feeling the emotional resonance of its consequences. locus is still out there. the freelancers are still out there. ephemera eats, and felix watches him from over the rim of his paper cup.
he almost blew him out a fucking airlock. wouldn't have even known until later, when checking the records. a moment to reconcile it, to compartmentalize it, and then he'd have been collateral damage with everything else he's torn to shreds following his fall from grace. another body. another consequence. another reason to drink.
ugly way to meet after years apart. it doesn't phase him anymore. the universe is full of horrors; he's just one of them.
he lowers his lashes and stares at the sunlight reflected in the shimmering surface of his coffee. )
Got us a job, next system over. ( something easy, not complicated. shit to keep them busy, to keep ephemera busy without overloading him. back to basics. ) Tiny little planet glassed back when the Outer Colonies were getting royally fucked, around 2530ish. It's being mined for silicates now, owned by some fucked up corporate family, but they're having a little trouble with another corporation encroaching on their territory. Rat problem, I guess.
no subject
[ His voice goes flat. ]
We cleaning house?
[ It's what they used to do back in the day, or one of the things they used to do. There were other words for it, each cleaner and more clinical than the last, but Ephemera knows the score. He knows what it means. All that nightmarish shit that command didn't want to admit they were doing. Clean house, kill 'em all. Didn't matter if they were Covenant or something more human. Line 'em up and run them down. Death from above. All that bullshit, the ODST way. And oh, they were good at it. Only had a few rules. No kids, no torture, no turning on each other. They managed all but one.
It held for a while. Right up until it didn't. When he was younger, he used to try and quantify it. Call it doing a good thing because it was all for the greater good, the war effort. That didn't last. Now, he doesn't care at all.
Ephemera eats his goddamn sandwich. Doesn't matter. Job's a job. Gives him something to focus on. ]
no subject
if chorus hadn't happened, maybe that's how this would have gone. cleaning house. burn it all to the fucking ground, just like old times, when shit started getting all irreparably twisted. ephemera lost most of that fragile wistfulness somewhere along the way, and gates just became – more. or less. right now they don't have the manpower or the resources to pull off a job like that. it's just the two of them, spiraling through the vast black of space, alone. )
No, ( felix says, almost carefully. he studies ephemera shrewdly. ) These people hold grudges. Real mafia shit. Nasty motherfuckers that make me look like a fucking saint. Their fattest rat made a run for it, back to territory our pleasant little corporate family can't touch. We just gotta run him down and bring him back.
( a pause, then: )
It's just a bounty, T. That's it. Nothing crazy.
( it's not like that, is what he doesn't say. it could be like that so easily, but it's not. )
no subject
What? What does it fucking matter?
Suddenly, he isn’t hungry anymore. Ephemera twitches again, then wraps his sandwich up. Tucks it away. He drinks his coffee instead. Tries to focus on the taste, the heat of it. Let it settle him.
Just a bounty. Fine. ]
So. No flamethrower?
[ His voice is very even. He doesn’t ask when they’re going after the Freelancers. He’s afraid the answer is never and then what would they fucking do? Split up again?
No. There’s no one else left. There’s just -
This. ]
no subject
felix rubs his thumb along the side of his nose, hooking under his glasses to pinch his bridge. fuck. this headache, and ephemera, and everything left unsaid between them. he doesn't know how to do this anymore. it was different with ortez. both simpler and more complicated in so many ways because felix loathed and loved him in equal measure. ephemera and the others tried and failed to find their redemption, and gates left because there was no coming back for him, ever. he knew what he was. he knows what he is.
maybe he should've patched him up, dumped him on a planet somewhere far away from the fucking freelancers, rural enough he couldn't hitch the first ship out of atmosphere and drive himself straight into an early grave. maybe this was a mistake. ephemera isn't his. )
I'll leave the executive decision up to you. ( he keeps his voice light, but there's something sharp and barbed there, writhing restlessly beneath the surface. ) If you have something to say to me, say it. By all means. I wanna fucking hear it.
no subject
[ Since they’re fucking going there. Ephemera thumps his head back against the wall. Hard. ]
Fine. Why are we here? Why aren’t we hunting them?
[ It’s a mistake. He knows it as soon as the words are out. There’s too much they have not, cannot, say out loud. And the moment the words are out in the air is the moment everything goes sharp, the noise of the distant crowd suddenly much louder, and Ephemera has the urge to just turn around and slam his head into the wall until it just goes quiet again.
He doesn’t. Because that would be fucking insane. ]
no subject
( out of his mouth like shrapnel from a bullet, just as quick and molten-sharp. felix hisses through his teeth, dumping his coffee in the street and crumpling the cup in his hand as he chucks it aside. bad place to lay shit out. would've been worse in space. silver linings. )
You know what I thought when you stopped responding on comms? ( the worst. slow, trickling terror, something he hasn't felt in a long time. ortez felt it move through him like an aftershock, told him to focus. ) You think Ortez and I didn't try to fucking put her down? Double-teamed her ass. Didn't make a bit of difference. We weren't just fiddling with our fucking dicks out the whole goddamn time, Ephemera.
