Work Text:
Alistair yawns as he reports for work that morning, checking the boards to see what he's scheduled for and who he needs to be. He's in two back-to-back scrims in the afternoon and a group melee at night for someone's birthday party. He's only dying once today. Nice.
His holo-emitter got smacked around during the last battle and he'd had to turn it in for repairs, so Alistair turns right at the first intersection to go to Resource Management, instead of heading straight for the barracks. The holo-emitters are vitally important to their business model, bordering on critical, so the repair area is huge and Alistair is always getting lost whenever he tries to find Dagna's desk. He threads through the chaos and chatter, ducking someone's overgrown and amorous fern and narrowly avoiding a laser clipping his ear when someone test-fires a rifle that isn't quite finished yet.
He finally recognizes a stretch of hallway with one of those demotivational kitten posters tacked up at a weird angle. Alistair takes the next left and there Dagna sits at her worktable, scowling down at a smoking emitter array with a pair of goggles shoved up on her forehead and a terrifyingly firm grip on some kind of red-hot repairing tool he doesn't recognize.
Alistair stops before her desk, dithering for a moment or two about whether he should make a noise to draw her attention – if he even wants her attention, which he's none too sure about at the moment – when Dagna snaps at him without looking up. "You idiots need to take better care of your equipment."
"That's not mine," he protests out of habit, and then blinks, because honestly, one emitter array looks very like another. "Is it?"
Dagna looks up at Alistair then, nailing him with a boiling look that changes as soon as she actually sees him. "Oh. No, it's not yours," she admits grumpily. "Sorry. I think someone stepped on this and then bent it? It's the worst and I'm going to yell really loudly when I get my hands on whoever it was."
"So, maybe I should take mine and get out of your hair?" Alistair asks hopefully.
"Smart!" Dagna says with a bright smile. "I knew I liked you. I have to track down a weird fault in your unit, though, so you get a replacement until I can make sure yours isn't going to fizzle out on live television." She pushes her chair away from her desk and rolls over to a tall cabinet behind her.
The unit she tosses him is brand new, so Alistair lets it scan his ID implant so he can log in and pull up his assignments for the day. He puts on his first change and raises his eyebrows at Dagna; she spins her finger in the air and Alistair sighs and obeys, turning in a slow circle with his arms out.
"Looks good," is her verdict. "Let me know if something fucks itself up between now and showtime."
And then Dagna picks up a really intimidatingly large wrench and Alistair – not to put too fine a point on it, Alistair flees for his life.
———
He heads for the employee lounge on the other side of the underbelly, collapsing into one of the sinfully soft chairs, and begins to go over his assignments in more detail.
One of the fights is a straightforward deathmatch: two equally matched pairs of fighters, weapons scattered around the arena, winner takes all. There's no history there, nothing Alistair needs to memorize, so he flips to the next.
This is the latest installment in a series of grudge matches between two rival gangs with really stupid names. Alistair's one of the more physically imposing fighters on staff, so he usually gets a brutish kind of character, and this time's no different; his only lines are snarled threats. There is some blocking this time, though, so Alistair spends some time memorizing that before he flips to the last page of his assignments.
The melee has an actual story. It's some kind of Romeo and Juliet thing, two families who have spent thousands of years hating each other until even the thought of speaking to someone on the other side makes them want to do murder. The writers even have the lovers fighting – one's played by Alistair, in a skin-sim that looks more like him than usual, and the other's played by Elissa.
Elissa.
Oh, shit.
Alistair swallows and glances up to look across the room at Elissa, who's studying her own assignments at a table across the room. They haven't talked in the last week, since the both of them got quite spectacularly drunk at a company party and made out for nearly an hour in a closet before Zevran and Taliesen found them with two missing shirts between them.
There are pictures. Alistair has seen them. Zevran made sure of that.
At that moment, Elissa looks up at him, her eyes cool and unreadable.
Call him a coward, but Alistair's never been more grateful for the half-hour warning siren.
