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The worst fucking part of being one of the Rebellion’s most valuable spies is that, more often than not, Freckles now reports directly to General White.
He’d bounced around and through different administrative intelligence positions since the whole mess that was his retirement from active missions, and that had been fine. Not great, because great has never exactly been an option when it comes to Freckles’ jobs, but he isn’t usually at risk of getting shot now, and eventually stopped wanting to kill himself.
So, you know, great.
But then (because there always has to be a “but” with him) he’d gotten a memo that he was being promoted for some fucking reason. That was a year or so ago, and he still doesn’t get it. What the fuck possessed General White to go, yeah, I hate the giant’s guts and look at it like I want to murder it slowly and horrifically every damn time I have to be in a room with it, but sure, I’ll trust it to supervise other spies and tell me all about it.
Yeah, sure, Freckles is valuable. Irreplaceable, really– less so these days, now that he can’t pass for an active Rosie, but even other Crown defects don’t have the knowledge and skills he does. None of that changes the fact that if General White saw a convenient way to off him, he’d be gone in an instant.
And yet here she is, sitting in this fort’s secured meeting room with her head in her hands after another tense video call. Every damn time she reports to General White, she has to do her best to ignore the way she stares her down and try to forget the shit she’s threatened her with. Freckles has been shaking since she was dismissed and allowed to shut off the computer. Fuck, she almost would rather get sent out into the field again than do one more of those meetings. Fucking hell.
The worst bit is that Freckles knows exactly why she looks at him like that. Even after a few years of hormones and growing his hair out, of tattoos and piercings and every damn thing he can do to make himself Freckles Luck, he still can’t get away from the family resemblance.
It doesn’t matter that she’s over a foot too tall, too scarred, freckled, graying, whatever else. It doesn’t matter what she does. To General White, she’s always going to be some defective mirror of Rose Prince.
Rose fucking Prince. The spoiled self-righteous bitch. The woman half the Rebellion venerates for having the bad luck of the shit she fought for finally catching up to her. She was never supposed to be Cole’s victim. She was supposed to get to stand at his side and watch their enemies burn.
Freckles stands up and leaves the room, picking up his comms on the way out. He scowls as he heads for the exit. It isn’t his fault he’s stuck with her face. General White acts like he wanted this. Like he’s mocking her by daring to have ever existed.
He wishes he’d never asked her if he knew her. That he’d kept his face blank when he realized why she’d always been so damn familiar, that when she asked he’d lied instead of making her spell it out. It’s not like he’s going to fucking tell anyone what he knows. He wasn’t planning on it even before she threatened to dismember and eviscerate him if he ever did.
Still. Every time Freckles talks to her, there’s still some tiny, stupid part of her brain she can’t shut up. A part that feels like a fucking kid whispering, “Snow?”
The Prince twins are both dead, and good riddance. If they’d stop rattling around Freckles’ head, that would be just peachy.
At least he’s on a planet. Oz, some weird little rock in the outer reaches. The rebellion has most of the western hemisphere of it. It might have been pretty once, before all the fighting. The plants that have the nerve to push up from the dirt are a vivid shade of green that doesn’t seem real. The bombs and fires and gas have left most of the terrain blackened and rocky, though. The most interesting things to look at outside the fortress are the dead skeletons of trees.
But unlike when he’s on most space stations, there’s someplace half-decent to sit and smoke. No cramped fireproof closet plastered in warnings about what’ll happen to the oxygen systems if you light up outside them. The little patch of dirt within the barbed-wire fence even has a battered little awning for when it rains. Fancy shit. Freckles settles down onto the bench and pulls a cigarette and lighter from his pocket. He shuts his eyes as he takes the first drag, then exhales and looks out at the wasteland.
She hears the east half of Oz is different. Bright and shiny and happy. The kind of place you don’t see poor people or suffering or even anybody who disagrees with shit, and nobody ever even thinks to wonder why. Propagandized to hell and back under Cole. Nobody wonders what’s behind the curtain. Why would they? He loves them. They live such perfect fucking lives because of him. Their genocidal dictator of a king keeps them safe.
Rose thought the same thing. It makes Freckles sick.
She remembers being her. She remembers how much she fucking loved him. She’d have eaten out of his hand if he ever asked her to.
