Archive of Our Own

They arrive at the cafe shortly after ten, morning sun just burning away the last of the overnight damp chill from the pavement. Carolina holds the door for Kimball. They're both out of armour, but Carolina brushes a hand at the small of the general’s back as she passes and there's the reassuring bump of a gun under the loose fall of her jacket. Carolina's carrying three weapons in addition to the weapon that her body is on its own. The bell on the door jingles off-tune and dull against the creaky wood of the doorframe at their passing.

There are few businesses operating just three weeks out from the attack on the capital and subsequent ceasefire, and it's clear that this particular establishment is only open in the loosest sense of the word. The front windows are still covered over with sheets of plastic, and most of the menu board has been crossed out with thick black marker, leaving only a few options down the side. A group of women in heavy camouflage jackets and boots sit around a table in the back, and they all make a point not to look up when Carolina and Kimball walk in. The old man behind the counter glances up from his paper book deliberately. Music crackles noisily from an overhead speaker, but it's not in a language that Carolina knows (Russian, maybe, she thinks) and the scratchy muffled efforts of the speaker make it nothing more than white noise bouncing back off the tile and wood.

"Good morning," Kimball says.

"Morning," the old man grunts.

"I'm glad to see you're able to open your business."

"You want coffee?"

"Espresso, if you have it, please."

He jerks his head at the board. "Says I do."

"Yes. I know with transport in the state it is shipping and stocking can be issues for many small businesses."

The man moves over to the espresso machine against the far wall. Across the room one of the women flicks a lighter and Carolina glances over automatically. Kimball folds her hands behind her back and keeps talking, raising her voice slightly over the shriek of the grinder.

"There's going to be an open forum next week for all small business owners in the city to express their concerns and offer suggestions to best deal with the situations. We can all agree that getting the economy moving is a good thing, and we'd like to insure everyone has a voice in that process."

"I saw the bulletin on the network," he says. Slams down a cup and saucer and punches a series of buttons on the machine. Carolina frowns, but Kimball doesn't seem bothered.

"I'm glad."

"Your friend want a drink, General?" he asks shortly, setting the cup down. Kimball smiles, tips her head to Carolina.

"The coffee at this place comes highly recommended," she says.

"Then it would be a shame not to try it," Carolina says, and does not punch Kimball or the old man in the face because she is an adult.

They sit down at a table. They do not sit by the window. This does put them in the direct line-of-sight of the group at the back table, but Kimball graciously allows Carolina to sit with her back to the wall. The old man turns the music up. Carolina sips her espresso. It burns her throat going down and the taste sticks heavy and gritty on her tongue and teeth.

"You need a raincoat," Kimball says. "Summer's over and it's only going to get wetter."

"I'm in armour most of the time. Best raincoat there is."

"The hope is that can change, eventually."

"For you," Carolina shrugs, stirs the coffee in her cup to avoid having to drink it.

"It's not an unreasonable goal for you, either. Once you've taken down Charon the only battles you may well have left to fight could be in the courtroom. You're going to have to start thinking about a future where you don't die in combat."

"You say take down Charon like it's going to be easy."

"Oh I don't at all think it will be easy, Carolina," Kimball says, sipping her espresso with apparent enjoyment. "I think it's going to be one of the most difficult things you've ever done. But I don't think it's going to be the sort of fight you're expecting."

"You think we only know how to fight with our fists and our guns." There is a procession of faceless men in the wings of Carolina's life who have, by their existence, taught her to fight on a myriad of battle fields.

"I think this will be a fight you will need a different kind of power to win. Chorus will stand behind you, of course--"

"You can't promise that--"

"I *can*, actually. Doyle and I have discussed this, this is maybe more our fight than it is yours. But Charon is a big name, and if they're in bed with the UNSC then the work you're going to need to do will be political as much as anything. You have to decide what you want out of this. If it's just to see Hargrove burn, that's easily accomplished behind closed doors. But if you want to bring the sorts of things that Charon's been doing into the public eye you're not going to be able to rely on the backing of the UNSC, not unless you can do everything very publicly."

"Epsilon and I left a lot of back doors into their systems while we were investigating the Chorus situation. Information isn't going to be a problem, assuming Hargrove keeps records. And if the UNSC isn't willing to play ball I'm sure all we need to do is follow the money back a few years. Freelancer itself hit a few Charon Industries facilities, and The Director had to get his information from somewhere. I wouldn't start painting the entirety of the UNSC with the same brush until we've turned ONI upside-down and inside out."

"I'll have to take your word for it."

Carolina sets her spoon on the saucer and forces down the rest of the espresso. One of the women in the back gets up and strides towards the door, backpack swinging off one shoulder.

"You watch the trees, Connie," the old man calls to her, waving a dishrag warningly, and Carolina flinches. He jerks his head toward Kimball and Carolina. "Brave new world out there."

"I'm nobody to be worried about, Mr. Petrov," she says. "I always pay for my coffee, don't I?" The door clatters shut behind her before he can reply.

"Journalists," Kimball explains at Carolina's unspoken frown. "Underground. Factory workers, usually, who send out the unbiased news before the Feds' propaganda machine gets its hands on it."

"Past tense," Carolina reminds her.

"Mmhm."

"I'll leave the future up to people like you," she says. "My short-term goals have served me well enough so far."

"So. Take down Charon?"

"Take down Charon. Help you in whatever way you need to get your government back on its feet. Charon might take some time, I have a feeling we'll be around for a while if you'll have us."

Kimball snorts. "Six months ago getting Tucker and the others to stay was an exercise in fair exchange. Now you give yourself to the cause like an offering."

"Circumstances change," Carolina says. "And I don't speak for any of the others. But... Epsilon and I decided. A while back. We'd done enough damage as other people's weapons. Seems like here is as good a place as any. Probably better than most."

"You don't think the people firing those weapons are the ones who should be paying?"

Carolina places both hands flat on the table, presses each fingertip into the rough grain of the wood one by one. "He did," she says. "I made sure of that."

Kimball glances down, briefly. Carolina wonders if she frightens her. "It's an admirable sentiment," she says after a minute. "And certainly not one without its merits. But you do understand that there is no balance sheet for your actions. There will be no universal quota of goodness that will make up for the perceived negativity you've brought-- we can talk about Karma, though you'd probably have better luck with Bones or Smith, I'm not as spiritual as most people-- but even then there's an assumption of intent and moral absolutism there that makes your entire argument practically impossible to validate."

"I can give you death counts," Carolina says. "I did what I thought was right under the orders of a man who was doing what he thought was right, but it doesn't change the fact that I jumped off a fully-populated 110 storey office tower in the middle of a civilian centre just before it was blown up and laughed about it on the way down."

"Every soldier in every army is doing what they think is right on the orders of someone else who thinks they're right. You're not that special."

"Ignorance doesn't negate my responsibility."

"Doesn't it? It was literally your job to follow orders. Anything else and you would have been court martialled, that's what being a soldier means, Carolina, it means putting your trust in someone, it means believing with unswerving faith that the person giving you the orders, at the end of the day, is doing it for the right reasons."

Carolina's chest is tight, her breath coming fast and short and her heart beating quick under her ribs. She shivers. Kimball meets her gaze and holds it and Carolina wants to look away, wants to back down or back off but the other woman's gaze is steady and daring her to push back and there is a reason Kimball fell in line to lead the New Republic so naturally. "You think that sort of leader exists?" Carolina asks. "You think soldiers-- anyone can afford to have that sort of unquestioning loyalty anymore?"

Kimball wraps her hands around her empty coffee cup, leans forward a bit in her chair. When she speaks there's an unexpected thread of exhaustion in her words. "I'd like to say yes, Carolina. I think that's the ideal. But I can also tell you straight up, if soldiers and civilians alike didn't start questioning the people in charge, didn't pay attention, didn't speak out, none of this would be here today. The New Republic wouldn't exist without that healthy distrust, and as much as I sit here and look at you and want to say that there should be somebody out there who you can hand yourself over to like you're supposed to be able to, I don't think that's true and I don't think it ever will be."

"My point," Carolina says. "Your people saw something wrong and moved to change it. I barely saw something was wrong, and by the time I tried to change anything it was too late to make a difference. So don't sit there and preach self-acceptance and forgiveness and moral relativism when you can not only say that you tried, but that you succeeded, in fighting back."

Kimball holds up a hand. "This isn't a competition for who's been the most revolutionary. Our circumstances were dramatically different."

"I'm not saying it's a competition," Carolina lies. "I'm just saying that it's unfair of you to call into question my chosen form of recovery."

"Maybe," says Kimball. "I'm just concerned that what you call recovery sounds a lot like self-flagellation or seeking absolution from some higher form of moral authority."

"I'm not religious."

"That surprises me."

"My father was a scientist. The worldview tends to stick."

Kimball inclines her head. "Look, Carolina. I'm not saying that what you're doing is wrong. And I'm damn glad to have you here for as long as you'll stay, I just worry that without a concrete, tangible way to track your progress on this... mission to do good of yours, you'll wind up burning yourself out with it."

"And would that necessarily be a bad thing?" Carolina retorts. "You said yourself that I have no plans for the long-term. I never expected to grow old."

Kimball drops her hands into her lap. "I think there are better alternatives. I also think this isn't the sort of thing we're going to address in one conversation."

Carolina, who doesn't think they need to address anything, slides her cup and saucer away from herself across the table. "The coffee is really terrible."

"It's not terrible," Kimball says, laughing under her breath. "Supposed to be like that."

Carolina stands up. Kimball's chair clatters against the tiles as she pushes it back. Everyone in the cafe watches them go. Kimball leaves credit on the table as tip. She'd already paid for their drinks at the counter, but she makes sure the old man sees her flash her credit chit past the reader on the table before they leave. Carolina makes Kimball wait just inside the door while she goes outside to check the vehicle. The guard pretending to be distracted by his datapad in the park across the street signals an all clear to her, but she goes over the truck for foreign objects anyway.

Kimball's quiet on the drive back to the New Republic HQ, but when they pull in to the underground parkade and the kid guarding the entrance --unfamiliar, too many anonymous faces for Carolina's comfort-- asks "Did you enjoy your coffee, General?"

And Kimball grins at him through the open window. "Absolutely. Went down to Petrov's on Fifteenth. Agent Carolina's a cheap date."

The guard grins, snaps off something between a salute and a dance move. "Demand better, Ma'am," he says to Carolina. "Petrov's has terrible coffee, everybody knows that."

*

Carolina leaves Kimball bent over a fresh stack of paperwork in her office and, wrapped in the other woman's raincoat, she heads into the downtown core and catches the shuttle train up the hill to the hotel. It's pouring by the time she steps off at top point, the earlier sun vanished behind low-hanging clouds, lethargic and heavy over the steaming city centre. She follows the mostly residential sidewalks under dripping canopies of overgrown trees, weaving alongside narrow streets overshadowed by low-rising apartment buildings-- seventy-year-old cheap pre-fab held together by the creeping vines and decorative metal staircases twisting up the sides as much as they are by determination and stubbornness. The river runs to her left, cutting off the north-east corner and drawing a line between the factory district and hydro-plant and the rest of the city.

The hotel is just a block away from the bridge, three blocks from the shuttle car stop, bordered on one side by a tiny cultural heritage museum and on the other by what had apparently, at one time, been the offices of a company dealing in the acquisition of off-world goods for individual consumers, but which has been vacant for going on sixteen years with no one possessing the capital to buy up the space.

According to popular lore, the hotel is the oldest building on Chorus. It is also, supposedly, the birthplace of the revolutionary movement that would become the New Republic. Opinions differ drastically on this point, naturally, with some insisting the lobby of the hotel could be set as singular stage for any important moments in the early years of Chorus' recent political history, while others, Kimball amongst them, dismiss the hotel as a pretentious fiction created by armchair philosophers and over-dramatic artists who thought that drinking a bottle of wine and complaining about their taxes on Friday evening made them revolutionaries. Kimball came to the New Republic from the university, and Carolina, while certain that much of what she suggests about the hotel's patrons was correct, is also aware what dangerous places publicly-funded universities can be without a solid fallback. She can very easily imagine the factory workers and the artists creating that solid grounding of principles and direction and action plans over cheap wine in the lobby of the hotel before it began leaking down to the army of discontent, overly-educated overly-energized students at the university.

Either way, the hotel had remained open for business throughout the war, converting rooms to temporary living quarters for single people or couples whose homes were lost in the fighting. The lobby has, perhaps in an unspoken nod to tradition, become an unofficial social gathering place for many of the New Republic supporters. Carolina steps inside and wrings her hair out on the already slippery tiles of the entryway. Inside there's a chill to the air, but the music is something warm and instrumental and most of the sofas and chairs are filled with people. The bar is less crowded, and she squelches across the faded carpet and down the two steps into the small clusters of wooden tables. Tucker waves to her from the back corner near the windows.

"You're famous, Carolina," he says when she pulls out a chair. He's mopping up the remnants of a curry with thin triangles of bread, scrolling his datapad with his free hand. The New Republic's chief medic is sat across from him and appears to be actively engaged in drinking her lunch, if the dusty bottle and tumbler of clear liquid standing proud between her untouched silverware is anything to go by. Carolina does not actually know her name. Everybody tends to refer to her as Lady Bones and Carolina's had enough casual conversations with her over the past few weeks that asking her actual name at this point would feel rude.

"Are we on social media?" Carolina asks, sinking into the chair. Tucker turns his datapad enough so she can see a blurry photo of her and Kimball sitting in Petrov's with their espresso. Underneath, the caption reads 'In case you were worried the new government wasn't gonna be provided those fifteen minute coffee breaks the unions fought so hard for.'

"There's more," Tucker says, and flicks his fingers.

'New Republic leader isn't afraid to show her face in public. Does anyone even remember what the Feds look like?'

'Kimball puts her money where her mouth is re: economic revitalization plan. Public forum next week!'

