Chapter Text
Revenant stalked the carpeted halls of the legends' private building, silent as a ghost. He'd been officially inducted as an Apex Legend half an hour earlier and essentially set loose on the premises. The change of scenery was a catharsis from the restlessness he'd endured for the last three hours. Before the final papers were signed, he had to sit through a digital class covering all aspects of the games: weapons, equipment, environment, and the legends themselves.
One of the administrative drones tried to give him a holo-pad, should he wish to review before his first game, but another had smacked their arm and jerked his head at Revenant. He's a machine, you idiot, had gone unspoken.
They had also given him a brief lecture on commercializing himself to maintain the public's interest. They were worried he wouldn't establish a dedicated fanbase – aka a target for merchandising – on account of his disposition. His temperament. His "vibe."
They'd really gone out of their way to avoid telling him he needed an attitude check to his face.
Revenant had found the conversation humorous, if not presumptuous. The idea of gaining fans was a joke and he chuckled when they told him he couldn't be graphic in the games. For fear of scaring away fainthearted viewers. He would find ways around the cameras. On the other hand, they made him out to be some fury-ridden creature that lived and died to kill, and that had irritated him a little. They weren't wrong, but he still had a personality.
It wasn't his problem that all the skinsuits ever saw was an emotionless metal skull.
A corporate associate was meant to be his tour guide, but she had doubled back to the administrative wing of the complex to retrieve an access key the lecturing fleshbags had forgotten to give him. He had grown bored of waiting for her and started hunting for a staircase or elevator; whichever came first. His efforts proved fruitless by the time he reached the last hallway, which led to a dead end.
One not as dead as Revenant would have liked. Sounds muddled together to form fragments of conversation. A particularly powerful bellow of laughter resounded from the only room on the left side of the hall. Revenant looked at the distant doorway with mild disdain. Turning around tempted him, but there was little else of note on that level.
The floor turned to hardwood once he reached the threshold. Most of the legends didn't notice the quiet taps of metal feet that accompanied his muted entrance over their conversations. Revenant paused in the doorway while his frozen gaze raked across the room. It was large and rectangular, outfitted with a kitchen, dining table, and two couches - one in front of an entertainment center, the other a rounded novelty off to the side. Floor-to-ceiling windows made up the wall to his right. There was an elevator sandwiched between the kitchen and table.
To his distaste, everything but the first couch was populated.
Revenant took stock of his newest marks. He wondered briefly what it would be like to have his victims recycled. Most of Hammond's employees had felt that way – a monotonous cycle of track, kill, rinse, repeat – but the games would be a different flavor. For one thing, he wouldn't be able to outright rip their skin open with his bare hands. Not like he was used to, anyway, administrative warning or not. Apparently the technology that censored the worst of the gore in real-time for the viewers wouldn't be able to veil a disembowelment. Pity.
He left the thought as the room registered his presence. Revenant recalled their aliases as they noticed him. Wraith and Crypto looked to him almost in unison from their respective corners of the room. Crypto, who sat with his tech at the table extending from the opposite wall, took stock of the simulacrum for a beat and then returned to his drone. Wraith sat at the rounded couch with an exuberant man and a distracted MRVN and didn't shift her focus back to their conversation.
Revenant met her gaze. He even turned his whole head to look at her. She didn't falter and her face betrayed nothing, but she unlaced her fingers and minutely shifted away from the man to her right. Said man – undoubtedly Mirage, if the computer's generous summary was anything to go by – broke his rambling to include her in the conversation a few seconds later, only to be met with a brick wall. After a couple vain attempts to get her attention, Mirage followed her gaze. Bemusement turned to surprise and then settled somewhere between curiosity and unease. The MRVN fiddled with a holo-pad, removed from the shift in atmosphere.
Several seconds passed while Wraith waited for something to happen and Revenant looked back at her with disinterest. In his periphery, the other group in the room was alerted to his presence by a small movement from the stern-looking woman sitting among them. One of their barstools squeaked as they all spun away from their food at the kitchen island to face him.
Revenant looked at them in turn, bored with Wraith. Bangalore, Lifeline, and Gibraltar all sized him up while Wattson looked at him with open curiosity.