When Rose was a kid, she wanted to fly ships. Freckles remembers bragging to her school friends that she was going to be a fleet commander in the star force one day. When she was about to specialize her fucking studies or whatever, though, Cole visited her. He told her how much her talents (what fucking talents? She was what, fourteen?) would be wasted there, how he thought she’d love the army instead. It barely took anything to make her cave. He said she should go to the army, so she did. Sit. Stay. Roll over. Good girl.
Either way, her dream was bombing innocents, killing their leaders, and forcing them to obey Cole instead. She thought she was so honorable. She thought she was spreading peace. That those people she killed and conquered were better off under Cole’s hand. She’d leave the wreckage of those planets and congratulate herself for saving them. All that shit about how Snow’s politics was just fancy lying, when all she ever fucking did in her life was lie to herself.
He distinctly recalls a time when Rose was around twenty-one, when she was leading troops on a planet whose name still escapes him. They’d been fighting in the same city for days, trying to crush the planet’s resistance forces. They’d started with orbital bombardments, but Rose had been assigned to sweep on foot and eliminate any enemy troops. The city was already a twisted nightmare of bloodstained rubble, and if that wasn’t enough they were armed with tear gas to flush people out of hiding. The air had been thick with it. She and all her soldiers already wore gas masks.
A kid had run out in the street in front of them, coughing and crying. Rose stopped her company and stepped forward. Her lieutenant had grabbed her arm, warning it might be a trap. Rose shrugged her off.
They had a few extra gas masks in case one failed. Rose gave one to the kid and ordered a few of her troops to take him to the refugee services the crown had set up for people who surrendered. Then she’d continued on the mission.
She didn’t even ask if the kid’s family was still alive. She practically had him kidnapped and then just kept fucking flooding his city with tear gas.
She didn’t see a thing wrong with any of that.
It’s not like Freckles hasn’t done shit. She couldn’t tell you how many deaths she’s responsible for. Back when she went on field missions, she’d use a bullet, a knife, poison, whatever would get rid of the person she needed dead. She’d leave bombs, set shit to explode as soon as she left, hack people’s orders to lead Crown armies straight into traps. Anything to keep the rebellion alive, to keep herself fighting another day. Back when she went to church with Iris, she was sure she and Rose were both headed straight to hell for what they’d done.
At least Freckles has the decency not to pretend she’s righteous for it.
Sometimes she still dreams about that poor goddamn Rose Red outside that one server room. It was one of Freckles’ last missions. The Red had been flogged a few days ago; her back was raw meat. It had been her third night on watch when she caught Freckles sneaking in. She’d been shaking so hard. Freckles couldn’t help but think of 76.
Freckles barely had to do anything to convince her she had orders to be there. It had been easy as anything to convince her to lie down a moment, to close her eyes, that Freckles would keep watch for her. The poor thing fell asleep in moments. It was fucking obvious she wouldn’t last three more days. Killing her in her sleep was a mercy. It didn’t make it any easier to cut her throat.
That still wasn’t like the shit Rose did. There’s no such thing as an innocent giant. And Freckles is fighting for her life. If she ever gets caught, if the rebellion loses, if she ends up back in the army’s hands? She’s worse than dead. She’ll be lucky if she can kill herself before they get any intel out of her or connect her to 11678. She’d be a giant; they wouldn’t even have to pretend to follow the human rights laws they only keep on the books for show.
Rose fought for glory– her own and Cole’s. She thought she had some kind of moral high ground about it, that she was different from all the other fucks in the army because she’d give a kid a gas mask to protect them from the weapons she deployed on them. Like believing in giving quarter and only slaughtering a few civilians made her some kind of saint.
She knew damn well what she was doing. She understood that she was killing people, that her king was killing people, that none of it was ever about anything but taking more and more and funneling it into Zantine and New Atlantis and wherever the fuck else. Rose knew it and justified it. Sure, she felt guilty. She didn’t let it stop her. She let her fucking general talk her out of it, or threw her conscience into a bottle of expensive whiskey to let it drown.
Everything she ever fucking touched was expensive. The fancy uniform for her kiddie soccer league, the stupid little purebred dog she had when she was little, the spaceship she was given for her sixteenth birthday. She probably shit into designer diapers when she was a baby.