( fuck. he forks his thumbs into his eyes, pressing deep in the sockets. his head is going to explode. )
I thought she killed you.
Cw for self harm
[ It comes out sharp, too loud. Too fucking loud. Ephemera rocks back on his heels, digging his nails into the flimsy, disposable coffee cup. He’s twitching. People are going to notice. ]
She killed me years ago, with all our people, and you weren’t fucking there!
[ He’s shaking. He drops the cup and doesn’t hear it spill. Doesn’t hear anything but his pulse pounding in his hears and the voice in his head that’s screaming at him to kill them all. Wreck the world, make them burn.
Ephemera screws his good eye closed. And then he does slam his head back. Just cracks it back into the wall like he’s going against an enemy.
The world goes white. And for a moment, there’s blissful fucking quiet. ]
no subject
felix has fielded this shit maybe once before from ephemera, immediately after he came at him with his helmet. violence turned inward, directed like a knife at his heart. he wasn't prepared for it the first time, brain muddied and fogged following ortez's betrayal and his crippling failure on chorus, but his reflexes are sharp now. he cuts the distance in a blink and latches onto his bicep, swinging ephemera's weight off the wall toward the ground.
he crouches over him, knee hooked into his side. his hand slides under his skull, pulls away wet and shiny with blood. fucking ephemera. on the street next to them, a passerby stops. felix doesn't hear anything she says. he smoothly draws his sidearm with his free hand, angled toward the trajectory of her voice with an icy keep walking, bitch. )
Stop it. ( his knee moves to ephemera's chest, weighing him down on the concrete. he wasn't there. he knows. ) I know. Terrence. I left you. It's fucked up, and I left you. It wasn't fair. I know.
( ephemera didn't know that gates was long gone before he actually left, mourning a ghost of a person who felix strangled and buried with his own fucking hands. how could he know that? none of them knew. they just saw what gates wanted them to see except in the moments when he slipped, when that vile ugliness peeked through the curtain. overflow. he couldn't hold it all in, burning down a wick to an explosion that would've eviscerated everything in the surrounding area.
a mercy, he thought at the time. i'm doing you a favor, rookie.
he exhales slowly, loosely circling his bloodied hand around ephemera's throat. his thumb presses into his pulse. )
But I'm here now.
no subject
It didn’t last. Sometimes he thinks that’s karma for all the evil shit they did in the war. Sometimes he thinks about that and sketches out their corpses until he screams. Felix doesn’t know about that. Ephemera’s been careful. He’s been so careful not to let that piece slip away from him.
He stares back at Felix and the sky above and feels blood ticking through his hair. Soaking into the ground. He thinks about glassing and what it smells like after a planet dies. And he thinks about their people, armor sundered, buried in pieces, and he thinks he’d scream if he could catch his breath. But Felix knocked the wind out of him and maybe the fight too, and this -
It twists. It’s too much. And Felix’s voice is too goddamn calm and Ephemera grabs weakly at his wrist, uncoordinated and slow. For a moment, he wonders if Felix is going to snap his neck. A stranger would. And aren’t they strangers to each other? ]
Let me finish it. Just let me finish the mission.
no subject
felix stays steady over him, unmoving even as ephemera latches onto his wrist, asks him permission in a voice close to begging. like he's a kid again. gates was twenty-one when they met for the first time. ephemera was bigger than him even then, but he was still the baby, the youngest, took his punches and rolled with every single one thrown at him regardless of the odds. and he survived. out of everyone. little open book ephemera, the rookie, the kid gates used to sneak whiskey before he was old enough to drink. he made it to the end.
to his own detriment. the freelancers tore into him. felix has his scars, but despite the years spread between them, he's mostly physically unchanged, left intact, a mirror image of the man that left ephemera behind so long ago. fantastic genetics, he thinks again, dully. maybe it would've been better if he was unrecognizable. made the pain less raw. maybe ephemera wouldn't see gates as he stares up at felix now.
he shifts his weight over him, turning his wrist in his hand. his gun clatters to the concrete as his fingers twine with ephemera's. he guides ephemera's hand over his own throat, to feel felix's pulse, then leans down and presses their foreheads together. that's unfair, too. beyond cruel. felix isn't gates, but he'll pretend. )
No. ( softly. request denied. he strokes his thumb into his throat. no. he won't. not like this, not when he knows how that story ends, and ephemera can hate him for it. that's fine. he knows what to do with hatred. he can hate him more later when felix rips open the freelancers himself. )
no subject
Could. Probably will, by the end. Ephemera tried to beat him to death once. That wasn't so long ago. And even now, he can't say why he stopped. It just happened and then there was a moment in the middle where the ground shifted. And then it was over.
He shudders, good eye still closed. The world feels too fucking loud. Screaming at him. And he shifts his grip to cup the back of Felix's neck instead. Shield the implant. ]
Please. I can't - Isaac, I can't.
[ A mistake. That isn't his name. This isn't who they are anymore. ]