'Most awkward morning after or most awkward morning after? It's ok, mystery lady, I wouldn't drink that coffee either.'

'General Vanessa Kimball appears in public after multiple assassination attempts. Incredibly brave or incredibly stupid: you decide.'

"Nobody told me you were banging," Tucker says petulantly.

"We're not," Carolina mutters.

"Do you want a drink?" Bones asks, nudging her bottle closer.

"You have no idea. Unfortunately people tend to frown on it when you drink the entire bottle."

"Enhanced metabolism?"

"Yes."

Bones hmms. "How many years would I spend behind bars if I wrote a paper on you?"

"Not worth it," Carolina says. "I'm not that interesting."

Bones pours a measure of the clear liquor into Carolina's empty water glass. "There's something to be said for the placebo effect. Trust me, I'm a doctor."

"Vodka?"

"The fuck else would it be?" Bones demands.

"Sorry. Stupid question."

Carolina throws back the contents of the glass in a couple burning gulps that go down like fire and leave her holding her breath to force back her body's automatic urge to cough.

"I'm guessing that little stunt was not your idea."

"No. No it was not."

"It was totally smart though," Tucker says, pushing his plate out of the way and resting his elbows on the table. "She made her point. Now Doyle's gonna have to do something."

"Uh," says Bones. "I think he already is."

The crowd in the bar has gone quiet, and Carolina turns to follow where everyone is watching the entrance to the hotel lobby. Tucker says something in a language she doesn't know, sounding delighted. Bones pours herself another drink and slams the bottle hard on the table.

Standing dripping politely on the tiles of the foyer is General Doyle, flanked on one side by Dr. Gray and on the other by his tiny silver-haired seventy-something-year-old lady second in command. He brushes a hand self-consciously over the shoulders of his suit coat where rainwater has collected, straightens his shoulders, and strides briskly through the lobby, smiling and offering greetings as he goes.

"They fucking deserve each other," Bones says somewhere between awe and horror, once Doyle and his companions have settled themselves at a table and ordered chai. "The entire fucking peace treaty is going to be one big game of dare and double dare."

"Wash is actually going to explode, holy shit," says Tucker, leaning over his datapad and typing furiously. "Like, do any of those three even know how to shoot a gun?"

"Peacetime selfie, Agent Carolina," Bones says wryly, and squishes their faces together in front of her datapad before Carolina can pull away. The older woman smells like cigarettes and antiseptic and when Carolina looks at the picture on the screen all she can focus on is the streaks of grey in their hair and the way neither of them are really smiling.

Doyle stays for about half an hour. A lot of people leave in that time, Tucker amongst them. "I need to go talk Wash down," he says. "And then my kids are running the obstacle course against Grif's team this afternoon and we are totally gonna kick their asses."

"The fences are back up?" Carolina asks.

Tucker nods. "As of like, an hour ago. Caboose is still very sorry, for the record."

"Kimball would still like an official report from him, for the record," Carolina retorts.

Tucker sighs dramatically. "Of course she would. It's the fucking stim-packs all over again."

Bones chokes on her vodka, coughing. "Stim-packs," she says, slamming a hand on the table. "Write it on my fucking tombstone."

Tucker shakes his head hard. "It was a dark time, man."

Carolina has no idea what they're talking about. She drinks more of the vodka. Thinks about ordering food, but there are meals back at HQ and the financial situation for herself and Wash and the Reds and Blues is still bogged down in nebulous bureaucracy. Her accounts were frozen after Freelancer reported her KIA, later seized when the Project was declared under investigation. She'd set up a few temporary accounts under fake names after Freelancer, but they had been brief measures with balances barely high enough to keep her in transportation and food. On Chorus, she has nothing to support herself beyond whatever skills she can offer to Kimball and by extension the government, and they have yet to discuss any sort of quantifiable associated value. She's got a place to sleep and food to eat and as dependant as it makes her feel, a life of military service as conditioned her to consider this an adequate trade-off. She thinks if she ever makes it back to Earth, if she can ever detangle the mess of red tape and high-clearance secrecy that her life has become, she will probably have a decent inheritance thanks to her father. Assuming all of his assets haven't been repossessed by the UNSC as repayment for war crimes. Assuming she wouldn't be charged for war crimes herself as soon as she showed her face. Maybe living out the rest of her days on Chorus isn't a bad idea after all.

Tucker disappears into the rain, and Carolina hunches down in Kimball's raincoat, the sleeves too long and the fabric damp and clingy in the chill humidity of the indoors and she finishes most of the bottle of vodka in silence while Bones sits and smokes and watches Doyle and Gray and Doyle's second drink their tea like they fully expect it to be the last thing they ever taste. Out of armour and in the back corner Carolina's practically invisible. She doesn't like going out without her armour, but the jacket helps in the psychological sense. Tactically it's useless, of course, but she can dredge up enough self-awareness to recognize that the presence of the unfamiliar fabric over her shoulders and back and chest is providing some sort of indefinable emotional support system. Kimball had assured her absently as she was leaving that they'd find her a jacket of her own before winter really took hold. Carolina wonders if she'd notice if she just never returned this one.

"Oh thank Christ, yes, please leave," Bones mutters as soon as Doyle and his party begin pushing their chairs back. "My blood pressure was going through the roof just watching you poor fuckers."

"They're not out yet," Carolina mutters darkly. She checks her own social media feeds. Nothing yet, but everyone she knows has reposted the 'morning after' photo of her and Kimball. She messages Kimball 'you could at least buy me dinner first,' and sends Tucker a picture of Doyle leaving the hotel.

'Tell Wash he can stop breathing into a paper bag.'

Tucker replies first. 'Pretty sure he's planning to use the paper bag to murder someone. Not sure who yet will get back to you also we have a cat now I guess'

'The public is more interested in a politician's sex life, news at eleven,' Kimball says.

Bones walks her back to the shuttle car through the rain. The sidewalks are coated in a carpet of waterlogged leaves, each footstep soft and slippery underfoot. "So you fell in with Vanessa pretty quick," Bones says, ducking to avoid a tree branch.

"I suppose."

"Surprising. After that mercenary son of a bitch, doesn't seem like her first move would be bringing in another right-hand-man straight from the Great War's trauma ward."

"I'm not a mercenary," Carolina says sharply. "I'm not in this for money, and I'm not going to betray her."

"Not in it for the money, that I can buy. Guilt complex the size of your metaphor of choice hanging over your head, I know the type. But what the hell's keeping you loyal? Can't tell me the plight of some backwater peace of shit colony and its civil disturbances pulls on your heart strings that hard."

Carolina stares straight ahead, lets the rainwater run into her eyes, kicks at the sloppy mess of leaves on the pavement. "I never said I was loyal to the New Republic, did I?"

"There we go," Bones says, laughing sharply. "Wasn't so hard, was it? And now I'm inclined to trust you a whole hell of a lot more."

"I'm so glad to have your blessing," Carolina says dryly.

"For someone who drank most of my vodka you could do to show a bit more respect." They cross the street, shove through the swinging gate to the fenced-off area for the shuttle car. "Besides. The truth of it is I liked Felix. Liked the motherfucker a lot, and until a month ago would've told you without a damn bit of hesitation that I'm never wrong when it comes to reading people. So listen, kid. I want to like you. Want to trust you, and Vanessa obviously thinks you're good people. And you seem like you'd lie down on the wire for her. But I can't trust you. Not now."

Carolina ducks her head quickly. "I understand. For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I don't think you should trust anyone entirely, and to be frank I don't know you and don't particularly need you to trust me, but I am sorry for what Felix did to all of you. I know what that's like, and it's not something I would wish on anyone."

Bones swipes the water off her face with the back of her arm. "Good," she says. "You don't take bullshit, which is gonna be a good quality to have if you're involved in the negotiations. Like I said. You seem like good people. Don't fuck it up."

"Not planning on it," Carolina says, and steps on to the just-arrived shuttle car. At the other end of the car a group of twenty-somethings chattering loudly in Hindi and sporting ill-fitting business casual wear keep glancing over at her and down at their datapads, obviously trying to match her to her photo on their social media feeds. When their stop comes they all crowd together and inch past her to get to the door like they're afraid she'll reach out and bite, sending nervous glances over their shoulders until the door hisses shut on the last cautious glance.

*

Carolina dyes her hair that night. The colour is something expensive and viciously bright crimson she'd picked up the same day the realization that she was going to kill the Director had solidified in the front of her mind. It's stored in a metal tube that she can tuck away on a pocket of her armour, and can be mixed with any base colouring developer. And naturally, if she needs to know the most effective and easiest to obtain hair colouring products, she goes to find Washington.

He's staying in a south-west apartment block provided by the Feds. Donut is staying across the hall. Sarge is deliberately not present, though Tucker even more so. Wash opens the door in full armour with a gun already drawn and a cat wrapped around his ankles.

Carolina says, "I can't believe you actually have a cat."

Wash lowers the gun. "Hello to you too. He needed somewhere to stay."

"Which is why they have shelters."

"Every shelter that's still operating is already over-capacity. And with his injuries, they would've had to put him down. Besides, he's a physical representation of Tucker's slowly growing guilty conscience. I'm feeling vindicated."

"Are you going to invite me in?"

Wash steps back. Carolina's shorter than him out of her armour and it's the first time all day she feels truly ridiculous to be out of it. She's still wearing the fucking raincoat, but in the heat of Wash's barren apartment it feels like nothing more than it is, a flimsy piece of ill-fitting fabric trapping dampness against her skin and dripping silently on the utilitarian grey of the carpet.

"What does Tucker have to feel guilty over?" she asks, already knowing she probably doesn't want to know the answer.

"He's angry that I'm staying here," Wash says, shrugging. "Thinks we should all be back at the New Republic base like one big reunited happy family, like that wouldn't send any disturbingly biased messages to the general population. 'Sorry, guys, the mysterious war hero strangers are all on the side of the revolutionaries for no good reason beyond Lavernius Tucker wants an active sex life.'"

"Were you even sleeping together before all of this?"

"No!" Wash throws up his hands. "That's what I said. The honeymoon phase has waited this long. And with everyone else practically going around in New Republic tee-shirts, someone's gotta attempt to maintain the appearance of neutrality."

Carolina's first instinct is to ask "why?" which she quashes, thank Christ. "You can't blame the captains for having loyalty biases, Wash. They worked with the New Republic for six months. That's going to leave an impression."

"What about you, Boss? You can't deny it looks like you've chosen a side, the way you and General Kimball are together. You know Epsilon and I have been talking with Doyle. He's already setting things in motion to get us in to Charon's records. He's assigned us an entire research team."

"That's very generous of him," she says. "But we've also got to face the fact that if we want Chorus as our primary backer in any allegations we launch against Charon they need to be doing so from a position of stable governance. They're already an outer edge colony. Let Charon's lawyers and PR department at them with the government the way it is now and any accusations they make will be laughed out of the courtroom before the ink's dry."

Wash crouches down so the cat can climb up his knee and onto his shoulder. "I know that. I just think it looks bad for all of us to come in here saying we're offering help as an unbiased third party and then have most of our people buddy up with the New Republic right out of the gate."

"The only person who said we were unbiased was you, Wash," she says gently. "People may have made that assumption, and I agree it would have been the best stance to take, especially knowing what we do about the degree to which this war was manipulated, but the truth is that's not how things are playing out. And you can't ask the sim soldiers to lose their allegiances now. What we can do--what we *need* to be doing, is making as widely public as possible the exact degree and nature of Felix and Locus' involvement in the war. Everyone needs to know which events were rigged, what information was false, where their blame should be directed. Because right now there's a lot of blame going around and nobody's quite sure where it should be going. And that's not going to end well."

Wash strokes the cat. Its left ear is missing almost entirely, and its back legs are wrapped in bandages. "Doyle's second," he says. "Mrs. Basak? Both her sons and all three of her granddaughters were killed in a New Republic attack a few years back." He doesn't look at her.

Carolina shakes her head sharply. "Grow up, Wash. Do you really think appealing to some sort of personalization, compassion will make me change my opinion? I'm sure everyone can produce a horrific story on command. That's war, you and I both know that."

He keeps petting the cat. She sighs. In some ways, the Wash she had found after Freelancer had matured into a confident, competent leader. But there are still cracks where it is glaringly evident the years of psychological scarring left their marks. She has ridden the rollercoaster of guilt in regards to Wash (twice over, thanks to Epsilon) but that doesn’t change the sour taste at the back of her throat when she looks at him.

"I didn't come here to argue," she says gently.

"Is that what that was?"

"I need a hair dye developer."

He lets out a surprised bark of laughter. The cat twitches, leaps away and disappears behind the sofa. "Jesus Christ. Am I that predictable?"

"Tell me you don't have any and I'll answer that question."

"Yeah, yeah, I've got it. That's one thing that comes easy here, I swear nobody keeps the same hair colour for more than a week."

She takes the bottle he digs out from the bag on the back of the bathroom door. They make polite, strangely forced conversation. She does not see the cat again. She's glad when she can escape back out into the dim twilight of lightly misting rain, turns the heater in her borrowed truck on high all the way back to the city centre and her own apartment.

