Chapter Text
One thing military life has taught Carolina to appreciate - not including a good meal, a good shower, and the continued survival of herself and her friends - is a consistent routine. Even after easing into retirement (a strange thought, deserved as it may be), she still finds herself up, ready, and usually in the gym by 7AM.
She isn't the only one, by any means; Wash isn't as much of an early riser, but they often find each other in the blue base kitchen for breakfast. Even their dysfunctional neighbors tend to fall into their own patterns. Once a week Simmons can be seen obsessively running inventory, before prepping half a fridge worth of vegan meals and hiding half of them over at blue base. It's a meaningless effort - Grif knows that they're there, he just also knows that Caboose's tootsie rolls are hidden in the vegetable crisper. Carolina isn't going to be the one to explain this to Simmons. She also won't be volunteering to explain what a vegetable crisper is to Grif any time soon.
Grif is a little less predictable than his companions, if only because he sleeps for upwards of ten hours a day and doesn't seem to care which ones they are. When he is awake, his whereabouts could be best described as 'next to Simmons'.
Carolina had said that she would give the simple life a day in court. It's been a day. It's been roughly 36 days, and her feelings about it at this point are still under consideration. It's kind of comforting, in a way, to know where pretty much everybody is without having to really think about it or actively look for them, and to know that regardless of what shenanigans they could be getting up to, nobody is going to die about it (despite Sarge's best efforts, Grif has meandered his way out of at least six distinct assassination attempts).
It's also... kind of boring. A part of her is tense, coiled like a spring, just waiting for something to happen. Nothing is going to happen. Even if something did, Carolina has made her home with a set of interstellar war heroes that insist on separating themselves into two color-coded teams for nostalgia's sake. Most incidents involving this particular group would be categorized as either 'inconsequential' or 'planet destroying', and they're really trying to be done with the latter.
Right as Carolina thinks this, a series of familiar bangs rings out through blue base. She sets down her coffee with a sigh and turns to see Wash doing the same.
"KNOCK KNOCK," Sarge calls cheerily, still ruthlessly attacking their front door with the butt of his shotgun, in lieu of an actual knock.
"It could be worse?" Wash offers, over the shattered ruins of their peace and quiet.
"How," Carolina grits out, struggling to imagine a more disruptive way for Sarge to insert them into his schemes every two days out of three.
"There could be punchlines." Wash gestures with his coffee as he points this out. "I know I'm not the only one who wasn't a fan of Wyoming's-"
"YOOHOO, BLUES! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE-" Sarge's yelling continues, to the detriment of Carolina's ears, and thinning patience.
"I'll show him a punchline," she says, moving towards the door. Maybe she can work some of her restless energy out this way.
"Y'ALL BETTER STOP IGNORING ME! BEFORE I DO SOMETHING CRAZY, LIKE GET MY FEELINGS HURT, OR-"
"God damn it Sarge, shut the fuck up! It's way too early for this shit!" Carolina pauses in the entryway - from the sounds of it, Tucker is yelling down at Sarge from the upstairs balcony. She would argue that the time of day isn't the issue here, but if it gets Sarge to leave, or at least quiet down-
"Don't be ridiculous! Our new enemy waits for no man!"
The groan that Tucker lets out could probably be heard from space. Carolina cuts her losses and opens the door.
"What new enemy, Sarge." His demeanor visibly brightens, even with his face obscured by his helmet. Carolina sighs internally; she supposes humoring him is the least she could do.
After much preamble and and a handful of non-sequiturs, during which time Wash had finished his coffee and Tucker had given up on sleeping in any longer to congregate with them in the base's main doorway, Carolina finally gets it out of Sarge, the only person still wearing a full set of power armor. Tucker is dressed only in a robe, and Carolina is silently grateful that he even has that much.
"The moon's... Local wildlife," she repeats.
"Iris doesn't have any local wildlife," says Wash.
"Correctamundo!" says Sarge. "I've been doing some research, and I've come to the brilliant conclusion that our dastardly new enemy is right beneath our feet, already extinct! The slippery bastards are just waiting for us to revive them, so they can wage war on an invading alien species! That would be us. It's just diabolical, I tell you, diabolical!"
"Oh, bullshit!" Tucker interrupts, while Carolina is still turning Sarge's insane words around in her head. "That's not research, we watched Jurassic Park on movie night!"