———
The unscripted fights are quite a bit different than the ones that come with detailed blocking and scripts. It's easier for Alistair to really let loose and use his military hand-to-hand training and all of the different weapons skills that he's learned since he started working this job. There are thousands of people watching in the stands, and millions more on screens and feeds and implants while they're comfortable at home, all of them cheering and waiting to see who's going to live and who's going to die.
Gladiators, they're called, like the old Roman tradition. And just like those old gladiator games, these are blood sports.
At least, that's what the crowd thinks.
Alistair delivers a powerful overhead blow to one of his opponents and arranges his face into a scowl as Maceron screams and jerks backward, stumbles to one knee, and then falls to the ground, blood spurting from a thick wound in his head that shows a little more gore than Alistair really wanted to see.
The holo techs that work here are the best in the business. The blood and gore is a little too realistic, honestly. Alistair has no idea how they do it, and he doesn't really want to know. This level of tech is over his head.
Alistair and his partner leave Maceron there to finish dying and hunt down their second opponent. It's not fair, the two-on-one stalk, but that's the game. Fair doesn't enter into it.
And anyway, fair isn't what the crowd wants. They want to watch Alistair's character hunt down his opponent and slaughter him.
It makes Alistair sick, sometimes, but where else is he going to go? He got cashiered out of the military for refusing to follow orders he didn't agree with. Fighting is his only means of making a living. At least they don't want him to actually kill people at this place.
(The kind of people who want to hire a disgraced ex-soldier down on his luck aren't usually the kind of people Alistair wants to work for.)
So he's lucky.
He is.
Really.
Alistair vamps for the camera, lifting the ax over his head and roaring like a caveman, and the crowd goes absolutely wild, shouting and cheering and flaring bright, colored lights for his victory. Alistair, being the coward that he is, pushes everything else down into the box of things he doesn't want to think about so he can do his job.
The grudge match with the gangs goes off without a hitch, though Alistair nearly takes a bad hit when he starts to grow tired from the exertion and sloppy because of it; he shakes his head, snarls for the camera, and gets back into the game with a vengeance, using the distraction to move smoothly into one of his pre-scripted fight segments.
Afterward, he takes a quick shower and heads back into the employee lounge to have a lie-down for the hour that he has left before his next match. Alistair can sleep anywhere. It doesn't matter if he's in the middle of a crowd or a hundred feet underground in the lowest levels of the City, where the artificial sunlight blasts around the clock; all he has to do is close his eyes, clench and relax his muscle groups in a wave, and it's lights out. It's one of the few unequivocally good things the military taught him.
He wakes up a couple of minutes before his alarm was set to go off, the skin on the back of his neck tight, like someone's been watching him. Alistair gets an elbow under him and scans the room; there's quite a few people here, most of them waiting for the same match he's scheduled in, but none of them are looking at him.
There's no sign of Elissa.
(The shameful sinking feeling when he realizes that he wants her to look for him makes Alistair cringe at himself.)
Alistair heads for the restroom and while he's there, he takes the opportunity to turn his holo on and load his next cover, examining his new face in the mirror. The mouth is the hardest to animate, and Alistair is unsurprised to find that the face he sees reflected back at him has a similar mouth to his, though the lips are thicker; he's handsome enough, Alistair supposes, with deep blue eyes and long black hair that falls over his face. That's going to be something he has to manage during the fight; he tries practicing different turns of his head to watch his bangs flop back and forth for a few minutes until he thinks he's got the hang of it.
He has a long machete strapped to his back and an old-fashioned crossbow revolver at his hip. Both of those are weapons Alistair already knows how to use.
That means it's time to go, before he's late for showtime and he gets his pay docked.
Alistair gives himself one last look, raises an eyebrow just to watch the stranger in the mirror echo him, and heads for the staging entrance. The other fighters are milling around there, already split into their groups; one side is dressed like rich and arrogant socialites, the kind that struts around with swords on their hips daring anyone to look at them sideways, and the other, Alistair's team, is clearly made up of lower-level rough trade. Alistair glances down at his holo-image and shrugs. At least he's playing his kind of people this time.