That's where Kimball finds her, later that night, mixing hair dye in the shared washroom in their apartment. The New Republic soldiers who didn't have family to stay with in the city are bunking down at a military base just outside of the city centre, but after a great deal of arguing it had been determined that it was both safer and more appropriate for Kimball to remain in an anonymous apartment in the city, the location of which is only known to her chosen guards and Doyle and his most trusted staff. Carolina, as Kimball's personal... whatever, takes the second bedroom. Initially Carolina had been opposed to the idea of Kimball being anywhere other than the base during the nights, but once it became apparent that the apartment idea was going to stick she had decided that she would simply remain on guard outside Kimball's door every night. It... Had seemed entirely rational at the time. Nobody had been sleeping much, a lot of things had seemed rational. Kimball had already tracked Carolina down at four in the morning in the training rooms on the base to deliver a dangerously calm, clearly exhausted and very non-negotiable rant on Carolina's training habits and the ways in which they were A) selfish and not in keeping with team readiness and reliability strategies, B) childish and indicative of some sort of barely hidden martyr complex, c) uneducated because there were both qualified therapists and effective chemical sleep aids freely available and D) probably related to larger personality type structures that, to quote, "will probably horrify me when I figure out the extent of the damage and which I am not awake enough to fully consider without crying". Kimball had apologized for a large percentage of the rant the next morning, but Carolina has not been permitted to train during the night or for more than whatever time the doctors consider reasonable since, so she probably should have expected Kimball's dismissal of the 'nighttime door guarding' plan as inevitable. She had not expected Kimball to suggest Carolina simply move in with her as a viable alternative, but the truth of the matter is it means she can still be nearby if anything happens, the beds are far more comfortable than anything on base, and she and Wash no longer have to avoid making awkward 'let's pretend we didn't hear each other's nightmares' eye contact over breakfast each morning.

"So we've got everyone talking," Kimball says, leaning in the doorway. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her hair is a mess from where she's obviously run hands through it.

"Are they saying good things?" Carolina asks.

"Mostly. It helped that Doyle followed my lead, and that neither of us were shot. That should lead to an overall calmer atmosphere, take the edge off if we can be seen in public without the assumption of an assassination attempt."

"Tell me you're not going to make this a habit?"

Kimball chuckles. "Not right now. At least not like it was this morning. I just couldn't sit in HQ behind the walls and the guards and risk turning into the exact sort of thing I'm fighting against."

"I understand that," Carolina says, a little impatient, "but there's sticking to your principles and then there's taking stupid risks."

"And you think this morning was the latter, I know. Here, let me do that, it's always tough trying to get the back of your own head." She steps in closer in the small space, scooping the gloves and bottle out of Carolina's hands. Carolina's first instinct should be to object --she's dyed her hair on her own successfully for years-- but instead she finds herself moving aside easily, tipping her head forward at the first gentle pressure from Kimball's hand.

"I think this morning was a gamble, and you were lucky that it paid off in your favour," she says. "I don't think you can rely on that sort of luck consistently."

"You think I'm naïve."

"No, I think you've had to be very brave and take very high risks and now that you're in a situation where you can afford to sit back and take stock of your resources, where each minute isn't a life or death clock ticking, you aren't quite sure how to turn off that emergency triage siren in your head."

Kimball guides her head to the left, fingertips brushing dye across the fine hairs at the base of her neck, sensation a choppy static thing as she passes over knotted scar tissue. A shiver rushes up and down Carolina's spine, and it's a conscious effort not to draw her shoulders up defensively.

"I'm not sure we're out of the danger zone," she says. "What if we figure out everything Felix and Locus did and everyone's still angry? What if they just fanned a fire that was already there?"

Carolina tries to shake her head but Kimball holds her still. "That's not what you’re afraid of, Vanessa. Come on. That's the expected scenario. That's why peace talks are happening, that's what the working groups and the negotiations and the social media tricks are all for. The real danger comes if the entire thing was a hoax. What if your entire revolution was a lie? That's when you get rioting in the streets, that's when the people get really angry. Because it means a whole hell of a lot of people died for nothing, it means everyone was fooled, it means, or it will seem like it means, that the Feds were right all along. And no one is going to like that."

"That's not possible," Kimball says assuredly. "There were stirrings of discontent long before Felix and Locus arrived on planet. I can show you binders of policy, hours of video footage of government silencing tactics, can walk you through word by word propaganda vs. fact and the blatant lies that were being fed to the public for years. Felix and Locus didn't shut down an entire media network for being too anti-establishment. They didn’t beat my aunt and uncle to the ground during an unarmed protest, or restructure the entire political science faculty at the university to better suit their agenda." She tilts Carolina's head back with a hand under her chin, leaving her throat exposed. Carolina closes her eyes against the glare of the florescent light strip and breathes shallowly as not to draw the acidic burn of the dye into her lungs. Kimball is still talking, her low voice rising and falling in even, steady rhythm. It is easy to see how she led an army to victory. The air in the tiny room is heavy with condensation, like it is everywhere on Chorus. Carolina can feel panic trying to get a hold in her veins but it's a distant, disconnected thing, like a memory or a dream that can't get purchase on the smoother glass of her mind. Her pulse beats loudly in her ears and she sways back a bit against Kimball, trying to keep her balance but lightheaded. She opens her eyes and blinks hard against the light.

"I refuse to entertain the idea that everything we fought for was a fiction," Kimball is saying. And then, "Carolina, are you alright?"

"Yes," Carolina says automatically. It's instinctive, a defence reaction that trips out of her mouth before her brain's even registered the question.

Kimball guides her head back down so she's facing herself straight on in the mirror. Unnatural green eyes stare back and she has to shut them again, has to fight down a burst of nausea as the panicky adrenaline comes closer to the surface. "Ok," Kimball says. "Almost done."

She finishes in silence, and once done she guides Carolina out of the bathroom with a hand between her shoulder blades. They sit at the tiny kitchen table and drink the terrible ginger tea that is the only kind of tea in the apartment and which they both hate but can’t be bothered to replace. Kimball doesn't turn on the lights beyond the dim glow of the stove light and the faint illumination of light pollution that seeps in through the window. She works on her datapad, lips pressed together in frustration, but when Carolina offers to help she declines. Carolina's own datapad is still in her bag by the door, and the one time she moves to go get it Kimball reaches an absent hand out to rest over her arm, gentle pressure holding her in place. She doesn't even look up from her work, and Carolina could break the hold with no effort at all, but instead she finds herself settling back in the chair. The dye takes thirty minutes to set. It's a clearly defined amount of time, and the dimmed lights and quiet presence of Kimball across from her along with the newly familiar strong scent of ginger from the tea ease her back from that edge of overwhelmed panic, settle her back in her body and her head.

When she washes the dye out her hair in the mirror is a vibrant, aggressive red. Kimball laughs from outside the doorway. "It looks like you washed your hair in the blood of your enemies."

Carolina grins something feral and sharp at her in the mirror. "That's the general idea, yes."

*

A week later, Carolina strides alongside a quietly furious Kimball through the halls of the New Republic HQ. Kimball's anger is a quiet, well-mannered thing and all the more dangerous for it. Carolina has yet to witness an explosion but is of no doubt that it will be deadly when it comes. Kimball is straight-backed and breathing deeply and each clank of Carolina's armoured footsteps on the tile seems obnoxiously, destructively loud in her wake. That morning Doyle had stated unequivocally that the Federal Army would not instate any New Republic soldiers into its ranks, would not permit any New Republic soldiers to apply to military service, and that any New Republic soldiers formerly holding positions within the Federal Army should consider themselves lucky not to be facing criminal charges. The negotiations, if they could be called that, had gone on for four hours and had gotten absolutely nowhere. Very privately, Carolina can see where Doyle is coming from. Carolina had been with Kimball the entire time, but unable to follow most of the negotiations. English is only spoken, as a general rule, in the home or in casual situations, and until she'd arrived on Chorus Carolina hadn't known a single word of Hindi. She's been trying to teach herself, but it's a long and arduous process made ever more frustrating by the constant reminders of her slow progress as conversations and meetings and documents pass her by. The world of politics is already an unfamiliar one, and the language barrier serves only to make it more so.

"Do we know where the law enforcement working group is on their action plan and policy drafting?" Kimball asks.

Carolina accesses the files on her datapad from her helmet's HUD. "Policy's still stalled at civilian police jurisdiction on military bases in the case of suspected abuses of civilian rights," she says. "And action plan is still waiting on information from Doyle's people."

Kimball blows out a frustrated breath. "Ok. I'd like you to sit in on their meetings, see if you can bring forward new ideas."

Carolina frowns. "I don't really think I'm qualified for the sort of work you're hoping to come out of this group."

"I'm hoping for *work* to come out of this group, at the moment," Kimball says. "And sometimes all that's needed is a fresh perspective. Besides, you were there this morning, know roughly what we're dealing with on the military side of things."

"Civilian police aren't going to solve that problem for you," Carolina points out.

Kimball rubs her eyes. "I'm aware of that, thank you. Nonetheless, I'd like you to be part of that working group."

"Thirty seconds ago you just wanted me to sit in on the meetings."

Kimball smiles flatly from behind her hands. "Keep talking. See what happens next."

Carolina does not keep talking. Carolina goes to the meeting of the working group that afternoon and once she's convinced everyone to, grudgingly, switch to English, been summarily dismissed in reaction to her lack of post-secondary qualifications, terrified one member into fleeing the room and offended another into storming out, and arbitrarily declared herself leader of the group as no one else appears to be taking the position seriously, she drags the rough outline of a completed action plan out of the remaining members by 2:00 in the morning. Kimball examines the result the next morning over coffee in her office.

"This is fantastic," she says. "Now bring me something slightly less terrifyingly Orwellian. I forgot you grew up under martial law and probably never saw a problem with that."

Carolina delivers the news to the working group, who then deliver themselves to the hotel for morning drinks. "It's atmospheric," one of the less obnoxious PhD candidates in military history says, pouring vodka into his orange juice. "We’re putting Chorus back together in the same place we tore it apart."

Carolina drinks a lot of very strong espresso very fast and tries not to bite anyone's head off. Bones staggers in shortly before the lunch rush and drags a chair up to their table uninvited. She folds her arms on the table, shoving datapads and cups out of her way and dropping her head into the curve of her elbow. Carolina pokes her, and gets a muttered stream of Hindi in reply.

"English," she says.

Bones makes an irritated growling noise in the back of her throat.

"Long night, Doc?" the only actual police officer (former) in the group asks.

"Eighteen hours long," she grumbles. "We need to get the second hospital back up soon, this is becoming untenable."

"Would you like to hear about the problems with the police force?" Carolina asks.

"I would not, thank you, give me that cup, I need to be awake more than you need to experiment with caffeine poisoning."

"Technically that's impossible."

"And yet you keep trying. Hold up, Kimball's put you in charge of writing police policy? Weren't you a fucking UNSC special projects lifer?"

"This is the second draft," Carolina says primly, and pulls her coffee further out of Bones' reach.

"I'll bet it is."

Carolina finishes the coffee and orders another pot. She also gets into a yelling match with one of the PhD candidates that successfully empties out their entire corner of the bar. Bones disappears in the early afternoon after falling asleep in her chair, having run out of acerbic commentary about the same time Carolina runs out of coffee and is refused any further refills. This is also, coincidentally, the same time the working group threatens mutiny, so they break for the day. Carolina reports back to Kimball on their progress over reheated dahl in Kimball's office.

Kimball regards her across the graveyard of coffeecups and folders. "You took to this project... well."

Carolina shrugs. "It's fun. I mean, once I crushed all who opposed me and set us on the proper path."

Kimball laughs. Carolina decides it's probably better not to mention what percentage of that was entirely serious.

The police working group is one of the more time-sensitive projects. Armonia is made up of about equal numbers of Federal and New Republic supporters with widely varying military backgrounds and equally varied political fluency. The Feds are still in charge of the police force, what there is left of it, and issues are cropping up faster than Carolina can keep track. The sense of urgency is palpable at each meeting, at each revision of the document or each bureaucratic thicket of red tape they find themselves tangled in as a result of their lack of experience in governance. Carolina's struggling her way through the policies already in place whenever she has free time, but more often than not she finds herself snagged on a particularly obscure piece of bureaucratic jargon and has to go begging translation from whoever she can track down. The working group, meanwhile, struggles visibly to put their ideas across in English during discussion, and if she hadn't seen the mess they were in before she showed up Carolina would worry that her presence is only serving to slow things down. It's an exercise in frustration, but one which remains primarily distantly academic. That is, until a radical Federalist shoots out the windshield of the truck that Carolina and Kimball are driving on their way between their apartment and the New Republic HQ.

Carolina's in full armour. Kimball isn't, but she's also in the passenger seat and Carolina doesn't have to say a thing before she's hit the floor, body folding up in the space between the dashboard and the seat even as she fumbles under the seat for a rifle. Carolina swerves the truck off the road, skidding up across the sidewalk before the shooter takes out their front tires and they spin to a stop. Another round of bullets comes once they've stopped moving. Carolina launches herself out of the vehicle, HUD already lighting up the shooter’s likely location and marking him in her sights as hostile. The speed unit flickers in and out-- there's not a whole lot of ground to cover but better if she does it fast. The shooter obviously sees her coming, because he's just turning to run when she hits him full force, slams him into the pavement and sends the SMG skidding out of his hands across the road. He's not even wearing armour. She thinks probably she broke a few of his ribs. He's young enough that her first reaction is to label him a kid, but once she gets a better look at his face her estimation of his age goes up by a good five years. Old enough, she thinks coldly, that the naivety and passion of youth is no excuse. She grinds his wrist against the cement. He doesn't even cry out, just grits his teeth and glares up at her.

"Who are you working for?" she asks. It's a safe bet to assume Fed radical, there'd been enough of them targeting Kimball in a variety of increasingly creative, increasingly desperate assassination attempts during the first three days after the ceasefire that it's not surprising to find a straggler. She swings her rifle off her shoulder.

"Fuck you, terrorist," he says. "I'm willing to die for the good of Chorus."

"Oh good," she says cheerfully, and puts the gun against his head.

"Carolina!" Kimball's voice carries across the twenty feet of pavement between them. She's still in street clothes with nothing more than a raincoat and a gun slung over her shoulders and she's striding down the sidewalk completely in the open, vulnerable.

"Get back in the car!" Carolina snarls. It does not strike her until this exact second that her responsibility may have been more to remaining with Kimball to ensure she was safe from potential further attack rather than immediately going after the attacker. It's not a particularly comforting thought, and she shoves it aside to be dealt with later.

