Chapter Text
Hunkered down behind a rock, Tae Joon nervously checked the mag in his R-301 yet again. Next to him Elliott, who was sitting with his back against the same rock, his wrists on his drawn up knees, leaned an arm out to nudge the hacker with his elbow.
"Will you cut that out? You're making me all jittery."
Elliott's own gun was stowed at his hip; a Wingman with a nearly empty chamber. He only had two bullets left and wanted to save them, but the anxious energy radiating off of his squadmate was making him edgy, too. Best to keep it safely stowed and nowhere near his twitchy trigger finger.
Tae Joon turned to him and gave him a withering stare. "Perhaps you do not see how dire the situation is, Witt," he muttered before turning away again and resuming his nervous activities.
"Perhaps you don't understand how dire the situation is, Witt," Elliott parroted in a ridiculous tone. "You think this is my first time, kid? Sometimes you get separated from your third, it happens, but she'll make her way back to us, no problem, then we can hurry up and win this thing."
Tae Joon sighed. "Don't see why you couldn't be the one who became separated from us," he muttered.
"Hey!" Elliott protested. "She's faster than most, happens to Ren- Wraith, all the time, she can handle it. And besides, the only reason you're not the chump hanging around on his lonesome is because I was watching your ass while you played with your little toy. You're welcome, by the way."
Tae Joon lacked the energy to respond. He was the first to admit that a lot of his ill will towards the holo-engineer was probably unearned; a case of wrong place, wrong time for Elliott and then a dynamic he'd felt compelled to maintain because it gave him a sort of identity within the Games. He wasn't just some random trying to hold their own on the back of some fabricated papers and the gun skills he'd only recently acquired in a back alley somewhere; he was Crypto, the grumpy hacker guy who had this hilarious back-and-forth with Mirage, which was better than anyone asking exactly what it was he was trying to hide.
He didn't voice this, of course. Instead he just grunted, still not looking back at Elliott and frowned at the rock face.
"Setting a portal."
Elliott grinned and clapped a hand on Tae Joon's shoulder. "See, what did I tell you, we'll be sitting pretty in no time."
He paused to smirk at Tae Joon. "Well, I'll be sitting pretty at least."
Tae Joon sighed and pushed himself up just as the portal roared open beside them and spat out their other teammate. Renee looked exhausted and like she was hurting; there was a small cut above her eyebrow and her skin looked raw at her cheeks.
"Let's go," she said to them, as Tae Joon nodded and flipped his rifle on to his back.
"You ok?" Elliott asked uncertainly as Renee shook out the pain in her wrist.
Renee looked at him. "I'm fine," she snapped at him irritably.
Elliott wasn't swayed nor intimidated. "Bullshit." He reached into his pack and pulled out a syringe before tossing it to her. "Don't say I never got you anything."
"Thanks," she replied dryly, but there was a small ghost of a smile making itself known. She pressed the syringe against her skin and jerked her head at the portal. "You guys head on through, I'm right behind you."
Elliott nodded. "What's on the other side?" he asked warily.
Renee closed her eyes and leaned back against the rock to catch her breath. "Fun," she said mutely.
"Liar," Elliott responded. "Come on Cryppy, what say you and I go clean up Wraith's mess for her? Again."
Renee huffed out a small breath. "Good luck," she muttered softly.
"I don't need luck when I got all this skill," Elliott responded, sweeping a hand over his frame.
"I was talking to Crypto," Renee said wryly.
Tae Joon laughed softly as Elliott's expression changed to one of faux shock. Elliott was still over-reacting even as Tae Joon placed two hands firmly on his back and shoved him into the portal.
-
The void technology used by Renee Blasey in the Apex Games was a complicated piece of science. It had origins all over the Frontier, a few components from the core systems, most of it was probably alien and some was definitely from the basement of some guy from HR who liked to go spelunking on the weekends. Either way, back in the days when they were still well funded, the ARES Division had cobbled together a means of warping reality itself without knowing exactly how or caring what kind of damage it might do. It was the type of thing they had quite the reputation for.
Basically, just because the technology did what it should, that didn't mean that anyone knew how it did it. It also meant that no one knew how to fix it when it went wrong.
If anyone had thought to ask Science Pilot Renee Blasey about this, she would have told them that when it came to living beings, the tech had never been quite right in the first place, but at least she was unique. The only one who had the Void seared through her very being, who felt the pain of being torn apart over and over by the voices and the versions of herself that didn't make it, the dimensions where the world had gone all the way down to hell without stopping and the screams that made silence just a friend she used to know.
But they didn't ask. Renee knew what the Void did to a person, but she didn't know why, either.