He heads over to the others –
A strong hand wraps around his upper arm, stopping him in his tracks. He knows that hand, and the shape of her fingers, the smell of her hair, the way she tastes...
Elissa is wearing someone smaller and sleeker than she really is, her hair longer and blonde and caught up in a ponytail. It's strange to look down so far to meet her eyes.
"Are we ever going to talk about it?" she asks him.
Alistair raises his eyebrows a little. "Is this really a conversation you want to have at work?"
"It's not like I'm seeing you outside of work, either," Elissa points out. "You're too good at avoiding people."
"Natural tendencies," Alistair says, but despite himself, there's a smile growing on his face that won't quit. She wouldn't be pushing like this if she didn't want to do it again – if she wasn't interested enough in him to first give him space enough to think, and then to come after him in this very straightforward and direct way. He should have expected it of her.
(And Alistair can't deny that the fact that she's come to him instead of the other way around is great for his ego.)
"I was going to text you just as soon as I thought of something to say," Alistair admits.
"'Hi' is traditional," Elissa says, her voice hard; but there's humor lurking in the mouth she's got pressed tight to hide a smile, and her hand is softening on his arm, until she's just holding on. Until she's just holding him.
Alistair grins at her. "Oh, but it's so uninspired, don't you think?"
Someone behind him wolf-whistles very loudly, and Alistair turns to find that Zevran is smirking at them in the most uncomfortable way known to man; he glares at Zevran, which just makes him laugh. "Save the flirting for the cameras," Zevran calls over.
Alistair makes a rude gesture with two fingers as Elissa's hand drops away from his arm, leaving him cold, though she's smiling ruefully when he looks back at her. "He's not wrong," she says, gives him an awkward little salute, and walks away to join her team.
Alistair watches her go, the excitement building low in his gut. Damn, but she's beautiful – strong, funny, entirely too kind – and Alistair doesn't understand how he got so lucky.
With that dash of hope swirling through him, Alistair finds it difficult to summon the kind of heartbreak and anger he needs for his lines to work. He really has to settle down and focus – but Elissa is making that impossible, because even though she's a consummate professional, she's still there, and that seems to be enough to keep him off balance. The fights go well enough, but Alistair's acting is so off that the techs summon one of the writers so that she can feed Alistair new lines on the fly. His character ends up trying to woo Elissa's character back to him. On the battlefield, as their families do their very best to kill each other.
This is ridiculous.
At first, Elissa just gives him withering looks and spins away to deal with one of her scripted fights, but after a while, she allows her character to start getting into it – and by then, Alistair is really starting to enjoy the whole silly game that they're playing. He gets to flirt with her in the most over-the-top way he can imagine, but he kind of really means it, and it's surprisingly fun.
He has to fight Elissa's "father" to get through to her, and it's turned into the central fight of the entire match, with the surviving members of both families gathered around them in a tight circle, pushing and shoving and yelling; Alistair tosses his hair out of his eyes and grins, baring his teeth. The writer whispers in his ear. "Come on, then!" Alistair roars. "I'll prove we're meant to be together, and nothing you or anyone else can do will change that."
Then again, maybe the writers are taking an opportunity to mess with him. He wouldn't put it past some of them –
Elissa's "father" goes for him then, shouting about his daughter's honor, and he and Alistair fight for a while before Elissa's "mother" tags in. Two-on-one needs far more focused attention, since the possibility of an accident is so much greater, and Alistair falls back on the instinctive moves that he's practiced so much that they're worn into his muscles and written on his bones. Still, they're pushing him back, inch by endless inch, and soon enough it's going to be time for Alistair to perform an overwrought death scene.
But Elissa's head snaps around, in the way that means that someone's whispering in her ear, too.
"Stop!" she cries, thrusting her body between Alistair and her parents, spreading her arms to become a better shield. Alistair has to twist quite alarmingly to avoid hitting her with the machete. "You can't – you can't! If you ever loved me, don't touch him!"
The crowd gasps as one in a sound that reaches even Alistair down in the middle of the arena, a few sharp whistles screeching through the air as they react to the stageplay happening in front of them.