"Do not kill him," Kimball says.

Carolina snorts. "He was trying to kill you."

"Yes. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't get a fair trial. We're no longer at war."

Carolina stares. "You're kidding. A fair trial? He shot at you. That's called treason."

Kimball shakes her head. "We need a government before you can go around accusing people of treason," she says wryly. "But that's beside the point. You don't kill people, not unless it's a last resort in self-defence. Is that clear?"

Carolina puts more weight on the shooter's ribcage. He groans, very quietly. It's deeply satisfying. "Yes ma'am," she bites out. Kimball tosses a pair of magnetic handcuffs to Carolina. Carolina decides it's probably better not to ask why there're cuffs in the truck. She snaps them on the shooter's wrist, jerks him to his feet. He goes an alarming shade of green and promptly throws up all over his own boots.

"We'll take him to the police," Kimball says.

Carolina rolls her eyes and is glad Kimball can't see inside the helmet. "Not to cast doubt on the Feds, but a Fed-controlled detention facility is hardly going to be the most secure place for a Fed radical."

"It's not like we have another option," Kimball replies with resignation. "I'll make some calls, find out if we can put some of our people in their to guard him as well. And with the courts in their current state we can barely prosecute a traffic ticket let alone an assassination attempt. But once things have been worked out a bit further, he’ll get a fair trial."

Carolina doesn't bother informing her that it is, in fact, not possible at all to prosecute a traffic violation at the moment. They're working on it. Lawyers are exhausting, and she's no longer allowed to be the primary point of contact between the lawyers and the working group. Kimball doesn’t need to know that, either.

"We'll take him back to HQ until I can make some calls," Kimball says, shrugging a bit helplessly. "I don't want to dump this on the police without some forewarning. I'm sure we've got an empty storage room we can keep him in for a few hours."

Carolina prods the shooter in the back with her gun. He trudges along in silence. It's not until they get back to the truck that Carolina remembers their tires have been shot out.

"I'll call for someone to come pick us up," Kimball says, letting her head thump back against the side of the stranded vehicle. "You, uh, keep our prisoner company."

She takes a few steps away. Carolina stares at the shooter. He stares down at the ground.

"The New Republic wants what's best for Chorus, too," she says.

"Fuck you," he replies, wrapping his arms around his stomach.

"Yeah. Good talk."

They stand in silence while Kimball probably radios everyone on the goddamn planet individually and writes in her diary and watches some cat videos. The shooter coughs painfully and spits blood onto the side of the truck. Carolina stares straight ahead and pretends not to see. Somewhere nearby, a bird starts to sing. Kimball continues talking on her radio. The shooter coughs some more, but nothing else comes out of his mouth. Eventually, it starts to rain.

After approximately six hundred years, Bitters shows up with another truck. His hair is bright orange this week. Kimball jumps in the front seat, which leaves Carolina in the back with the shooter.

"So this looks exciting," Bitters says flatly once everyone's buckled in.

"Casual morning assassinations, you know how it is, Lieutenant," Kimball replies.

"And let me guess," he says, still sounding profoundly bored, "You're gonna deliver him straight into the hands of the prison industrial complex, because that's apparently a thing we're still doing even though we spent like eight years fighting against that sort of Federalist bullshit. Cool. Nothing problematic there at all."

Kimball's shoulders sag a bit. Carolina glares. "I was just going to kill him," she offers.

The rest of the drive goes by in silence. They do, as it happens, wind up putting the shooter in a storage room. There are two guards posted on the door but Carolina spends most of the day checking in on him anyway. Kimball sends for a medic once Carolina admits the extent of his injuries. The medic has spiky neon blue hair and she spends the entire examination and treatment talking very seriously to the entirely disinterested shooter. Carolina has no idea what she's saying, but it's pretty easy to guess it's not in line with the shooter's own politics, considering whenever the medic looks at Kimball there may as well be literal hearts in her eyes, and she makes a point of introducing herself to the two guards and asking them about their families and hobbies. She does not once even acknowledge Carolina's presence.

The police don't come to retrieve him until almost midnight, and Carolina's resorted to pacing the halls to release her restless energy. Kimball oversees the transfer herself. The shooter is silent when they take him. His skin is sallow, sweat beading on his upper lip and forehead.

"I wanted to apologize," Carolina says once the doors have shut behind the officers (who looked about as happy to be there as the shooter) and the lobby is empty.

Kimball slumps a bit, leans her back against the back of a chair. She'd decided an hour earlier that if she sat down she would just never get up again, and she's been leaning tragically against any available surface ever since.

"For what?" she asks on a sigh.

Carolina folds her hands behind her. "I didn't act in accordance with my position this morning."

"How so?"

"I'm meant to be acting as a body guard. I should have remained with you until we were certain that the danger had passed."

Kimball inclines her head. "Our situation is a little unique. I'm a soldier, can defend myself. It was more important that you were able to detain the assassin."

"That wasn't my call to make."

Kimball taps her fingers together. "Maybe not. But in a situation like that, where a snap judgement needed to be made, I trust you to make the correct choice."

Carolina shakes her head. "And when I don't?"

Kimball pushes herself back somewhere in the vicinity of fully upright. "I trust that that won't happen, but if it ever does you can consider it a learning experience. If you don't trust yourself to make the proper call in that sort of situation then I suggest you consider why that is and take steps to improve your confidence in regards to that type of decision."

Carolina responds to Kimball's tone before the words fully penetrate, nodding briskly and murmuring agreement and only really taking in the meaning behind the words once they're already walking down to the parkade. She’d been expecting a reprimand, and it's difficult not to take Kimball's suggestion as one. The morning's events play over and over in her head, and driving through the quiet nighttime streets with Kimball barely awake in the passenger seat creates mirroring loops in her head, keeps her eyes scanning the darkened buildings and thick foliage for the glint of a sniper rifle or the slight movement of an attacker. Kimball’s' wearing a spare set of armour for the drive, but Carolina still maps out the exact movements she'd need to throw her own body over the other woman's without causing damage, reviews the placement of the weapons in the truck and the most efficient way to ensure that they would both be armed.

When they get back to the apartment Kimball wanders around making tea and replying to the last few messages on her datapad. Carolina stays a safe distance away from her, keeps her shoulders and eyes down and doesn't speak unless spoken to. Every step Kimball takes is weighed down with exhaustion, and she pauses for a long moment in reaching to get mugs down for tea, forehead tipping forward to rest against the door of the cupboard and hands braced above her head like the task has proven impossible to complete without a rest.

When she disappears into her room she leaves a steaming mug of tea on the table for Carolina and pauses at her door to say goodnight. Carolina takes the tea and retreats to her own room where she does not sleep for most of the night.

The attempt on Doyle comes two weeks later. Carolina's just returning from her morning workout at the base, and she quickens her step to catch up with Doyle’s second in command where she's making her way up the front steps of the New Republic HQ. Her boots click sharply against the stone on each step. She's in uniform. It's a thing the Feds do a lot, a subtle reminder that they possess a longstanding power structure-- one which is built around the solid backbone of legislation and tradition and which the New Republic can achieve only through time and success. Her silver hair is knotted in a severe bun at the back of her head, and she swings the heavy doors open with hands papery and blue-veined but with a casual ease that speaks both to a decent muscle tone and to a sharp self-awareness of her presentation and the implied power it represents.

"Agent Carolina," she says briskly. "Good, I was hoping you'd be here, makes my job easier, can take me straight to General Kimball."

"Do you have an appointment?" Carolina asks, partly just to be obnoxious and partly because Kimball's been running herself ragged and each time she has to rearrange her schedule to deal with another crisis the circles under her eyes get darker.

"Take your helmet off," Mrs. Basak says impatiently. "I certainly can't lip-read through your faceplate."

Carolina pops the seals on her helmet. "Do you have an appointment?"

"I do not." She keeps walking, crossing the lobby and starting up the stairs. A muscle in Carolina's eye twitches.

"General Kimball is very busy," she says, jogging to keep up far enough ahead that she can turn back a bit to face her as she talks. "You can't just barge in."

"You haven't been watching the news," Mrs. Basak says dismissively. "Given that someone set off an explosion in General Doyle's office forty-five minutes ago I'm actually quite certain I can barge in."

"Do you know who was responsible?"

"Not yet. We've got security tapes, we'll know soon enough. But until then General Doyle is recovering from a mild concussion and I decided I'd like to speak to General Kimball in person."

"I can assure you the New Republic had nothing to do with any attack on the Federal Party," Carolina says. "So if you're here to throw accusations, you're wasting your time."

"Of course I don't think Kimball had anything to do with it. She and her people are in the best situation, strategically, that they've been in for years. But every group has its radicals."

Carolina bristles. "We're very aware of that. Are you sure it wasn't a Federalist? Maybe some of your people are unhappy with General Doyle's leadership."

"The tapes will tell us. Meanwhile, I'm here as a favour to Kimball. There are plenty of people within the government ready and eager to blame the New Republic for this attack. And just as many citizens will follow their lead. I'm here to discuss damage control-- The Federal Party is prepared to make a formal statement assuring the people that we don't blame the New Republic. We'd simply like a few assurances from the New Republic before we do that to make sure everyone is on the same page."

"You’re here to blackmail us."

"I'm here to minimize the potential for unpleasant fallout after an attack on the head of our government."

"What sort of assurances are you looking for?"

"The sort I'll be discussing with General Kimball, not her... bodyguard." It's pretty clear she has to stop herself from saying something else.

Kimball's just coming out of her office when they reach her, but seeing who is accompanying Carolina she immediately steps back inside, politely holding the door open. "Mrs. Basak," she says. "It's a pleasure to see you. I apologize I didn't know you were coming." Kimball’s switched to Hindi by the end of her sentence, and Carolina, following the other two into the office, settles in to watch the elder woman for signs of a weapon while she struggles to follow the general gist of the conversation.

The meeting lasts for two hours. As soon as Mrs. Basak leaves Kimball's professional mask falls away and she rises to pace to the window, hands tugging through her hair.

She starts speaking, swears quietly, switches to English. "Everything they're asking for seems so small," she says. "A change of wording here, a compromise on a bit of policy there. The suggestion that encouraging New Republic supporters to remain peaceful and quiet and not to stir up any sort of fuss. And in exchange the Feds will do us the *courtesy* of letting everyone know we weren't responsible for an attack that we all know we weren't responsible for."

"Politics," Carolina says. "Sounds about right."

"And they're making an assumption that the backlash will be so dramatic that it could destabilize the peace talks. Never mind that when I get shot at it's 'oh, let's keep all of this quiet, this sort of thing is to be expected and we don't want to draw attention to our embarrassing radicals.'"

"Do you think the backlash would be that bad? People would just be operating on presumptions of guilt."

"I don't know. Either way, I'm disrespecting the people. But there are enough people out there who lost their faith in me after the Felix thing, or after I agreed to peace talks, that publicly supporting Fed silencing tactics could spark just as much backlash as more Fed radicals thinking we attacked Doyle."

"So you take your chances. Maintaining your integrity in the eyes of your supporters is going to be more useful in the long run. And besides, you've got just as much authority, just as much credibility as Doyle's people do right now. You have to stop thinking of them as the real government. You said it yourself, there is no government, not really. Make a statement before they get the chance. Express your sympathies, but make sure everyone knows you had nothing to do with it. They can't contradict you without looking like they want to start something."

Kimball bows her head. "You’re right. I've let myself get bogged down in the compromises and power shifts of politics, but I spent years leading an army to get here. I can't let myself lose sight of the importance of what I'm fighting for. What we're all fighting for."

Carolina, familiar with the unseen strings of political whims and the stress fractures they can create in the soldiers they pull on, wants simultaneously to ruffle Kimball's hair and pledge her undying allegiance to her. Instead, she says "I'll send the speech writing team up."

Kimball blinks. "I have speech writers?"

"You have Creative Writing undergrads who are very passionate about your cause," Carolina says. "Or possibly they're just very forward-thinking in securing future employment. Either way, they're yours and they've been waiting a month for the opportunity to write a speech for you, so I'm sending them up."

Kimball shakes her head slowly. "Right. Of course they are. Sure. Why not?"

*

It's planned that on the three month anniversary of the ceasefire, Kimball will leave the capital on a day trip through the nearby towns. Three towns, three hour-long speeches, eight hours spent in transit. Twelve hours in total during which she does not intend Carolina to accompany her. They argue about it, of course. They're eating a late lunch/early dinner in the open stairwell of HQ, so everyone working late knows they argue about it which will probably be embarrassing for Kimball later when she realizes that Carolina is right.

"I fought in the army," Kimball says, and "My people aren't useless," and "I've survived far more dangerous situations."

To which Carolina replies with such original rejoinders as "Things are different now," and "I'm here, it's ridiculous not to use me," and "You're acting like a child."

Needless to say, no one wins. Carolina goes to the base to punch the shit out of some training sims, but Epsilon radios her before she makes it more than half way there.

"I finished decoding the files Tucker found with CT's dogtags," he says, like this is supposed to mean something to her.

"What are you talking about?"

"He didn't tell you? The one's from CT. Well, fake CT. I mean, they were real CT's originally, but it was fake CT who had them when he died."

"I'm coming over," Carolina says. "This sounds like the sort of trauma I should experience in person."

She catches a ride to the western part of the city with Jensen, who apparently has family in the area. She's the sort of uncomfortably terrified quiet during the drive that makes it clear she heard their argument. Probably Carolina should try to make her feel at ease. Probably Carolina should not have an argument with her CO in a public space where anyone and everyone can hear. She hadn't really been able to identify her body's physical reactions during the fight but now that she's sitting in the safety of a moving vehicle with only a nervous soldier for company she can recognize the adrenaline crash common after a high-stress mission. She thinks even two weeks ago she would not have had that argument with Kimball. Isn't sure what it means that she can do so now, even if the aftermath feels like every shitty comedown without the cushion of painkillers to ease back the stale fight-or-flight chemicals clogging her bloodstream.