She had figured, however, that what with Singh Labs being a sparking, leaking disaster beneath Kings Canyon, that no one else would be joining her very exclusive and terrible club. Maybe the Void could hurt people, but now it could only hurt her. She'd made her peace with it, and had even come to look upon the Void with something like fondness. Her life had been saved over and over again by the constant voices and her life was such that she thought a few shooting pains through her skull were a small price to pay.
It never really occurred to her that phasing others through the Void could be dangerous. They were tourists there, they lacked the vital tech that made walking through dimensions possible, both within their heads and without, she was their guide and they were only passing through. Hell, over the years and the innumerable matches, she had phased so many of her teammates and not once had they ever emerged from the portal in a worse condition than they had entered it in. After all, the most danger they did face was the fact that they were going to end up in the same dimension at the other end, and everyone knew how shitty this one could be.
Some things in the universe, however, are special. Special in a way that defies all logic and reason, in a way that means the cosmos can take it's rule book and shove it, because whatever clandestine ideas it might have, whatever rigid and unchanging facts it might perceive as existing, some things are just special enough to undo it all.
Divine intervention.
A reality warping cosmic event horizon.
Or, in this case, Elliott R. Witt and his indefatigable bad luck.
Elliott wasn't exactly unlucky, most of the time. Elliott's life was a mixture of heart breaking tragedy and, well, heart breaking comedy with just enough nonsense sprinkled in to keep him smiling. Elliott was the sort of man who would wash his socks and lose a whole suit in the dryer, who would paint himself into a corner and who would never know that the claim that his phone was waterproof was actually true, because he would never be able to find the damn thing in the snow. He was also the sort of man who gravitated towards the one person who looked upon his existence as a particularly large thorn, who felt himself become more enamoured with every barb and dig Kim threw at him but that was only because Elliott was clever, and saw something beneath the half-assed, edgeless words that looked a lot like a guy who needed a friend. Maybe Elliott was a people pleaser, unwilling to stand up against the mockery that was levied at him with an almost sickening consistency because no one likes someone who can't take a joke, but he appreciated the fact that Tae Joon's insults were directed the same to everyone else. Everyone was an idiot, not just Elliott alone.
Of course, something had changed not too long ago after the whole stupid business with Loba, and though it had been Tae Joon who had the shortest end of the stick driven through every inch of his character, there was something in his manner around Elliott that was like an unspoken gratitude that Elliott wasn't one of the people doing the driving. Elliott hadn't believed a word of his guilt even before Makoa had told them all the truth, but Tae Joon still wore his dark circles to the ring remembering the ones who had.
They existed in the strangest place. If unrequited love was a thing then they had made unspoken friendship a whole new trope, or at least rehashed an old one into something weird.
Elliott and Tae Joon liked each other, a lot, because they saw the things in each other that no one else did.
They were also too fucking stubborn to say it out loud.
Friendships aren't made to be tested, but sometimes the universe has other ideas, and friendship that only existed on the edges of recognition, like a chore a person had been putting off for too long, was about to be be strained to breaking point.
Elliott and Tae Joon emerged from the portal, but something was definitely wrong.
"Hey, since when do my decoys have portal privilege?" Elliott asked in a voice that was emphatically not his, just as Tae Joon chose that moment to ask why the fuck Elliott had made a hologram that looked like him.
There was a moment of silence, followed by a far more prolonged moment of panic.
At this juncture, something important, something unknown to our two unfortunate legends must be explained. The Void, such as it is, exists between dimensions. That is to say it is neither here nor there. It's everywhere, and it is nowhere.
But it is, ultimately, everywhere.
So for every Tae Joon Park, and every Elliott R. Witt, it exists on the edge of what they cannot know but for some it exists in the thin slice of non-reality they must, as all probabilities must, share.
Basically, Tae Joon and Elliott went into a portal at the exact same moment as an alternate version of Tae Joon and Elliott, and gave the universe an anuerysm.
The universe does not like Science Pilot Renee Blasey. She keeps on doing such awful things, like making holes where holes should not be, and the universe is forever cleaning up her mess after her lest the whole fabric of reality collapse in on itself and bring about the end of days.
And so it was that Elliott the physical being and Elliott the consciousness were returned to their correct reality, albeit in the body of Tae Joon Park, who in return found himself in both the body of a holographic engineer and in a frantic crisis, and the universe looked upon what they had done and spake thusly:
"Fuck it, close enough."
Compared to the vastness of multiple realities, the fact that these poor, long-suffering heroes found themselves in quite possibly the weirdest quandary ever known to man or beast was nothing.
To them, however, it was everything.