"And we don't even know that this moon ever had anything like dinosaurs inhabiting it," says Wash.
"Right," Tucker agrees, just to add insult to injury, "this place could have been filled with mutant cows, or dogs that could talk. Fucking beavers maybe, we don't know."
Sarge grumbles indeterminately. "Well, I also watched Zombeavers."
Carolina puts her foot down. It is agreed by the majority that Sarge will not be attempting to revive, recreate, or reproduce any wildlife that may or may not have existed on Iris at any time, for any reason, and especially not so that he can go to war against it.
When all is said and done, Caboose says "yes, I would like to go in the door now, thank you," and they all discover with great shock that he has been standing directly behind Sarge, possibly for the entire time.
After separating to let him through, Wash turns to Sarge and, noticing his downtrodden disposition, awkwardly asks if he would like to come inside for a strawberry yoohoo.
"No, no," Sarge says dejectedly. "The day I step inside blue base is the day I die! Besides, I- well I'm sure there's some trees around here that need punching. You know how it goes."
They watch him leave, just concerned enough to stare but not enough to really do anything about it. "Red team problems," dismisses Tucker, before he turns to Carolina. "What's got you so pissy?"
Carolina starts. "I'm not pissy," she argues. "I'm trying to enjoy a peaceful retirement."
Tucker laughs. "Psh, no you're not. You're trying to, like, miserable a peaceful retirement. You hate not doing stuff."
She raises an eyebrow. "Maybe I should take lessons from you, then."
"Hey!" Tucker objects, but he doesn't really sound offended. "I do plenty, it's just none of it's important. Maybe you should try Grif."
"That might not be such a bad idea," says Wash.
Carolina swings to stare at him, probably looking some variation of betrayed. "No hey, I'm serious," he continues, hands up in surrender. "You still haven't really relaxed. Maybe doing nothing is just... a skill you haven't mastered yet."
"I can master it," Carolina says immediately.
Approximately two weeks later, after the discovery and unlikely ("Well, at this point, statistically speaking, probably likely-" "Simmons, you are the biggest nerd I have ever-") befriending of living dinosaurs, Carolina turns to Wash and has to ask: "you don't think that Sarge..."
"No way," he says. "If he did, it would have to be an accident. I- I refuse to believe that he could do this. And there's no way he wouldn't have taken credit for it by now."
Carolina takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly, the way she's seen Grif do after Donut makes basic warthog maintenance sound like a series of increasingly involved sex acts.
"Okay," she says. "This is one... Incredible coincidence."
At the very least, there are no signs of zombified beavers in any of the waterways. She couldn't not check.
On day 61 of the Reds' and Blues' retirement, an incident involving Donut's scented candles results in the loss of both of their new bases. He's more or less forgiven when he nearly cries upon learning that almost none of his (extremely flammable) belongings survived the blaze, or Grif's impromptu bonfire on the beach after he found more of Donut's magazines and tanning oils under a propped up umbrella. (When Carolina asked him why he did it, Grif faced her with a dead eyed stare and replied, "I had six family packs of Oreos under my bed. Now I don't even have a bed." Needless to say, he took the loss hard.)
After the fire is put out, Carolina springs into crisis mode almost like she missed it. They make shelters with what they can salvage from the wreckage and take stock of their rations - their next shipment isn't due for another two weeks.
"It's not too bad," Wash confides when they regroup to consider their options. "We're in a better position than we were at the crash site on Chorus. If we ration, we can make it the next two weeks. Shelter could be improved, but that's not my main concern."
Sarge is measuring out his 'living quarters', having co-opted a lightly singed sofa for his end of the red team shelter. Simmons squeaks every time Sarge's measuring removes another foot from the side he'll be sleeping on. Grif is sulking in the red team warthog, or possibly just asleep. A radio survived, playing songs Carolina doesn't recognize while Caboose and Donut sort through burnt rubble and sing along to it, one more coherently than the other. Tucker is lying facedown in the grass, exhausted after climbing through a burning building to save his photo of Junior, as well as a magazine that Carolina can only assume is porn.
All things considered, spirits are pretty high, after having just experienced a fairly catastrophic event that has everyone wearing power armor again (except for Sarge, who never stopped). It's a pleasant surprise to find that they're all considering the same dilemma: nobody wants to go crying to Kimball and ask her for some new bases, please, nevermind how thin we're stretching the resources of a planet still recovering from war?