Wash opens the door to his apartment, but he doesn’t say much beyond the pleasantries of greeting. He's in full armour. The cat is sitting on his shoulder. It glares at her when she walks in.

"Epsilon's in the kitchen," he says.

She wants to ask him how he's been, wants to ask what's so obviously wrong. Wants to shake him until he lets her take care of him like she should be able to. Instead she leaves him alone in the still empty living room and passes through to the kitchen where Epsilon's hologram is glowing brightly on the table.

"You know I'd make a comment about forgetting what your face looks like, but since that's physically impossible I'll just settle for the implied guilt trip and hope it's somewhat effective."

"I've been busy."

"I know."

"What did you find?"

"Wash was right when he said they were Connie's files," Epsilon says. "I mean, obviously all of this would be easier if Wash and Tucker could talk to each other like adults instead of throwing temper tantrums like whiny little babies whenever they're in the same room for more than five minutes, but you try telling them that."

"Does it give us anything on Charon we didn't already know?"

"Some. Mostly old info from back in the Freelancer days. The Director knew Charon had its fingers in pies it shouldn't, but I guess he figured it was easier to skip the middleman and grab the technology for himself instead of reporting them. Connecticut knew something was up, she just didn't follow the right trail of breadcrumbs. Director was hitting installations with security loaned out from the UNSC, sure, but she didn't follow the money back to Charon's holdings in various black market alien tech. But that's ok, neither did the UNSC."

"More like it was convenient not to notice," Carolina says.

"Especially convenient if you're Malcolm Hargrove."

"So what you're saying is this doesn't give us anything new," Carolina says. "Nothing that you and I hadn't already figured out."

"Nothing that'll help us, no. Maybe a few records on Hargrove's actions before he became Chairman of that oversight subcommittee, but mostly it's a refresher on Dr. Leonard Church's Bad Life Choices 101. Also, does anyone know what happened to the Counsellor?"

Carolina shivers. "No, and please don't mention that again. I try not to think about it."

"Yeah, I don't blame you. If we all show up dead in our sleep one night we'll know who to blame, is all I'm saying."

"Why did you call me here, Church?" she asks impatiently. Wash is still notably silent in the other room.

Church sighs. "Hey, I just thought I'd keep you up-to-date on what's been happening with the Charon thing. In case you still care."

"You know I do."

"Hard to tell, these days."

She stands up. "We've had this conversation."

"You and Wash have had this conversation," he corrects her. "And there was one other thing. A video I thought you might be interested in seeing. It was included in Connecticut's data files."

"Oh?"

"It was Connecticut's goodbye video. Because, you know. She actually said the words. I'm starting to feel like we could all learn something."

Carolina has to force herself to suck in a breath. "What?"

"Yeah. Though I should probably warn you, she made it for Tex. Guess she didn't have anything to say to the rest of you."

Carolina puts her hands on the table, presses her fingertips hard against the surface. "Why-- I don't need to see that, Epsilon. I don't want-- it wasn't meant for me. Or you."

"Didn't stop you before. How many times have you watched York's journal entries now? Come on, Agent Carolina. Would you like to watch this file with me?"

"Washington," she says loudly without looking away from Epsilon's flickering blue glow. "Your AI's turning evil."

"We prefer the term delayed onset ancillary rampancy, thank you."

"You said you were metastable."

"I lied. Also, I'm a fragment. That is literally impossible. Did you sleep through AI theory class?"

"So you're just going to tear yourself apart again? How many more iterations are we going to have to go through, Church? The shows getting old." The bits of her dinner she'd actually eaten churn in an uncomfortable mess in her stomach and she wishes she'd taken the rest of her meal with her when she'd stormed out.

"Hey, you and Wash are one for one on assisted suicides," he says. "Consider me the tie-breaker."

Carolina leaves. Wash is sitting on the sofa in the living room. He's still in full armour. The cat is sitting on his lap. Neither of them look at her as she passes, but when Epsilon's hologram flickers to life near the door in an obvious attempt to waylay her, the cat launches itself across the room and pounces on it, batting in increasing frustration at the intangible blue glow. She hopes this happens often. Outside the air is heavy with humidity. The streets are mostly abandoned, and she walks all the way back to city centre to a backdrop of muffled radios leaking through thin walls and the steady fwap fwap of paper pamphlets catching in the furiously puffing wind and slapping against walls and street posts. The wind catches under her coat, heaving the fabric up around her chest and arms, transforming her into a horrific bloated sea creature in the reflections of dirty windows gone dark and sleepy with the evening. The occasional vehicle rushes past in a blur of there-and-gone exhalation, splashed streaks of tepid murky water and lingering exhaust the only sign of its passing. Carolina wants to put on her armour and run, wants to move with the impossible speed of those vehicles, nothing relevant but the next couple seconds, the next fifty metres, the one-two rhythm of her heartbeat and the way it can't keep up with her footsteps. It would take 120 seconds running the speed unit straight before her heart would stop. She would be lying if she said that is not, in the end, how she assumes she will finish things.

She gets back to the apartment after dark. Her lungs ache deep down in her chest and the back of her throat hurts like the morning of her mother's funeral, in the back room of the church with her father and the minister and the woman they introduced as her grandmother. Kimball's sitting on the sofa, head bent over a datapad. She's out of armour, soft pyjama pants under a baggy university hoodie making her look years younger than she is. Carolina tosses the raincoat, now entirely dried out, onto a kitchen chair.

"Carolina," Kimball says, setting aside her work. "I'm sorry for how I handled today."

"It's fine," Carolina says, and she's surprised at the way her voice comes out high and too loud. Outside the wind moans restless and discontent. In the apartment above theirs someone turns their music louder, bass pounding through the ceiling and reverberating out of time with Carolina's too-quick pulse. Her exposed skin burns in the still air.

"It's not," Kimball says.

"You're right," Carolina says, her voice lower. "This isn't my planet. This isn't my problem. And you should be grateful for that. My problems tend to end up dead or well on their way to it."

"Did Wash say something?"

"Wash," Carolina bites out, "said nothing. Very loudly."

"Something happened."

"You mean aside from your continued insistence on childish risk-taking?"

"Yes."

"Nothing you need to know. Leonard Church is an unrepentant asshole and I continue to be too fucking stupid to walk away, second verse same as the first and equally unimaginative and banal in its predictability."

"Would you like to talk about it?"

"I would not."

Kimball inclines her head. "Ok. I'd still like to discuss what happened earlier. I think I handled it poorly, and I'd like a chance to explain my reasoning."

Carolina shakes her head. Keeps walking past the living room and towards her bedroom. Feels like if she stops moving the stillness will invert down through her skin, crushing her ribcage and folding her lungs and legs up until she's a two dimensional memory stained into the carpet. "It's not important."

"It is. You were obviously concerned, and likely rightly so--"

Carolina doesn't intend to punch the wall. She's turning the corner into the hallway and her body shifts with the momentum, arm swinging to balance the slight shift of weight with the turn and it's so easy to add that extra bit of force and direction to the movement, to press her fingers hard together, fingertips digging into the soft flesh of her palm, easy to let her body do what comes naturally. She doesn't hit with her full strength, so she doesn't break her hand. She knows how to throw a punch. That doesn't mean a wall is ever an appropriate target. The flash fire burst of pain cuts through everything else like a bucket of ice water, and it would be the easiest thing to just keep lashing out, to fall into familiar rhythms, potential energy slowly converting to kinetic with each uncoiled muscle group, the tension of the last day, the last fucking decade bubbling hot and eager to spill out. She knows she should be tired from the run-- a good two hours having passed between Wash's apartment and Kimball's, but Carolina's body is nothing if not dependable under fire, built for endurance beyond what is rational or reasonable. She has been created to survive, and she is her father's greatest creation.

"Carolina," Kimball says. She doesn't raise her voice, but there's something hard there, something deliberate in the way she speaks. Carolina goes still, freeze-frame, energy caught at a precipice tingling electric just beneath her skin. "That's enough," Kimball says, still unnervingly calm.

"I can't--" Carolina says, and doesn't know how to finish the sentence. There are so many fucking options to choose from that it's overwhelming. The ache in her throat is becoming unbearable.

"That's fine," Kimball says. "That's ok, Carolina. You don't have to do anything right now."

Carolina's not sure she knows how ridiculous the words sound, how fundamentally, critically impossible the idea that she does not have to--that there is a point at which Carolina can be at rest. That there is a space in the universe that allows for Carolina to simply exist without the constant push and pull of outside forces keeping her in motion is so utterly illogical that she gets stuck on it, a broken record, a program looping through constant if loops faster and faster with no final solution.

Kimball touches her. Carolina didn't notice her move, loses time and observation, needle skipping track to track in jerky beats of blood in her ears and drums in her feet. She eases Carolina's hands down to her sides, unclenches her fingers one by one, runs hands down from shoulders to wrists once she's done in slow passes. Carolina can picture very clearly what it would feel like to twist, one hand on her shoulder one hand coming up under her chin to snap the head back-- the kill would be guaranteed if she were in armour, but even without it's a fair chance she could do it in under ten seconds. Kimball stands close behind her, close enough that Carolina can match her breath, in and out, and it is maybe only then that Carolina realizes that Kimball was shaped in war, that her first reaction will always be to run towards the fire and the screaming and the weapon standing primed in the corner of her living room and ready to go off.

"Before," Carolina says, staring at the wall and fighting to get the words out past the pain in her throat. "You said it's not necessarily the weapon's responsibility. To-- I've been trying. I've been trying to do this, and everything keeps falling apart in my hands, I used to be able to handle this, I used to be better. Someone needs to be aiming the gun, or putting the safety on. Pretend the metaphor isn't falling apart, pretend we haven’t been ignoring whatever the fuck this is for three months, we both know there's something and I'm angry at you, I'm angry at myself, I can't talk about it right now, but we need to. Because things are falling apart around me and I can not allow that to continue, I need to be better, I need to know how to be better."

Kimball's hands have settled loosely around her wrists and she thinks it should feel restraining but it's just an anchor, two points to triangulate the hot swollen place where the words keep fountaining out. Her whole body's shaking, but beyond those three points her physical reality is a distant, secondary thing, overrun by the static in her head and the numb sick way the world is falling away then rushing back again in slow uneven waves.

"You're right," Kimball says.”The metaphor is crying in a corner somewhere. And we probably should've talked about this sooner, I'm sorry. But right now you need to lie down."

Carolina lets Kimball guide her to her room, lets her help her off with her shoes and drinks the glass of water when the other woman presses it into her hands.

"I suppose you're still opposed to chemical sleep aids?"

Carolina nods, up and down carefully. Everything seems to take a lot of focus. "Yes."

"Ok. Lie down. I'm going to turn off the lights. Would you like me to go or would you rather I stayed?"

Carolina thinks about it. "I need to be alone," she says. The idea of someone watching her while she falls asleep makes her heart beat faster and her legs want to run.

"Alright. I won't leave before you in the morning. And we'll talk about this tomorrow, I promise."

It takes a long time for Carolina to fall asleep, but she doesn't remember much of the intervening hours. The wind continues to howl. Eventually the music quiets, and all she can hear is the wind and the echoing rush of traffic, there and then gone. She doesn't dream.

In the morning she wakes late, still in her clothes and dehydrated. Her eyes are crusty and gummed shut and her hand throbs in time with her heartbeat. Outside the rain plops past the window in listless over-ripe droplets. She showers mechanically, brushes her hair in front of the window. Her armour is a comforting familiar weight as she assembles it around her body, each movement as natural as breathing. She could do this, each fiddly little clasp and precisely calibrated seal, in her sleep.

Kimball is standing in the kitchen, reading something on her datapad and drinking a cup of coffee when Carolina comes out of her room. She looks up. Carolina hasn't put on the helmet yet. Feels like it would be cheating.

"I've got a meeting with the economic sustainability council first thing," Kimball says. "After that I'm speaking with the chief of the armed forces and General Doyle, which they're still not letting me bring anyone else in on; and no, I'm no more comfortable with it than you are but I have to think if they were going to assassinate and or kidnap me they'd pick something slightly less obvious. Assuming that doesn't go for more than two hours I'm free for lunch. If you're free, I think we should talk then, because my afternoon will be down at the university. I'd like to sit in on the initial education reform town halls, and I have a feeling they're going to run late into the evening."

Carolina grabs a bottle of water from the cupboard. "That's fine." Somehow scheduling it makes it seem less intimidating, though she's still furious with herself for letting things escalate to the levels they had the night previous. They leave the apartment together in silence. Carolina thinks it should be awkward-- it is awkward, but not to the degree it ought to be. Kimball stops by her office before the meeting and shoves a handful of protein bars at Carolina.

"You missed breakfast, and unless you ate at Wash's you didn't finish dinner. I don't want you passing out."

It's automatic to retort that she's perfectly capable of managing her own fucking caloric intake, but she forces herself to take a step back and examine that response. The truth is she does need to eat. Snapping at Kimball will only serve to further an already uncomfortable situation. And when it comes down to it, perhaps there is a value to be found in the act of being cared for not out of necessity, but out of affection.

In the empty elevator, Carolina tears open the protein bar and says quietly, "Not a judgement on one's abilities, but something done regardless."

Kimball smiles. "Based in emotion, not calculation. You aren't a cost-benefit analysis, and I'm more than aware just how capable you are of taking care of yourself."

The elevator doors swish open. Carolina falls into place a half step behind Kimball and to the left.

After the economic sustainability committee meeting Carolina drives Kimball to the legislative building and idles the armoured truck outside the gates as the guards check their identification. Kimball straightens her jacket. Carolina wishes they'd at least let her carry a gun.

