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Wash is teetering on the precipice of sleep when a distant bang echoes through the compound. He’s seized first by panic, instincts alerting him to the potential scenario of intruders in the base and his heart punches the cage of his ribs. For a fractal moment his hands are trembling under the worn sheets, his mind is reflexively stumbling through blithe memories that he can never validate as his own, yet he anchors himself into reality in a matter of minutes. Just breathes. Inhales and exhales and swallows the stress, the anger.
Then the annoyance sets in. Of-fucking-course he’s awake again.
Sleep has been evading him as it does most days, yet lately it’s been difficult to adjust to constantly relocating bases with General Doyle’s eccentric army. He speculates that he’s on edge because of Locus’s insistent presence like a shadow on the wall. On some equally irritating level, he also figures that comfort has never come easily to him to begin with, not since the Epsilon program attempted to self-destruct inside his head, and without comfort he can’t relax long enough to embrace rest.
(Dreams are like memories anyway.)
The banging reverberates through the complex again. He recognizes the sound to be the radiator pipes in the ceiling, automatically adjusting to decrease their heat outlet.
The room is evenly tepid when Wash finally pulls himself out of his bed. His gaze darts around to the two other beds across the room which are visibly vacant of their assignees. Wash doesn’t mind sharing quarters with the Reds (or Lopez who simply folds into the corner) but something about their restlessness bothers him; something about them has always unnerved him, to say the least. Donut is too hyper to sleep most nights, while Sarge appears to simply resent the idea of being unconscious at any moment in time.
(“You can never know when the enemy is going to use the cover of nightfall to their advantage! That’s why the military invented the sun!”)
At least he could trust the Blues to stay asleep through the night.
Another bang. Goddammit.
Sarge might be in the armory religiously cleaning his shotgun, Lopez could be roaming the base looking for vehicles to fix, and Donut is most definitely with the tank driver he’s been flirting with over the course of the last week. Now the room’s too quiet to be comfortable.
Wash pulls on some military trousers and a shirt he thinks might be Sarge’s because it’s both one-size too small and smells a bit like burnt cedar wood; the familiar, persistent aroma of cigar smoke, but it’s fallen too close to his bed and it’s difficult to navigate the darkness. He doesn’t think the Sarge will mind.
Wash abandons sleep altogether and vacates the room. At the very least, maybe he’ll manage to wear himself out on a trot around the base; if not, he has an excuse to socialize with the Feds and learn some of their secrets.
(And he suddenly wonders, who the fuck is awake at such ungodly hours?)
There’s a bracket of light spilling through the open doorframe of a room at the end of the corridor. A familiar voice hums a song that might have once been popular somewhere in the universe but most of humanity’s traditions have molded to fit the ever expanding universe. Adjusting to the harsh, vacuum of space with the aid of the terrifying, invested belief that the stars are sentient beings. Wash almost finds the theory as stupid as people’s fascination with soulmates; he honestly (honestly) doesn’t know if souls are as sentient as stars.
He raps his knuckles against the doorframe. The eccentric woman who answers is gorgeous underneath her armor – sable hair braided back, onyx eyes framed by half-rimmed glasses – and he has no definitive term for how his gut pitches into acid. Wash thinks he might, quite simply, have a thing for women in purple (because how else is he supposed to justify the cataclysmic anomaly that was once agent South Dakota?)
“Agent Washington! What a pleasant surprise!”
He glances around the room, returns his gaze to her. “Sorry, are you busy?”
“Don’t be silly, I was just organizing some old medical files!” She gives him a smile that could simultaneously define and devour the planet’s sun, despite the tepid concern in her voice when she speaks. “Is something troubling you?”
“Not – not really.” He feels his chest ballooning on air. She manages to suck the oxygen out of the room yet he’s only aware that he’s breathing when she’s in his radius. After a moment he exhales, rubs the back of his neck and says, almost bashfully, “I can’t sleep.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. You always look so tired.”
“I usually take walks to help me relax,” he replies, diverting his attention to the corridor, to the shadows subsuming the length of his vision. (Locus could be among them.) After another pause he adds, almost reluctantly, “Did you want to come? I heard walking is good for the body.”