Which means that if they're going to get new bases built, they're going to have to fundraise.
They don't do a lot of fundraising, in the end; they do a lot of standing around and talking about fundraising, most with a particular level of distaste. Donut is all too excited about the whole thing, and Caboose suggests a bake sale at six separate occasions. Negotiations break down when Tucker realizes someone has used his (probably porn) magazine as a fire starter.
Conversations tend to devolve similarly at every opportunity. Carolina has been using a miraculously un-scorched tarp as a mattress for over a week when they finally come to a conclusion. It starts with Grif letting out a loud groan as the topic of fundraising is broached, and saying, "God, can't we just sell some shit and be done with it?"
Tucker huffs out a laugh and shoots back: "are you kidding, dude? You really think anyone's gonna buy any of this crap?" He gestures over at their ever-growing pile of Unsalvageable Burnt Crap for good measure.
"We're war heroes, though, surely we have something," says Simmons, who has slept in a warthog with Grif for the past three nights in the face of his shrinking living space. His tone has a hint of desperation.
"We didn't exactly get trophies or anything," Wash points out.
"Just our war stories! Fat chance of getting anyone to pay for those," says Donut. "Looks like we'll have to revisit my Tupperware party idea-"
"Yeah, no, I think people don't like hearing about wars or cool battles with explosions or anything like that," says Caboose, mostly to no one, but everybody has already stopped listening to Donut. "I don't think they really make many movies about it or anything, you know- Oh, I know! What if we made a movie-"
"I was almost in a movie once," Sarge muses. "Until that damn production company said they wanted to buy my rights! Disgraceful, it's like spitting in the face of a red-blooded American!"
"Wait, are you American, Sarge?" Simmons asks. "I thought you were from a colony-"
"Can we sell our film rights?" asks Wash, somewhat urgently. He turns to Carolina, but she only shrugs in response.
"We can, right?" Tucker says uncertainly. "How much would that even go for?"
It turns out they can. And film rights are worth a lot - enough for two bases. By the time the film rights thing is sorted out, the Reds and Blues have had enough time to talk and stand around and reconsider and talk and decide that maybe they want to build a waterpark instead.
"Am I the only one who has concerns about this?" Carolina says to Wash as they watch Sarge present his proposal for a waterslide called the Red Death with at least three full loops and a shotgun shaped section in it. The man is a walking OSHA violation.
Wash shrugs at her, almost sheepish. "It sounds kinda fun. I mean, when's the last time you went to a waterpark?"
Never, Carolina doesn't say. Wash gets a funny look on his face when she reminds him that she was raised by the very man that she organized a revenge mission for.
"This isn't the simple life I had envisioned," she says instead.
Wash laughs lightly. "Well, it was never going to be boring with these guys. I think uneventful might be our best bet."
"Uneventful," Carolina repeats, willing it not to taste sour.
"I think we should have a yellow slide," Caboose is saying, having taken Sarge's place. "You know, in memory of someone who maybe isn't here right now."
"Oh, wow, okay," says Grif, sounding surprisingly touched.
"Yeah, uh. Yellow Church. He will be missed." Caboose sniffles loudly, and then departs the side of the makeshift room that they've been treating as a stage.
"Jesus fucking Christ," says Grif.
"What are they talking about?" Carolina turns to Wash once again.
"I, uh, actually have no idea," Wash says. "Normally I just assume that it doesn't matter."
Yeah, alright, thinks Carolina. That's probably the policy that will save her the most headache.
The yellow slide is the tallest and the straightest, sloping on a steady decline. Despite herself, Carolina does think it looks kind of fun, and it is.
The Reds and Blues develop a game where they race each other down their color-coded slides, shooting out and, when they get good enough at it, inevitably injuring themselves on the other end. They get a scorecard and everything. The Blues are up by two thanks to her, after she subs in for Caboose (who had hit and almost broken his nose on the opposite end of the pool) when Donut burns down the waterpark.
"Lube shouldn't be so flammable!" he keeps saying, as well as, "come on guys, it was only the park part!" But Sarge and Tucker have spilled so many of their mimosas in the pool that Carolina is pretty sure she saw at least some of the water going up in flames too, and anyway they're too busy once again saving what they can to live out of.
At least their food stores went mostly untouched, so Grif won't resort to eating untested glowing mushrooms like a madman again, even if it was pretty funny, and a nice surprise to race someone who could match her speed for the first time in a while.