"This is ridiculous," she says quietly. "You meet with Doyle all the time, why the secrecy bullshit now?"

Kimball shrugs. "The military issue is a hot one. And with the chief there, I guess he feels more comfortable keeping it behind closed doors."

"Closed, locked, barred and throw away the key," Carolina says darkly. She spent too many years in ONI3 to be anything but actively suspicious of the sort of meeting where two powerful men ask an oppositional political leader in for a friendly chat in private with no weapons. The guards wave them through, and Carolina drives down the tree-lined path past manicured lawns, and circles around to the private entrance for visiting dignitaries.

Kimball rolls her eyes, as always. "Just drop me off here. There's no point in you standing around waiting while I'm in the meeting."

Carolina would like to point out that there is a very good reason for her to stand around while Kimball is in that meeting and that reason was bought and paid for by UNSC military tax dollars and ok, maybe the metaphor is crying in a corner, but Carolina could destroy half of this fucking catalogue-designed compound without breaking a sweat and she thinks it might not hurt for certain people to be reminded of that. Another guard approaches the truck. She hopes he can feel the heat of her glare through her helmet.

"I've been sent to escort you, General," he says to Kimball, not even looking at Carolina. Carolina ignores the quick flash of pride when she understands what he says without having to think about it. Kimball nods briskly and slides out of the car.

"I'll contact you when I'm done," she tells Carolina, also in Hindi, and then she's walking away into the building and Carolina's pulling back onto the driveway, gravel crunching pleasantly under the tires and birds chirping somewhere in the trees. Her hand is still aching, so she goes to the clinic where she knows Bones is just getting off shift and lurks outside with espresso until the other woman emerges, already lighting a cigarette and still wearing scrub pants stained with something disgusting.

"Don't you ever work?" she demands, but she takes the coffee.

"I do plenty of work, thank you," Carolina says. The parking lot is mostly deserted but for the two of them sheltering beneath the overhang of the building. Across the street there's still hastily erected caution tape blocking off a half-collapsed storefront, graffiti sloppily sprayed across the remains. Carolina tugs off her glove.

Bones snorts. "Words come out of your mouth, but I don't see the second hospital reopening. The people aren't getting any healthier, the doctors aren't getting any faster. The beds and the equipment we could be using over there would make a phenomenal difference."

"We're trying," Carolina says. "There's a hell of a lot of bureaucracy involved, but Kimball's doing her best and from what I've seen, so is Doyle."

Bones shrugs, then, seeing Carolina's hand, "The fuck did you do to yourself?"

"Accident."

"Did the wall do something to offend you?"

"It's not--"

Bones grabs Carolina's hand firmly, shakes her head as she carefully prods around each joint. "I've seen enough broken hands in my day, kid. I’ll tell you I'm always happier to see the wall get it than somebody's face."

Carolina cringes. "I wouldn't."

Bones presses hard on a particularly sore spot. "Yeah, not a lot of people say they would. You should've iced this, incidentally. The swelling will go down on its own eventually and I can give you something for the pain, but you don't have to worry about any broken bones."

"Good," Carolina says, eyes on the rain splattered pavement in front of her. "Thanks."

Bones finishes her espresso, tosses the crumpled paper cup in the trash. Carolina's hand continues to throb. She breathes in and the air sits heavy in her lungs, damp and cold on the inside of her chest and throat. She thinks about the way she'd thrown herself into the argument with Kimball the day before, the rush of adrenaline, the way her hands had shaken and she'd stopped eating and her words had been quick and fast and cruel and how even now she can't really remember the particulars, can't separate out moments or bring to mind her emotions. Is realizing just how closely the simple volley of words is linked to the same sort of mental compartmentalization that happens during any combat-intensive mission. But there'd been no follow-through, no equivalent demonstration of force from Kimball's side. Carolina had brought a canon to a knife fight and found only a debate.

She stares down at her hand. Thinks about the sort of people who say they wouldn't; the sort of people who know six hundred ways to hit without ever raising a hand. The rain falls harder. Bones stubs out her cigarette, turns up the collar of her coat.

"I'm headed home to sleep," she says. "Might be the last chance for a while. Enjoy your brooding, I guess."

Carolina waves with her undamaged hand and watches Bones until she's walked out of sight.

When Kimball calls Carolina's been standing in the parking lot watching the rain and counting the beats of her heart out in sets of ten in the bruised veins of her hand for forty minutes. People rush past her, in and out and back in again, and nobody stops to offer greeting or ask if she's alright. Carolina drives to the legislature and Kimball is waiting in the little guard house, tucked in behind bullet-proof glass sharing coffee and a smile with the two guards on duty. She strolls up to the truck, swings herself in and shakes her hair like a dog, splattering water against Carolina's helmet. No one cares about the rain on Chorus, no one who grew up here. Everything's waterproof that needs to be and nobody will pick up their pace to get under cover if the rain starts up, no one ducks their heads in deference to the weather. Carolina has yet to accustom herself to this blatant disregard for nature. She thinks maybe it's something you can't learn later.

"I'm not dead," Kimball says as soon as she's closed the door and Carolina's started driving.

"Well done."

"I'm--" Kimball slumps back in her seat. "I don't think they're going to budge on the military issue," she says. "This has been a sticking point since the very beginning, and I don't know what else I can do."

Carolina shifts gears. "You aren't going to win every battle," she says. "This ceasefire was as much a draw as it was a victory, you were prepared for this." What she means, of course, is 'you should be prepared for this,' but she has enough faith in Kimball's pragmatism that she doesn't voice it.

"This isn't an issue I can afford to compromise on," Kimball says, frustrated. "The idea of the entire military presence being Federalists without even so much as a watchdog New Republic presence isn't feasible. It's setting the stage for history to repeat itself twenty years down the line, and I can't be the person to allow that."

"You don't have a choice," Carolina says. "Your alternative, to be blunt, is the total deconstruction of any form of government left. Tear everything down, start over from the beginning. And you and I both know that where Chorus is standing fiscally and socially to initiate something like that would cost more lives than anyone would be comfortable with."

"So I'm just supposed to let us backslide into the exact place we were before? I'm starting to wonder if the ceasefire came too soon."

Carolina snorts. "Do you think your people would've won that fight, Vanessa?"

Kimball stares out the window. "The worst part of this," she says, "Ok, not the worst part, but a deeply frustrating part, is that that I like Doyle. Think he's trying as hard as I am, and think he's as invested in the wellbeing of the people as I am. And you would think I would be used to people who I like having such staggeringly different political philosophies. But I guess we got used to dehumanizing the Feds once we left the city. Easier that way, and not like they weren't doing the same thing. Everything's getting personal again and it's a different sort of stress than running low on ammo or food."

Carolina politely doesn’t look as Kimball pulls herself together, the frustration and exhaustion clear in the way she lets her forehead rest against the glass of the window. "So give ground on the military issue and take it in other areas," she says. "The police action plan is going live next week. Speak up at the education reform panels today. Make sure if the military can't be trusted there are other measures in place to keep them in line. There's policy rewrites happening in every branch of the military, there has to be even with Doyle stonewalling you. Find out what they are and get people in on them. Hell, if you've got people to spare send them digging after any of the old blood higher up, make sure nobody's hiding skeletons in the closet. Or at least make sure the skeletons are the politically advantageous variety."

"I guess that's all I can do," Kimball says. They don't say anything more until they've parked and are walking up the spiral stairwell to Kimball's office on the fourth floor.

"I'm sorry if I'm pushing you into this conversation," Kimball says, swinging herself around the narrow curve of the centre spiral in a quick jump. "I realize I sort of arbitrarily decided we were talking about this and we were doing it today and I don't want you to feel pressured."

Carolina pulls off her helmet so she can glare more effectively. "I was the one who said we should talk about it. Don't let your professional misgivings reflect on your personal confidence, it's neither attractive nor rational."

Kimball's mouth hardens, and she says, "I'll take that in the spirit it was intended and refrain from pointing out the obvious hypocrisy. I've got a few notes I'd like to file as wrap-up on that meeting. Would you go grab us something from the cafeteria for lunch while I do that and bring it to my office? By that point I'll do my best to stop feeling sorry for myself and I'd like you to try and curb the attitude. Clearly neither of us have had optimal mornings, but I'd like this conversation to be a positive one."

Carolina reverses her path on the stairs, goes down to the cafeteria and waits in line to pick up wraps and kachumber and then takes an extra five minutes to pace outside Kimball's office and practice some deep breathing. When she comes in, Kimball takes her lunch and says "How long have you been having panic attacks?" so Carolina has to go back out into the hall and count to thirty five times over and she's starting to think that she should have used her free time that morning to get in some training instead of loitering outside the hospital wiggling the loose teeth of her various childhood traumas.

When she walks back into the office, she says, "I deal poorly with losing control of situations because, historically, I have always been the most qualified to be in control. When things are out of my control there's an inability to assess accurate personal accountability and success, which is... a problem."

Kimball finishes chewing, sets down her fork. "Accountability to whom?"

"Yes, well, that's also been a problem. Historically. I'm realizing there's more than one reason I enjoy working with you."

Kimball nods. "I assumed it was something like that, but I didn't want to overstep."

Carolina folds her hands behind her back. "You can," she says. "That is, you're not overstepping. We can have boundary conversations, you seem like the kind of person who insists on that sort of thing. But I think it would be helpful if you... stopped hesitating. I can appreciate your reasoning and I'm grateful that you're the sort of person who is careful like that, but it can start to feel... unreliable." She lifts a hand to run through her hair before remembering that her helmet is still on. "I need to know that if I push there will be something to push against."

Kimball taps her fingers against her plate. "That's absolutely reasonable. Again, we probably should have had this conversation sooner, and yes, we'll be discussing boundaries, but I can see how I may have been doing more harm than good in certain cases. You're used to functioning with a high degree of autonomy within a given set of clearly defined, goal oriented parameters, and right now you haven’t really gotten any of that."

Carolina shrugs slightly. "It's not just you. Things are apparently complicated with Wash and Epsilon, and I've let myself get out of the loop on the Charon project more than I should."

Kimball frowns. "Washington isn't-- I know that he was your teammate, under your command, and of course I understand what that means. Maybe I can't understand the sort of bond that a smaller unit creates, but I do understand the need to take care of your people. But it's also important to trust your people to take care of themselves, or to find the resources to get the care they need."

Carolina shakes her head. "It's not a teammate thing. After everything I don't have the right to say I want to take care of Wash, even if I do, and I do trust him more than most to take care of himself. But there are things about Freelancer that I think it would be good to talk about. We're the last two, and it feels like there should be some sort of camaraderie there, but he seems happier if we barely see each other."

"People process grief and trauma differently."

"I'm also worried about his post-implantation issues. He didn’t have Epsilon for that long, but some of the behaviours I've seen in him even now are... concerning."

"According to Captain Tucker he's a capable leader and a good man," Kimball says. "There's a lot of affection there. A lot of loyalty. I think Washington’s doing better than you think, and if he's not he's got people looking out for him."

Carolina shakes her head slightly. "You're right, but it's still a concern. I'm sorry, we've gotten off-track."

"Don't apologize. There's no set track for this conversation, I think all of this is important tangentially." She takes a bite of her salad, stares down at the desk while she chews. Her shoulders go up, her back straightens, and as she looks back up at Carolina she takes a deep breath. "My next question. Is this limited to the professional realm? I know things can get blurry, with us living together, and I also know that there have been instances where in I've... well, employed certain techniques to help you through panic attacks, which you don't have to talk about with me but which I do think you should talk about with someone. I don't want to make assumptions, again, and I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable or like anything is, um," she ducks her head, "I'm just going to start quoting workplace harassment policies at you, I'm sorry, no one warns you that working in politics makes everything you say into an annotated speech."

Carolina actually has to stop and think about this, which is inconvenient, as she's been getting through the entire conversation primarily by not thinking too hard about anything in particular. "I wouldn't be averse to a personal aspect," she says carefully. "That sounds fucking ridiculous. I like you. I like working with you and I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy sleeping with you and, I mean, I'm not going to lie to you, Freelancer destroyed any concept of professional boundaries, and I've never been particularly interested in the idealized ideas of civilian romantic day-to-day, but you work too much for that to be much of a concern anyway. And if your question was can you order me around in bed the answer is yes, and in regards to the rest of our lives personal and professional, you said it yourself, high degree of autonomy within a closed system."

Kimball covers her mouth to hide a surprised little chuckle. "We'll come back to the in bed part of the discussion," she says. "But thank you for being honest."

Carolina nods stiffly. "I figured honesty is kind of an expectation."

"Yes," Kimball says immediately. "From both of us." she drops her hands to the desk, and her gaze settles somehow with a new weight over Carolina where she stands still with her hands behind her back. "I have high expectations," she says lowly. "But you know that. It's one of the reasons this works."

"I'm used to it," Carolina says. "I'm very good."

"The difference in this situation is that my expectations are not, I hope, unreasonable," Kimball says. "And I don't ever want you to be afraid of not meeting them. There is no punishment for failure, no standard you need to meet in order to be deserving of care or affection."

Carolina wants to escape to the hallway again but she feels pinned in place by Kimball's stare. She's glad for her armour, the familiar impregnable shell shoring up the bits of her that seem to want to curl up and slip away. Carefully, methodically she takes Kimball’s' words and sets them aside in a box in her head and puts a lid on it and pushes it back into a dusty corner where she doesn't have to look at it too closely.

Kimball sighs. "Sit down, Carolina. Eat your lunch. We'll work on that part. For now, I think we've got a good starting point. And I still wanted to apologize for yesterday's argument and try to explain my point of view again."

Carolina sits, takes off her helmet, picks up her fork. She can already tell Kimball's not going to back down on the issue of going without Carolina on the day trip, and at this point Carolina feels too emotionally wrung out to put up much resistance.