“Exercise is typically good for the body, Wash.”
He chuckles awkwardly. “Good point. The doctor knows best, am I right?”
She smiles again; too sweet, too kind, too horrifyingly sadistic to be real. Wash reevaluates his previous concerns with the existence of soulmates. His memories itch for a filler, for something that can fill in his every blank despite his adamant decision on keeping people as far from his brain as possible – yet she gives him a look that makes him hate the stars, that makes him hate how his subconscious craves another foundation of memories to explode upon.
“Give me just a sec.”
When she emerges from her room again she’s thrown on a similar pair of military trousers, slipped into combat boots but she hasn’t changed her shirt. The blood is bothering him. Like an itch crawling under his skin, skittering against the surface like a spider, a roach, a centipede holed up in a rotted wall. Wash feels his memories – or what might be Epsilon’s memories – misting through his mind again, recollecting the idea of premature corpses uprooted from old graves, the ominous pang of war reflected in the exoskeleton of an insect with too many legs.
He swallows drily.
“Where to?” she asks, hands on her hips and he forgets how to blink.
“The top of the base. It’s usually unoccupied.”
“I always assumed you were a man who preferred top.”
She’s messing with him but he lets that slide. He’s already submerged in the tattered bits of memories that trace a path back to the nights he spent with South in their downtime, exhausted and groaning because she almost breaks his goddamn hip on sheer endurance alone. A soulmate in her own right, the god-fearing judgment of nature and too gentle smiles clasped promptly behind lowered helmet visors, a star burnt out for burning too bright in a universe with bigger suns.
(A goddamn shame.)
“Not really,” he says, and Emily’s smile drops into a frown. “I’m just a man of questionable preferences.”
~*~
He watches Armonia glisten like an event horizon. A graveyard of skyscrapers under a wasteland of stars. From this angle he can see an unfamiliar, unmarked carrier ship jetting across the helm of the sky like a shooting star, streamlining along the glace of the midnight clouds. If he gazes up it feels like gravity might give out and if he closes his eyes the skies mumble something ancient and taboo about the precise coincidence of being born into a universe in which he knows someone like Emily Grey. At this point he can’t imagine a version of reality where he doesn’t know her.
(And perhaps he should be thankful.)
"You smell like cigars."
"This is Sarge's shirt," he responds blatantly. Emily gives him a curious glance and he amends his statement with an eye roll. "Just a mix up in laundry, don't get excited."
“Oh, my dear agent Washington, I'm always excited!"
There's several prolonged seconds of silence that passes between them like the heartbeat of a quasar.
"Armonia was my home,” she remarks next, tossing a rock over the edge of the guard rail and into the sacred maw of the canyon below. If there’s an echo Wash certainly doesn’t hear it. He’s fixated on the way the flood lights above illuminate her porcelain features, contrast to the silent ravine. When she speaks he listens and it’s odd because, well, he can’t imagine doing anything else. “I never even held a gun before the government collapsed. But I suppose learning to shoot a moving target helped sedate some boredom in the long run!”
Wash quirks an eyebrow. “You’re in the middle of civil war and yet you still manage to get bored?”
“I’m a genius, remember? When you learn entire sequences of science in a fraction of the time as compared to the normal populace, you have to find some other hobbies to ease those voices in your head!” She pauses, her smile never meeting her eyes but never leaving her face. “Maybe you don’t know that feeling.”
“Having voices in my head?”
“Intellectual boredom.”
“Because I am thoroughly experienced with the former.” (And who’s fault is that? he wonders.)
She leans towards him, lips curling upwards into a smirk. “You don’t say? I’d love to psychoanalyze you some time!”
“Please don’t get any ideas.”
“Too late!”
Wash sighs in resignation and his breath almost condenses in the northern wind that blows down from the summit of the mountain. Emily rubs at her arms, pressing against his side as she seeks out his warmth.
“I never used to be like this,” she admits quietly. Her obsidian eyes glaze over with the memories of what Chorus had once been, the stress of being one of the last remaining doctors on a planet forgotten by the government that was supposed to protect it upon establishment, and the bitter ache of having to hold one too many hands of gutted patients. After another moment she scoffs. “I think this war finally broke something in me and I just…had to cope the best I could.”