It was then that the associate meant to accompany him for a tour trailed into the room. She held an ID card in her left hand and tapped it on Revenant's arm. He restrained himself from flinching back in disgust and instead tensely turned towards her to take it. She addressed the legends while he looked over the card's text and the small portrait of him taken earlier. His name was listed under Alias instead of Name, which had "N/A" in its field.
"Everyone, this is Revenant. He's your newest coworker." Mirage visibly relaxed and Wattson offered him a little wave. "Revenant, this is everyone." She pointedly side-eyed him and said, "Targets only on World's Edge."
This one's feeling brave, he thought to himself.
Bangalore and Gibraltar exchanged unimpressed looks while a couple others narrowed their eyes. The associate bid them adieu, having watched Revenant comb the entire floor from the security room. She was confident he would figure out the rest of it. Eager to put distance between herself and the ex(?)-assassin, she said something about HR's hours being extended over her shoulder as she left through the hall.
Key in hand, Revenant met everyone's stares as he crossed the length of the room to the elevator. He wanted to inspect the training grounds below; he was dying to know if they were allowed to practice on each other outside the ring. Targets only on World's Edge. Maybe with weapons; hand-to-hand should still be on the table. With his hands, it wouldn't be hard to make a little bloodshed look accidental. Revenant held his card over a scanner and the two buttons lit up.
Before he made his selection, Bangalore spoke up. Flatly, she asked "You always this quiet?"
His response was a soft click of the down button.
"Gonna be a drag if cat keeps ya tongue." Lifeline said, returning to her plate.
If Revenant could roll his eyes, he would have before he turned around. He regarded the women and their companions for a moment. Voice dripping with sincerity, he said, "I look forward to meeting you all... real close and personal."
On the other side of the room, unnoticed by everyone, Pathfinder's screen lit up with an exclamation mark and he looked up from his holo-pad. He leaned to the right to peer around Gibraltar and gasped. The elevator doors opened as he put his holo-pad on the ottoman. He nearly shouted to get Revenant's attention before he left. "Hello again, friend!"
Revenant glanced over his shoulder, surprised to see he was indeed who the MRVN was addressing. Caught off-guard by the unreserved greeting, he languidly stood half-inside the elevator and turned towards the robot. Just enough to convey waning interest.
Pathfinder's screen displayed heart eyes as he stood and said, "Say, you're looking much better than the last time I saw you! Much more corporeal."
Revenant didn't have facial muscles to manipulate into an expression, nor a screen to so brazenly display his emotions. All that betrayed his confusion was a quick twitch of his head towards the kitchen crew, but they were all looking at Pathfinder with varying intensities of What the hell are you on about? The MRVN had to be referring to his shadow form, but when would he have seen it? Revenant was no stranger to leaving witnesses, but Pathfinder's level of familiarity didn't project "witnessed a massacre."
Pathfinder came to stand in front of him, heart eyes replaced by a simple smiley face, then faltered. He started to extend a hand but aborted the motion a second later; his screen flickered once, but maintained its smile. He folded his hands in front of himself and said pleasantly, "So, how are your shadow minions doing?"
Revenant recoiled a twitch and felt the eyebrows he no longer had raise in surprise. It was his turn to falter; how the hell did this random MRVN know about them? Revenant struggled to come up with a response that wouldn't earn him a one-way ticket out of the games, but he couldn’t get past the idea of throwing Pathfinder against the elevator's back wall and dismantling him until he had the truth.
Pathfinder watched Revenant stand there for a long pause. He shuffled his feet and drummed his fingers over his hand a couple times. Gibraltar was about to ask the whopping What? on everyone's mind, but Pathfinder changed the subject. "Well... I guess you aren't being prosecuted for murdering Forge, being inducted as a legend and all. Congratulations!"
Now everyone was staring at them; that even got Crypto to look up from his work. His fingers hovered over his laptop mid-keystroke while he looked at them with his equivalent of open-jawed staring. Mirage and Wattson's jaws actually dropped. Wraith froze. Gibraltar and Lifeline seemed dubious of the concept. Bangalore looked impressed.
The audacious comment broke Revenant from his momentary stupor and he acted before the legends could recover from theirs. He hauled Pathfinder into the elevator by the arm with a grunt, prompting an Oh! from the robot. He pressed the close door button at the same time Wraith jumped up to intervene.
"Relax, skinsuit," he said as the gap narrowed to a close. "We're just catching up."