Later, after she's predictably lost the argument but convinced Kimball to let her look over her security plans well in advance, Carolina goes down to the lobby-- ostensibly to check up on Tucker and the land distro working group but in actuality her intent in finding Tucker is more personal. He's talking with Bitters and Jensen when Carolina approaches, and they both scurry away as soon as they see her coming. That's a problem, she reflects frankly, and one that she should probably start dealing with.

"Dude, did you know there are literally no buildings on this planet higher than five storeys because the swampland is too structurally unsound to support them?" he asks instead of saying hello.

"I did, actually," she says. "Unfortunately. I hate your policies and everything they stand for, by the way."

He swings his backpack up onto his shoulders. "We're sinking three centimetres every five years. Just. Squiiiiiiiish." He makes a truly disgusting sound with his mouth, hands coming together in illustration.

"The rain will break down the buildings long before the sinking becomes a problem," she says, glaring out the glass fronted doors where the downpour has somehow managed to transition from torrential to biblical levels of precipitation. "Are they just dumping the ocean on us?"

Tucker glares at the rain. "Don't show weakness. You can't let it know it's winning. Did you know there is literally no such thing as an umbrella--"

"Yes," says Carolina. They stand for a moment united in bitter silence. Finally, she says "I wanted to talk to you about Wash."

"Oh cool," says Tucker. "We're talking about this. Come to the hotel with me, it's some dead guy's birthday, there's apparently cake and beer."

"Yeah, ok."

They walk to the shuttle car like walking into battle. Carolina switches to thermals after the fifth time in as many minutes she tries to wipe the water away from her visor enough to see where she's going, and each step she takes sends up geysers of water around her knees. Tucker is out of armour, and his pants and shirt are drenched through after the first block. He doesn't have a raincoat, which seems both a massive oversight and entirely in character. His dreads hang heavy and waterlogged and helpless against his shoulders, and every few steps he ducks his head to swipe water out of his eyes with a frustrated hand.

"This is bullshit," he says at one point, too loud. "When does this become a severe weather warning?"

Carolina slogs through the puddles beside him and doesn't say a word. With her speed unit, she could've been at the shuttle car three minutes ago.

By the time they do get there Tucker's progressed to resignation, and he stands dripping vindictively in the recycled air of the shuttle as they whiz up the hill, rain streaking the windows as the hydro-powered electric lines shoot the shuttle on its predetermined circuit. Carolina stands across from him and stares at the leaflets tacked up on the doors behind his head. There's a picture of Doyle with a stereotypical evil villain moustache and cape, and somebody’s drawn x's over Kimball's eyes and mouth on a grimy and yellowed "Terrorist attacks on capital continue" news article.

The shuttle stops midway up the hill to let on a group of teenagers carrying heavy backpacks, then continues up. Tucker wrings out his hair all over the floor. Everyone gets off at the stop by the hotel, and one of the teenagers points at Tucker as the rain promptly undoes any drying out he managed on the shuttle. Her friends laugh, and another of them nods towards Carolina, which gets a flurry of datapads raised to snap photos.

"I'm old," Tucker says, a little hysterically. "I'm wet and I'm old and I had an argument about cat food this morning before I went to work where I gave a motivational speech to my squad about learning from your mistakes and then worked through lunch because the wording for a paragraph about commercial vs. personal agricultural development was too vague."

"Beer," Carolina says, and steers him in the direction of the hotel. He has to stand in the foyer for a good ten minutes before he's allowed to come onto the carpet, but Carolina gets him a glass of the heavy, dark beer and claims one of the soft sofas over by the elevator before anyone else can. The bar is crowded but the lobby is still quiet, and Carolina takes the time alone to slowly work her way through reading the scrolling text on the screen behind the desk giving a brief history of the first leader of the New Republic, born this day fifty years ago, died seven years and eight months ago and from the scant facts provided seeming entirely unremarkable but for the fact that he happened to lead a revolution.

"I'm going to make an umbrella," Tucker says when he sits down on the other end of the sofa. Carolina's eaten her own piece of layered honey cake and already started in on his, but he's more interested in the beer. "I don't care anymore."

"You could wear a raincoat," Carolina suggests dryly. Tucker flops backwards.

"That's like admitting defeat."

"But making an umbrella isn't?"

He drinks half the glass of beer without coming up for breath. "So you wanted to talk about Wash?"

"I did. I just wanted to check in on him. We haven't spoken much, lately, and I assume you and he are still involved, so you seemed the best source of information."

"Aside from like, talking to him directly, you mean. Because Freelancers."

"He doesn’t seem to want to talk to me."

"He doesn't want to talk much," Tucker says. "Look, I think Locus fucked him up more than he wants to admit. I think he and Epsilon have a whole fuckton of issues that they're not letting anybody near with a ten foot pole, and I don't know if working together on the Charon thing is making those worse or better. But..." he stares down at the fabric of his pants where it clings to his skin. "He's got an apartment, and a cat. He was the one to make the first move in our... thing, but nobody's allowed to know that. Doctor Grey put him on some medication, which, like, ok, I wouldn't let her put a Band-Aid on a paper cut, but Wash promises me it's helping."

"Epsilon said he's going rampant," Carolina says carefully. Tucker rubs a hand across his face.

"That's because he's an asshole. I don't know if he is or not. I don't think he knows, to be honest. I think he's telling people that to see what their reactions are."

"And that doesn't concern you?"

"Of course it does! The guy's my best friend, or ...something like it. But I can't help him unless he wants to be helped."

"Don't tell me you've been seeing a therapist, too?"

"Hey, don't knock it. But no, that's a 100% Tucker original. ...or it was one of the headlines in those magazines Doc used to leave all over the base. Either way, I've got enough on my plate without adding How to Deal With Your Crazy AI 101 on top of that. I know literally nobody cares, but I talked to my kid for the first time in three years last week."

Carolina's glad she isn't drinking anything. "You have a child?"

"Dude, you don't have to look so shocked. My kid is the fucking best."

"Sure," says Carolina. Tucker flips her off.

They sit in the lobby for three hours in an unspoken mutually agreed upon battle of wills with the rain. Much to Carolina's surprise, they win. The skies start clearing up right around cocktail hour, and Carolina politely disengages from the drunken lawyer intent on expounding upon the flaws in the UNSC military industrial complex (informed by what he's seen on the news and the one textbook he read back in undergrad and entirely unconcerned with the fact that Carolina's only catching about every fourth word), punches Tucker in the arm until he jerks awake and out of danger of resting his head on her shoulder, and begins the surprisingly difficult process of departing. A good chunk of the people from HQ have just finished for the day and are arriving at the hotel in strung-out, exhausted clusters, and Carolina gets waylaid by three different people who are under the misapprehension that she is Kimball's secretary and can schedule them in for meetings, once by a very upset member of her working group with a last minute addition that's going to mean nobody's sleeping tomorrow night, and twice more by complete strangers who seem honestly interested in pausing just to exchange small talk and pleasantries. Tucker tells a kid who is not Palomo to shut the fuck up, tries to convince at least six other people of the brilliance of his umbrella scheme, and chants 'I can't hear you' aggressively at an older person in a suit who waves a datapad in his face and comes up with about ten different creative ways to call him unprofessional.

By the time they step outside the rain is barely more than a drizzle. Carolina puts her helmet back on out of habit, but the damp has crept inside and the soft puff of her own breath mists condensation on the screens for a brief moment before the seals engage and the air filtration adjusts the moistures levels.

They walk back to the shuttle in silence. The streets are empty-- disconcertingly so in comparison to the crowds at the hotel. Water rushes high and fast in the gutters and down the roadways, curling through the twists and turns of the narrow streets like hopeful estuaries of the nearby river, sweeping along branches and debris in its wake. The gate to the shuttle car drop off zone is broken off one hinge, swinging lopsided and confused, the far edge dragging in the mud. When the shuttle car comes, it too is empty.

Tucker sits in one of the sideways seats, dumps his backpack beside him. Carolina stands, not trusting the seats to support the weight of her armour. An empty can rattles back and forth with the motion of the car as it rushes down the hill.

They stop at the midpoint stop and don't start again. Tucker whines loudly about having to walk the rest of the way, but they buzz the 'emergency' button and no one responds. Carolina has to force the automatic doors open, and when they step out onto the sidewalk the electric signs are dark.

She gets a message from Kimball on her datapad the same time they hear the first explosion.

"What the fuck?!" Tucker yells. Carolina puts him between her and the solid metal bulk of the shuttle car. She checks her messages at the same time she pulls her rifle off her back. Kimball's message just says 'call me,' and Carolina takes a second to glare at the uninformative line of text.

"Are you in the city centre?" Kimball asks as soon as the connection goes through.

"No. At the shuttle stop on the hill. I'm with Tucker. What's the situation?"

Kimball sounds distracted when she answers.”Riots, as far as I can tell. I'm at the university and the roads are closed, and I can't get back downtown so I'm relying on second hand reports and social media feeds."

"Stay there," Carolina barks. "Who the hell is rioting?"

"We are, apparently," Tucker says from behind her, surprised.

"No comment," Kimball says to someone on her end, and then, "Yes, thank you. Prof-- Professor Bashir, can I use your office?"

"Members of the New Republic who say they are afraid General Kimball's government is becoming just as bad as the Federal Government of Chorus took to the streets of downtown Armonia this evening in what many insist is supposed to be a peaceful protest," Tucker reads haltingly, obviously translating as he reads. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck."

"That explosion didn't sound peaceful," Carolina says darkly.

"I need to make sure Doyle knows we aren't sanctioning this," Kimball says. "And then I need to convince him not to bring in the army."

"What scale are we talking?"

"I don't know. I need to talk to Doyle. Get downtown, see if you can figure out what's going on. You said Tucker's with you, that's good. Get him talking to people. We can't let the Feds spin this as senseless violence. Find out what the message these people want heard is. Make sure it gets heard, make sure we hear it."

Carolina huffs an impatient breath. "I'm a little more concerned with damage control than talking about their feelings."

There's the sound of a door slamming shut over the line, and the background noise drops sharply. "Carolina," Kimball says. "I don't think I need to repeat myself."

Something inside of Carolina's head snaps into place with such suddenness that she has to take five seconds just to breathe. The frantic background clutter of frustration and panic and over-sensitivity falls away in a way that it hasn't in possibly years. She sinks her weight down through her core and to the balls of her feet, feels the pulse of blood and adrenaline through her muscles and skin, the smooth, intimately familiar second skin of the armour, the potential power behind each slight movement.

"Understood," she says.

She leaves Tucker by the train car, talking quickly into his radio and messaging on his datapad at the same time. "Meet me downtown," she says. "Kimball wants you talking to people. Primary objectives are making sure their message gets heard. And I assume trying to calm people the fuck down, but don't quote me on that one."

"Tell Kimball that part of my service record was redacted for a reason," Tucker grumbles. "Sangheili and humans are kind of different."

She's activated her speed unit, so she doesn't hear the rest of his rant. She parallels the shuttle line down the hill, coming dangerously close to somersaulting the bottom fifty feet where the incline gets sharp. Water splashes up in arching streams behind her, and she skids to a halt across the street from the New Republic HQ in a wall of murky water chest high and fierce before it sloshes back to the pavement. The front windows of the HQ have been smashed. There are flowers and candles set out across the front steps, but mud and broken glass have made what was likely a pristine display appear more like abandoned trash. The steady up and down hum of people chanting carries on the wind from the next street over, but she can't make out what they're saying. People pass her on the sidewalk but keep their distance. Someone pushes a leaflet into her hands and she takes it with a muttered thanks.

The leaflet is in English and Hindi, so she can read the information quickly: the people who have gone untreated as the second hospital goes unopened, the rising concerns about the future of the New Republic soldiers, the concerns from smaller towns with issues that Carolina hasn't even heard of. And near the back there's a section on her and Wash. Whoever made the leaflet did their research, and while what she does know about Charon makes some of the statistics and information presented suspect, it's not untrue that Freelancer was primarily used to take out Insurrectionist targets on outer rim colonies. Much like Chorus would've been if the UNSC hadn't walked away from it entirely. She scans the leaflet page by page on her datapad and forwards it to Kimball and Tucker and Wash.

She lets herself move with the flow of foot traffic away from HQ and further into the heart of the city, closer to the legislature. There haven't been any further explosions, and she can't tell where the first originated. The storefronts and office buildings seem unscathed, and against most of her instincts she reclamps her rifle to the mag hold on the back of her armour. She was expecting a fight, and without an immediate target having been made apparent her very presence feels like a deliberately aggressive statement. Once she gets down a few blocks she sees what must be the main branch of the protest-- she's starting to think calling it a riot was overkill, and she's frustrated with herself and the others for not checking their sources. People are packed into the street, holding signs and shouting various catch phrases. Carolina records as much as she can on her datapad. Each sign has a clear, concise, and specific message. No one appears to be armed, but there are a lot of haphazard or civilian-grade armour and protective clothing, and recording devices are running visibly in many people's hands or backpacks or pockets. She follows them all the way to the legislature, getting swept up in the straggling ends of the march by the time everyone starts gathering in the outer courtyard. It's getting dark, but in the twilight the hundreds of people press in close, as members of the crowd take turns speaking into a megaphone. Carolina messages Kimball to make sure she's still at the university and to get an update on the Feds' reaction.

'No military action,' Kimball writes back. 'Doyle's not happy, but he can see that it's mostly peaceful.'

Carolina, knowing that Kimball herself is not always a strong proponent for peaceful protest, does not message back. Tucker finds her as she's taking shelter from the rain under one of the well-groomed trees by the edge of the courtyard.

"So the explosion was just dumb kids using the protest as an excuse to break shit," he says quietly. "Trains stopped because of the flooding. Poor maintenance at the hydro plant, add it to the list of shit that's been put on the back-burner too long in negotiations."

"Kimball says Doyle’s not happy, but holding off on calling in the army."