There were a few scholarships offered at her school. She thought the kids who were there because of them were just let in to fill a quota. Hell, she looked down on other rich kids for not being rich and noble and fucking Empire enough. There was a girl she hated for years who she’d gossip about to Snow, say that her family had only bought their title three or four generations back. Not like Rose. Not like the Princes, who threw their lot in with Cole clear back in the beginning. Who were just handed their money for being his most obedient fucking doormats for millennia.
Rose loved it. She loved the empire, loved the army, loved Cole. Did since she was a tiny fucking kid. She and Snow once made him a birthday card. Freckles remembers fighting with her over the markers, using chubby baby hands to draw the three of them holding hands and smiling. Squirming with impatience while her nanny dressed her and Snow in matching itchy dresses to go to the birthday dinner, clutching the card and proudly handing it over to him when the time came. Freckles remembers his smile. Warm, grandfatherly, as if he hadn’t probably spent the day ordering cities burned and dissidents put in front of the firing squad. He let Rose and Snow sit on his lap as he accepted the rest of his gifts and well-wishes.
Even with Cinders, she refused to see him for what he was. She listened to Cinders talk about her father being fucking shot in front of her at Cole’s order and still acted like he was a fucking idiot. Like he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, like he just made a mistake and would apologize and do better if someone just sat him down and explained that killing people in front of their kids is bad. Rose thought she’d get promoted to general one day and convince Cole there was a way to keep all the wealth and perfection of the empire while only killing the people who deserved it.
She felt so horrifically guilty even for that. She felt like a monster for hating what Cole did to Cinders. After work at that prison she’d lock herself in her quarters and have a whole fucking spiral about being a traitor for wanting to be slightly less of a fascist. She was so fucking brainwashed. She was so fucking stupid.
And Cinders… fucking hell, Cinders. What the fuck kind of woman fucks her prisoner in the bathroom of her cell, deletes the security footage, and still thinks she’s the one keeping that prisoner safe? Rose didn’t fucking care. She knew every damn moment she spent talking to her and touching her and promising she’d get her out of that place was taking advantage of her. She knew she shouldn’t, and she did it anyway. Because they were in love or some shit.
She liked that Cinders needed her. She’d have fucking denied it til she died– she wouldn’t have even believed it herself. But Freckles remembers being her. She fucking liked it.
That shit fucked Freckles up back when things went bad with Emmie. Trying to sort out the difference between the ways Freckles had been a piece of shit to her and the ways Rose had been a piece of shit to Cinders, what all Freckles inherited and what he can’t blame on anyone but himself. Freckles doubts Cinders and Rose would have had a much better time of it than he and Emmie did by the end of things.
Sure, Rose didn’t exactly deserve what happened to her. It was fucked. But everybody acting like she’s some kind of innocent victim is either stupid or lying. She did shit that was just as bad to plenty of other people. There’s a damn reason Cole picked her as his best soldier.
She followed orders the way the brainfucked Rosies do without anything in her head forcing her to. She did it because she wanted to.
And Freckles is stuck with her face.
To General White, to the rebellion, to every random person who sees her and gets edgy about her, she’s just a fucking giant. Fuck all the years she’s spent putting her neck on the line, right? If she gets treated like a human being she might snap and kill everyone or whatever the hell the justification is.
Freckles isn’t even technically a person by rebellion law– she’s a piece of equipment managed by Iris. She’s the rebellion’s fucking attack dog. And if she stops doing tricks for them, if she barks at the wrong person, if she tugs at her leash too much? Half an ounce of lead directly into her brain. People said 11678 needed to be put down. Freckles isn’t much better. People are just a little bit more polite about it now.
Rose was proud to be Cole’s dog. She practically put the leash on herself. She was fucking pathetic.
General White probably wishes Freckles was like her.
He scowls and grinds out his cigarette. Fuck this. Fuck her. Fuck everything. He’s got a few hours before anyone else should want anything from him. Maybe he’ll kill time in the gym on base, lift weights or something until he doesn’t have to think. Doesn’t work as well as drinking, but that’s what trying to be sober gets you. Weights would be fine. Better than this.
He sure as hell doesn’t want to spend the handful of hours he ever fucking gets to himself pissing himself off more about a dead woman.
Fuck Rose. Freckles has shit to do.