"What the fuck?" Elliott demanded, and justifiably so.
Tae Joon, in Elliott's body and out of his wits, stared open mouthed at the body he had always considered his own and echoed this statement with his silence.
"What. The. Fuck?" Elliott remarked again in Tae Joon's gruff, Korean lilt.
"I.." Tae Joon began, and then stopped himself, because his brain was a clockwork engine and could handle anything, so long as it was neatly ordered, and Elliott sounding scared was first in the queue for analysis. Elliott sometime had a nervous edge to his voice, but this was pure, unadulterated fear, his fear, and it did not belong in Elliott's mouth.
"I'm you!" Elliott continued, because Elliott's mind was twenty wind up monkeys in the midst of a sugar rush, and the chattering stopped for neither time nor tide.
"You... you are not me. You are... in me."
He'd never seen such a pained expression on his own face. When in doubt, make a stupid joke, but Elliott was mired so deeply in doubt and disbelief that the innuendo just wouldn't come.
Instead he shouted "Renee!" at the top of his lungs, before bringing hands that were not his own to his face and groaning.
Tae Joon walked slowly up to the portal. "Let's go back through," he said decisively, because someone had to be in charge and Elliott was looking rather close to a complete tantrum.
At that moment, Renee popped out of the portal as if she were going to the store for milk and looked at who she though was Tae Joon tiredly.
"What?"
"What? What? I'm fucking him is what!" Elliott shouted, pointing at his own body.
"You're fucking him? Is now really the time to be telling me this?" Renee ran a hand across her forehead. "I mean, I always knew there was some weird tension between you but-"
Elliott grabbed her shoulders and forced her to look him in the eyes. "I mean, I am not Hyeon, I am Elliott. Your portal fucking switched us!"
Renee looked casually back at her portal. "Huh," she said quietly. "How about that."
Elliott was almost beside himself with rage. "Huh?? How about you damn well fix it?!"
Renee shrugged. "How?"
Tae Joon groaned next to her while Elliott collapsed to the ground on Tae Joon's knees.
"This does not seem strange to you?" Tae Joon asked while Elliott used his voice to wail.
Renee looked at him. "Yes, but the Void... It does things to people. Always has. Why not this?"
"Who cares why?" Elliott lamented from the ground. "Just make it right!"
Renee chewed on her lip for a moment. "I don't know how."
Elliott let out another sob while Tae Joon, who practically had a Masters in dealing with scary shit happening very quickly, sighed. "We should-"
"It's a sniper, move!" Renee informed them suddenly, diving to the side and pushing Tae Joon to the ground with her. A Kraber bullet split the air above them.
"Fix later," she said seriously. "Fight now."
It turned out to be an clusterfuck of epic proportions. Elliott tried to send out a decoy and instead found himself sitting in open ground like a neon target while Makoa lasered him with his devotion. Tae Joon was a little more level headed and sent out an actual decoy, but inexperience sent it colliding with a rock and vanishing instantly. Renee took Makoa out but with her two squadmates currently neck deep in a crisis of identity, she didn't stand much chance.
The squad was wiped and sent to the med bay to lick their various wounds.
-
When they woke up, side by side in the med bay, both Tae Joon and Elliott mimicked each other's actions by sitting bolt upright and staring at each other. Tae Joon groaned with Elliott's deep tones and slumped back down on to the pillows while Elliott frantically patted his hands over Tae Joon's chest and pulled at his hair.
"Stop that," Tae Joon said wearily as he pinched the bridge of his nose with synthetic free fingers for the first time in years.
"How are you being so calm about this?" Elliott hissed, his voice breaking as he tried to work his way around a new set of vocal chords.
Tae Joon looked over at him, the drop of his own stomach still present when he saw his own face staring back, and sighed. "Is panicking going to fix this mess?" he said levelly.
"It might!" Elliott replied with a hint of hysteria.
Tae Joon said nothing but held his gaze until Elliott too fell back on his bed, defeated.
"We... should perhaps not tell anyone about this," Tae Joon said quietly. "Besides Renee, I think it would be better to keep this between us."
Elliott was staring blankly at the ceiling. "Right. Sure," he muttered angrily. "Of course."
"I for one don't wish to end up as some scientific study buried in a lab somewhere, and I am sure you do not either."
"Whatever you say."
"And I would appreciate it if you could drop the attitude. This is not my fault and I too am in the same predicament as you are."
Elliott had never heard himself sounding so clear and concise. He screwed his eyes up and pounded at the mattress with his, or rather, with Tae Joon's, fists. "Oh no, buddy, you are far from as screwed as me. You got the cherry end of this deal. What you got there is a gift. But me? I'm a nerd."