"Wash says Doyle's going to have a stress-induced coronary, and he was never actually going to call in the army. Also, he thinks people are selfish morons more interested in the melodrama of acting out than the reality of survival, so he and I are no longer on speaking terms."

They stay through the end of the speeches, stand in the rain and the dark at the edges of the crowds for hours until Carolina's muscles have stiffened up and Tucker's teeth have started to chatter. Tucker leaves eventually, but Carolina remains under the trees standing sentinel. The crowds start to disperse early in the morning. She trails after a group of students out of the courtyard and down the street and slows at the turn off to HQ. She messages Kimball.

'Where are you?'

'HQ,' comes the reply.

Direction affirmed, she jogs the last kilometre and cuts in the side entrance to avoid the mess that is the front steps. The halls are eerily busy, people buzzing through the corridors in a hushed, caffeinated rush, skin sallow under the florescent lighting. Carolina finds Kimball in her office, hunched over a datapad and glaring at a folder of paperwork spread haphazardly across the surface of her desk. A screen propped up behind her is scrolling the social media feeds steadily, mostly reposted photos from the protest and the march, brief lines of text that Carolina guesses are early news headlines struggling to pin down information into marketable packaging. There's a bottle of painkillers and three empty paper coffee cups in a precariously constructed tower on the far corner of the desk, dangerously close to the remains of the potted plant.

Kimball looks up when Carolina walks in. "Well," she says. "We're not going to war. So that's something."

Carolina pulls off her helmet, shakes her hair free of its tight braids. "It's a pretty big something. You've spoken to Doyle?"

"Extensively. Not in person, that's happening tomorrow, but we've been teleconferencing off and on since eight o'clock. Have you been at the legislature this whole time?"

"Yes. I wanted to make sure nothing turned violent." It's... not necessarily a lie.

Kimball pushes her chair back from her desk, rubs her hands down her face and lets her forehead rest against the heels of her palms. "I've been in contact with as many of the organizers of the protest as I could reach. Set up meetings. We're reviewing all of the issues laid out in the pamphlet-- Doyle and I are both, as well as everyone else working on policy development in our respective parties. I'll have to make a public statement, which..." she drops her hands, sags back in the chair. "I don't even know if I have a right to be sitting here."

"If not you, then who?" Carolina asks.

Kimball shrugs slightly. "Maybe there should be elections. Maybe we should’ve done that right off. I was never intended to step in as leader beyond the war. I fell into this by virtue of circumstance, and so did Doyle. What right do we have to represent the people when they didn't even choose us for the job?"

Carolina tugs off her gloves, tosses them down beside her helmet. "An election at this point would be a farce. You really think you have the resources to run that sort of process? If people want these issues addressed with any sort of urgency they can’t sit around and wait for an entire shift in leadership before it happens."

"So you think I should just let things get worse?"

"You and I both know that's not what you're doing. It's been a few hours and you're already making changes. You're listening to the people. There's a point where reality takes precedence over idealism, and I think maybe you've just hit it."

Kimball shakes her head. "And if this sort of thing keeps happening?"

Carolina shrugs. "You deal with that when and if it happens. But if the people see you're willing to listen, willing to change, then the chances are it won't happen."

Kimball nods slightly, brings a hand up to rub the back of her neck and comb fingers through her hair. "You're right. I know you're right, I guess I just needed to hear someone else say it. Tonight's been a mess."

"When did you come back from the university?"

"Around midnight. I waited until I was as sure as I could be that it was safe, I promise."

Carolina paces the circumference of the office, checking out the windows just in case. Kimball shakes her head. "No one's going to try to assassinate me tonight. I had someone run to the apartment and get changes of clothes for both of us, there's a bag behind the door. And don't argue, you've been in armour all day and we're not going to get home to sleep tonight."

Carolina grits her teeth, but she takes the clothes and changes in the cramped washroom across the hall. Leaving Kimball alone now that she's set eyes on her again sets her hair on end, but the isolation and quiet of the empty room helps drag reality back over her consciousness from the surreality of the late night.

When she comes back to the office, armour piled in a corner behind the door and gun still close at hand, Kimball has moved from the desk to the ratty old sofa tucked against the far wall. It's further from the window and the door, and some of the tension seems to have gone out of her back, so Carolina's pleased. She's typing furiously, bottom lip clenched between her teeth, and there's a fresh cup of coffee on the table beside her. Carolina grabs her own datapad from where she'd left it on the desk and comes over. And... She means to sit beside Kimball, means to settle in hip to hip on the thin cushions. But instead she finds herself sliding easily to the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her and flexing the muscles in her calves, back coming to rest against the base of the sofa, her shoulder tucking in close and comfortable against Kimball's knee. Kimball's typing continues for about thirty seconds, enough time for Carolina to open a message to Wash on her datapad. And then Carolina feels the way her body goes still against her, the way her weight shifts as she looks down at her. Determinedly Carolina does not look up, but she does lean a bit more heavily into Kimball's leg, wedging the edge of her shoulder just in the curve of her knee. After a moment of that quiet observation, Kimball goes back to typing, much more slowly. A few minutes later, when the typing has turned to scrolling, a cautious hand ghosts over Carolina's neck and brushes through her hair. When Carolina makes no protest Kimball’s' touch becomes surer, setting a steady rhythm stroking through her hair and over the back of her neck, slowing as Kimball's focus returns to her work and the motion becomes an absent, automatic thing.

Carolina finishes her message to Wash, sends a revised timeline to the policing working group in light of that evening's events, and looks over Kimball's day trip security plans, adding recommendations where she sees possible gaps. The part of her that wants to keep Kimball safe wants to demand to be permitted to accompany her, but now she wonders if her presence in the smaller towns as a Freelancer might not do more harm than good. A personal political awareness has never been something she's aimed to cultivate and she's beginning to feel a sense of creeping shame for the oversight, suspects it will only grow in the coming days.

They stay like that until the sun comes up. Kimball dozes for an hour and jerks awake swearing and on the verge of tears for her lapse, shivery and slow with exhaustion. Carolina finds breakfast at one point, and they take turns giving themselves paper towel baths in the washroom before they leave to meet with Doyle. Carolina sees Tucker in the lobby, but he's yelling into his radio and there're dark smudges under his eyes so she doesn't offer a greeting.

The meeting with Doyle is shorter than she expects. It's soon enough after the event that no one has enough information to create action plans, and they'd apparently used their teleconferencing time wisely the night before. Kimball has a teleconference with the mayors of the smaller towns as soon as she gets back to HQ, and Carolina intends to use the free time to head back to the apartment to shower and change but finds herself following the familiar path up to the hotel instead, caught up in a cluster of tired looking economists from the bottom floor who greet her warmly and talk to her about domestic taxation like they don't mind that she clearly has no idea what they're talking about.

She eats breakfast with them, drinks about a litre of water and follows it up with more coffee. The news media is running stories of the protest and it's playing loudly on the screen behind the desk. Everyone looks tired and strung out and every conversation is an exchange of gossip or opinions about the protest and what it means. She catches Bones in the bottom of the stairwell, their voices caught and dulled by the close walls and old carpeting.

"You knew," she says.

Bones' eyebrows go up. "Good morning to you too."

"You knew about the protest."

"Yes. I did."

Carolina snarls out an angry breath, clenches her hands into fists at her sides. "Why didn't you say anything? Warn us?"

"Warn who? You? Kimball? So you could've done what, exactly? Why do you think you needed a warning?"

"Damage control?! Doyle could've brought in the army."

"He could've, you're right. That's still a legitimate concern. Think about that."

"This didn't help anyone," Carolina snaps.

"We'll see," Bones says calmly. "Look, kid, Kimball's got her heart in the right place, I'm not denying that. But there are real people out here, and I think it gets easy to forget that real fast."

Carolina walks away, leaves the hotel and Bones and waits half an hour for a shuttle car to take her back to city centre, where Kimball is still on video call in her office. Carolina goes down to the cafeteria and gathers up a sandwich and a mug of tea and a bowl of gulab jamun, and piles it all on a tray beside the updated police action plan. She lurks outside Kimball's office until her call is over. Kimball's hair is sticking straight up from her head in the back, and there are lines carving themselves into the corners of her eyes. Carolina sets the tray in front of her and rests a hand on her shoulder, feels the tension still pulling all her muscles taught just under the skin.

Kimball looks at the tray, looks up at Carolina. "Thank you," she says, and her hand shakes a bit when she covers Carolina's hand on her shoulder but there is still determination in her eyes. Carolina matches her breath to the rise of Kimball’s' chest, exhales with her. Then breathes back in. Keeps going. There's a lot of work yet to be done.

Later that night, Kimball and Doyle give televised speeches. Carolina has the rough outline of Kimball's talking points, and she's surprised at how much she can understand without a translator once Kimball starts talking. She's honest about their situation, admits that she did not expect to be in the position she's found herself in but that she intends to work as hard as she can while she's there and that she will always hold the interests of the people at heart. She also puts forth the potential for an official election within the year. Carolina had argued against the idea, but Kimball had been determined, and when she'd contacted Doyle about it he'd agreed wholeheartedly.

When she brings it up the crowd of people gathered in the back of the conference room where she's recording the speech all nod their approval, and Carolina wonders if they are simply entirely confident that Kimball will be voted back in or if they, too, are harbouring concerns about her long-term leadership. It leaves Carolina feeling oddly separate, caught with the strange but obvious realization that not even the people working closely with Kimball see her with the sort of devoted confidence that Carolina does. It's a betrayal, almost, because Carolina looks at Kimball and sees flaws and weaknesses but more importantly she sees the ability to recognize those and overcome them, and it's a new type of loyalty that she's been feeling quite secure and comfortable with. It is isolating to understand that she may be in the minority.

Wash finds her after the broadcast. He's in the lobby, and his armour is dry so he's obviously been waiting a while. "Hey boss, he says at her approach. His head is down and he shifts from foot to foot awkwardly.

"Wash. It's good to see you."

"Yeah. You too. Sorry about the other night. Epsilon was out of line."

"It happens," she says evenly.

"It does. It shouldn't, though. But... I was just-- I just wanted to let you know. We’re going to meet with UNSC officials and a couple big media broadcasting companies next week. Off planet, Doyle's providing a ship. It's me, Epsilon, Donut, and Simmons. Plus a few of Doyle's lawyers. We're going ahead with the Charon thing, and this is the first big step."

Carolina sucks in a breath between her teeth. The tarps covering the front windows flap furiously in the wind, and she can hear Tucker and Palomo arguing about something from across the room. Off to her left she can see Kimball coming down the stairs with her speech writers trailing behind like very drunk ducklings, arguing with sweeping hand gestures and shouted rebuttals.

"I'm glad," she says. "But I'm not coming with you."

Wash shrugs. "I know. I just thought I'd keep you informed."

She wants to put a hand on his shoulder, but she's not sure if the act would be appreciated. "Thanks, Wash. That's good to know, and if there's anything I can do..."

He shakes his head. "Not right now. Later, obviously, we'll need testimonials from everyone. But for now I think you've got your own work to do."

She nods. Kimball breaks away from the speech writers and approaches the two Freelancers cautiously. She raises her eyebrows at Carolina when she's still a good fifteen feet away and Carolina nods her over.

"Agent Washington," Kimball greets.

"General."

"Wash was just explaining the plans to start the ball rolling on uncovering Charon's bullshit," Carolina explains. "It sounds like they've got everything well in hand. Heading off planet next week."

Kimball's smile becomes a few degrees weaker. "I'm happy to hear it. Though I'm sorry the New Republic has been unable to provide as much support as we'd initially hoped."

Wash waves her off. "We got all that we needed from General Doyle. Chorus is very generous, and I understand the drain on your resources that these peace negotiations have created."

Carolina spots Tucker coming up behind them, and screws up her determination. "Wash," she says. "I'd like to sit down and talk with you before you leave. We haven't seen each other much at all lately, and I'd like to know how you're doing."

Wash tips his head up. She can’t see his face behind the helmet, but when he speaks his voice is soft with surprise and uncertainty. "Yeah. I'd like that."

She doesn't get a chance to say anything else before Tucker is dragging Wash away with a cheerful wave over his shoulder and an apologetic "sorry, we need to go have a screaming match about direct vs. indirect activism and then have awesome make-up sex before our cat becomes the child of a broken home."

She can hear Wash's disgruntled shushing as they walk away. Kimball rests a hand at the small of her back, and Carolina turns into the contact, shifting to meet the other's soft gaze.

"You're not going with them," she says.

Carolina huffs out a breath. "You know I'm not."

"I-- No, I didn't know."

"You should have."

"I'm not a mind reader. And I can't expect that sort of... Charon is personal for you. I'd understand if you went with them."

Carolina does not grit her teeth. "Yes," she cuts her off. "Yes, Vanessa, you can expect it of me. This is where I want to be. I'm not helpless, I'm not going to break. And I am telling you that yes, you can fucking expect that I will be here and loyal to you until such time as you no longer want me or our circumstances change drastically. I've spent most of my life belonging to people or institutions in one form or another and with varying degrees of consent. This last year I've been learning what it means to belong to myself, and you don't get to disrespect my choices when I tell you that as someone fully in charge of what happens to me I am choosing to give myself to you."

Kimball's hand is shaking a bit. "Carolina. That's... you have to understand how big this is. And that because of your history I'm always going to have concerns. But it's also... a lot of responsibility."

Carolina laughs sharply. "You're responsible for an entire planet."

"It doesn't exactly work that way."

"Beside the point. I trust you to make the right calls. And if you don't, it's a learning opportunity."

Kimball glares weakly. "You can't use my own words against me."

"I'm not using them against you," Carolina says. "It's not an attack. It's a show of trust." She straightens her back, presses into the warmth of Kimball's palm. "I'm yours, Vanessa. And I'm not going anywhere."