“This war broke a lot of us.” (And who’s fault is that? he wonders again in hopes the blame won’t sit so heavily on his shoulders.)
“Sometimes I imagine that destruction and recreation are humanity’s only qualities,” she says listlessly. “That we’re all doomed to suffer the horrors of war like a music track, endlessly repeating. Genetic memory, perhaps, natural instinct, most likely.”
“Real tragedy.”
“Tell me about her.”
He glances at her in bewilderment. “About who?” (He knows who.)
“I think her name was…South. I’m a curious person.”
“How did you know about-?”
“You mumbled her name several times while you were unconscious in my medical ward.”
Wash lowers himself to his knees. “She’s just a bad memory,” he replies, the forlorn pang of guilt and malice burning the back of his tongue. He kicks out his legs to sit back against the division, lowering his head into his palms. And he wonders, quite suddenly, if his skull has always been this heavy.
Grey follows his lead, possibly out of her own curiosity. She presses against his side once more. “What makes you say that?”
“A lot of things.” (Too many gunshots, rattling his mind.)
“Did she make you happy?”
“Far from happy. Content at best, I guess – I had myself convinced that she was probably my only real stability in the world. A little piece of unyielding sanity in a job that got us all killed. She had my back, I had hers and…I trusted her, blindingly, to the point that when I expected her to fight with me she shot me instead.” He flinches when the memory of the gunshots rattle the inside of his skull. “I was angry, you know? So goddamn hurt and when I saw her again I decided to kill her like she never meant anything at all.”
“That means she did make you happy. Otherwise it wouldn’t have hurt so badly.”
“Too bad her memory stayed,” he utters, rubbing the back of his head like there’s something that doesn’t belong inside his brain. “That’s all Epsilon seemed to leave behind, in the end – memories that I can’t forget because they have the most meaning, no matter how often I tell myself that she could have been nothing more than a dream.”
The ship from before finally passes high over the base.
“You should make a wish,” Grey chides, prodding his ribs with her elbow.
Wash picks himself up, catching a glimpse of the aircraft’s fading tail lights. “I didn’t think you’d be the kind to believe in superstition.”
“I’m a doctor, not a nihilist.”
“And I’m too old to make wishes.”
She leans her head into his shoulder. “If you could wish for something, what would it be?”
“If mankind can be saved, I’d wish for nothing more than a way out." (Even if he doesn't deserve it.) "I don’t think I can take back what I’ve done, what I’ve lived through, what I’ve said – and maybe some twisted part of me would be willing to stumble over South again, give her a second chance or give me some sick satisfaction in knowing I’ll never fuck up anything in life worse than I will with her.”
She’s looking up at him quizzically when he turns to her. He brushes the pad of his thumb over the plush of her lips. “But?” she murmurs, her forefinger glossing over the defined five-o-clock shadow of his jaw and catching, briefly, on the edge of an old scar from grenade shrapnel (he’s never told her about Tex, but finds it in poor taste to dwell on the worst memories). Her nail arcs up to trace his ear. His breath hitches, chest pillowed with anticipation, a malevolent shiver sliding dangerously down the length of his spine.
“But,” he continues now, leaning in, heat and desire and wondering, simply intrigued by her existence, by her, “if mankind is destined for ruin, I’d wish for you. A little piece of unyielding sanity in a world of unrelenting pain.”
“Wash…”
He pulls her in by her cheeks, and when they kiss he trembles and he falls into her with the desperate, gravitational force of a northern star. She hums against him as if curious, always so goddamn curious, gradually progressing into gentle moaning when his fingers find an old rope burn on her neck and trace the scars on her pallid flesh. In return she holds him, her fingers clutching his back, her knees viced against either side of his waist. He could compare her to South if he cared enough to linger in such a distant memory.
(That’s his fault, more than anything.)
When they part he rests his head against her chest, feels her blood rushing under the fragile surface of her skin. His hand slips into hers, fingers slowly entwining, his caramel tone latticed to the snow of her flesh. Committing her touch to memory. The opposite of amnesia.
“Emily.”
He listens to her heartbeat endlessly repeating.