Tae Joon felt a spike of irritation shoot through him. "That is your concern? Witt, you are the shallowest person I have ever met."
"Look man, I'm not denying that I'm shallow, believe me, but you're wearing my livelihood, Kim. Mirage isn't just some super handsome, suave charming guy who everybody loves, he's a brand. I can't have some clueless hacker setting up shop in the merchandise. It's bad for business."
Tae Joon wasn't at all swayed by this. "Just... shut up. I'm not going to hurt your precious face."
Elliott shifted uncomfortably on his bed. "That's all I ask." He lifted his hands and flexed his fingers in front of his face. "What's... what's all this stuff, anyway?"
"Nothing. It doesn't matter. Do not play with it," Tae Joon instructed him firmly.
Elliott held his hands up. "All right, got it," he said defensively.
"Don't touch any of it ," Tae Joon continued as Elliott slowly began lifting those same hands towards his face. They fell back on to the bed sheets with a thump.
"Youre being kinda modest, considering," Elliott grumbled. "One of us is gonna have to take a leak at some point."
Tae Joon reflexively looked down at his crotch, heart thumping suddenly. Closing his eyes, he tried to keep his composure. "We are both, adults, Elliott. You don't have to be so immature."
Elliott shrugged. "I'm just saying. No point being so delicate about your body when I'm the one in the driving seat."
"Odd that you even have the nerve to say that," Tae Joon said. "And it is not... some sort of notion of decency. The synthetics are... not, I'm sure you know, something I was born with. They are not exactly comfortable sometimes, and interfering with them might cause you discomfort."
Elliott looked at him, head slightly tilted. "They hurt?"
"Not often," Tae Joon said, unable to maintain Elliott's gaze even when it was being directed at him with his own damn eyes and turning away.
He could see Elliott flexing his fingertips once again on the edge of his vision, could almost hear the way Elliott was searching his accidental new body for pain.
"What should I do?"
Tae Joon looked over, confused.
"Do?"
"If they start hurting. What do I do? Is there like a lotion or do you take a hot bath or what?"
Tae Joon shook his head slightly. "You... put up with it."
Elliott's mouth fell open. "What? No. That's stupid. One of your friends is literally the best medic in the system, and you've just been 'putting up with it?'. Hyeon, man, you don't have to be some broody, suffer in silence type, ok? I promise we'll all still think you're cool if you go in for a little pain relief."
At these words, one of the medics walked into the room, a clipboard in their hand and an official Apex Smile on their face. Tae Joon threw Elliott a pleading look and Elliott sighed softly.
"Good morning," they said, even if the expressions on the two men's faces should have told them it was anything but. "How are we?"
Elliott and Tae Joon just shrugged and made noncommittal noises in the back of their throats. That seemed to satisfy the medic, who walked closer and began to check their vitals.
"Nasty hit you took there, Crypto," they commented as they took the hand of the hacker, if not the attention.
Elliott watched dazedly as the medic looked at him. "Wasn't your head though, you feeling ok?"
Suddenly realising that the medic was addressing him, Elliott sat up a little straighter. "Me? Oh, I'm fine. Perfect actually. As usu-"
Behind the medic, Elliott could see Tae Joon frantically shaking his head and making a silent crossing motion with his arms. Elliott swallowed heavily and made a conscious effort to soften his tone.
"I'm fine," he mumbled.
The medic gave him a quick look but then decided that a sudden bout of chatiness wasn't exactly terminal, not even for Hyeon Kim, and turned to deal with 'Mirage' instead.
"How about you?" they asked, lifting his wrist and checking his pulse.
"I'm good," Tae Joon said a little too loudly.
The medic looked at them shrewdly and then decided that perhaps this was the most subtle and useless prank in history. Both sets of vitals were fine so with a promise they'd both be free to go in a matter of moments, the medic left them to their own devices.
"I do not talk as much as you," Tae Joon said once they were alone again.
"And I don't shout everything I say!" Elliott snapped back. "...except that."
Tae Joon smirked, the expression looking right at home on Mirage's face. "Still, as soon as we get out of here I think we should go to see Renee at once." The expression fell from his face and Tae Joon squirmed a little where he sat.
"Sounds like a plan. Hey, everything ok over there buddy?" Elliott asked.
Tae Joon looked sheepish. "You need to go to the bathroom."
To his surprise, Elliott just laughed. "Then go man, I got nothing to hide. But hey, don't get jealous, yeah?" he added as Tae Joon got to his feet.
Tae Joon could forgive Elliott the wink, he'd done it himself before, but he would have a much harder time letting go of the image of himself shooting out a full set of finger guns.