"Get out of the way, daughter," her father growls. "We'll have our revenge for this insult, and then we'll find you your true match, and you'll understand – "
"You'll have to go through me," Elissa declares, stepping backward until her back touches Alistair's chest. "Lose a daughter, or gain a son."
"Felice, move," her mother snaps, suppressed fury in the trembling point of her machete.
"I won't," Elissa says clearly. "Choose."
Elissa's father touches her mother's arm, and their eyes meet for a long, long moment, and Alistair imagines the shot: the cameras cutting to a close shot of the father and mother looking into each others' eyes, the silent communication, the tiniest of nods as they decide on a plan without words.
"Daughter," the mother says, sighing and dropping her blade. "I love you too much to lose you."
Elissa smiles then, and takes three long strides to reach out and hug her mother –
And then Elissa's father immediately seizes on the opportunity that Elissa's inadvertantly given him and lunges for Alistair, his hands wrapping around Alistair's throat as he begins to strangle Alistair –
Obedient to the demon on his shoulder, Alistair struggles to pry the hands away, pretending that he can't breathe; his movements grow more and more desperate as Elissa screams and struggles to get to him, but her mother is holding her in place and Alistair can count on no help from her.
With the last of his air, Alistair gropes at his belt –
And plunges his machete into her father's chest.
The man's hands fall away from Alistair's throat, his eyes going blank and empty, and he falls backward into the sand at their feet.
Alistair instantly knows that something is wrong. They don't simulate the smell of blood. It's impractical and wasteful and a pain to clean the arena at the end of the day, and it's a lot easier to pump chemicals into the air up in the stands to give the crowd the right experience.
But Alistair knows that smell. He knows it by heart.
He blinks four times in a row to activate the panic button hardwired into his holo and tries to figure out what his character would be feeling, though it's hard with the jumble of insane thoughts all running through his head at the same time. The writer's gone silent. He's not getting any cues. Horror, triumph, he'd probably want to know if Elissa still loves him? Good enough.
Alistair falls dramatically to his knees and stretches his hands out to his starcrossed lover across the sands. "Run away with me," he implores her, projecting his voice so everyone's looking at him and not the body. "We can be together somewhere far away from here. Alone – just the two of us."
She looks pale, but that suits the moment. "But my father," she protests, gesturing at the body with one perfectly even hand.
"He tried to kill me," Alistair reminds her. "They'll never let us be free here, my love."
Elissa gives the moment some silence to give it weight, looking at him, and then at her father's body, and at her mother's imploring impression, and then she hurries over and takes both of Alistair's hands in hers –
And as if they'd scripted it that way, the whole platform begins to sink into the ground, and the safety shield forms over their heads and solidifies into an opaque barrier. Hidden from the crowd and the world above, Alistair drops Elissa's hands as if they'd burnt him and dives for Roan's still body.
There's no pulse at all. His body is already cooling.
Alistair knows himself and his skills. He struck a heart blow. There's no question in his mind. There was no saving Roan from the instant Alistair's blade slid inside of Roan's body.
But how? There are a hundred safeguards meant to prevent exactly this kind of situation from happening.
"We have to call the police," the woman playing Elissa's mother says, her hand at her throat. "He's dead."
"And what are we going to say?" Elissa demands. "One of the gladiators died? We're supposed to die! Everyone already thinks that we're disposable. If we call the police, the whole thing comes out, and then we all get charged with fraud and this whole operation gets fined into the ground – "
"Not to mention, then someone else would take our market share, and they probably would actually kill the talent," Alistair says, grimacing. "She's right. We can't say anything."
He looks up at Elissa, whose worried eyes are already settled on his face. She doesn't need to tell him that since his were the hands that delivered the blow, Alistair is the prime suspect. He doesn't have a motive, but that doesn't matter, not in the City. The cops are just as likely to take an easy win and send him to the chair for something he didn't do.
"We have to solve this ourselves," Alistair says to her.
Elissa nods, her mouth settling into that stubborn look that he –
Not now, Alistair tells himself. Later. When this isn't hanging between them like a thundercloud.
(Please let there be a later.)