"Hmmm," says Sarge, surveying their newly cobbled together living space.
"It looks like a pile of junk," says Tucker.
"It has walls and a roof," Wash deadpans.
"Sold!" Simmons adds. "No complaints here!"
"Our new place has pretty good acoustics," Tucker says one morning in their makeshift kitchen. "You know, for a shithole."
"So what?" asks Wash as he fries some eggs for blue team and also Sarge, who is sitting at the end of the dining table like a dog that won't beg, but also totally is. "You gonna start a band?"
"Oh, shit yeah! Chicks dig musicians. Can anybody play any instruments?"
Carolina responds "not me," and refrains from asking what chicks he's aiming for, for fear of retribution via terrible pickup line.
"Marimba," says Caboose. "And saxylophone."
Tucker rolls his eyes. "Lame! Seriously, nobody can play anything? I like, kind of know guitar, but that's not as important as me looking hot holding it."
Sarge grumbles. "Simmons banjo... Maybe guitar?" As if he thinks red team needs to edge them out on musical skill in particular.
"Also drums," adds Caboose.
"Fuuuuck yesss!" Tucker actually fist pumps, before he starts demolishing his breakfast. "This is gonna be fucking awesome," he says.
Simmons walks into the kitchen at the tail end of blue team (plus Sarge) breakfast, Grif trailing behind him and already digging into a sandwich of unknown origin. Everybody's attention turns to Simmons, who flushes, stares back, and walks into a makeshift countertop.
"Hey... What's up?" He asks weakly, rubbing at his hip that's sure to bruise.
"Can you play guitar?" Tucker dives straight in, and Simmons shrinks under his stare.
"Uh- no, not anymore, I gave Grif my fret hand, so the muscle memory is..."
The room's collective gaze swivels and turns to Grif, who turns to Simmons. "Wait, can I play guitar?"
"Have you been to any of their band practices?" Wash asks her, on day 114.
"No," she responds, looking up from where she's hammering an extra panel into their shelter's mostly-stable wall, just to be safe. "...Have you?"
"They're not bad," he answers. "And they're looking for a singer, if you want to audition."
"...They're really not bad?" Carolina hadn't really considered the possibility that they might be good.
"I mean, it's not like they're gonna perform anywhere. And Tucker's right, he does look hot holding a guitar." His grin is familiar - it's the one he wears when he's joking but also not. She laughs.
"I won't tell him you said that. Is this your way of telling me to get a hobby?"
A half grimace. "Not in so many words. But I'm a little-- worried about you. I know you get... restless, and I don't want you to..."
"Take off without telling anyone? Again?" Alone, she doesn't add, because they've all done a great job of not really talking about Church so far.
"Well, yeah. But I don't want you to stay just to be miserable, either." He gives her a little smile.
She'd be lying to say she hadn't considered it. Hadn't found herself getting bored, like there was something out there that she should be doing, feeling a wave of relief when she was thrown into a situation that needed attending, however insignificant. But these guys are her family now. She's not going to leave them alone again.
"I appreciate your honesty, Wash. But I'm not going anywhere." A full grin, now - it's almost enough to remind her of the eager-to-impress rookie that he used to be, but they've both changed a lot since then. For the better, she hopes.
"And I appreciate yours. Try to have some fun, yeah? Enjoy your peaceful retirement." She used to make fun of Wash a lot, she remembers. Especially with York, like when they almost convinced him that he could throw up in his helmet, or that time he had to replace his codpiece because it was irreparably grafted to her grappling hook. Those were the days.
Her laziness lessons with Grif haven't been entirely unhelpful, even if he does treat them as a joke and an excuse to quote old movies she hasn't seen, but she does still feel that itch from time to time. Like she isn't doing enough, like there's still so much she has to make up for. Maybe she doesn't need to learn to do nothing; maybe she just needs to remember how she used to have fun, before everything went to shit and the weight of her sins and her father's burdens almost broke her back.
"I will," she promises. "I'll catch up with you later, I want to grab that singer position before band practice ends."
"You think they'll take you on?"
Carolina grins wolfishly. "Of course. How could they say no to me?"
The wall is left as it is - it's sturdy enough, and there's plenty of time to fix it later if they need. What Carolina wants, now that she really, actually thinks about it, is to see the look on their faces when she grabs the microphone.
She's sure she doesn't know any of their songs. She'll sing along anyway.