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The lizard league in the Pentagon... again. A historic low for the country, beating the stock market crash by a mile. Cecil couldn’t fucking stand it. He was running through the facility, awash in red alarm lights, dodging rubble in places but strangely empty of lizards. He felt like how Mussolini had, hunkering down in that disgusting mountain, waiting for the raging crowd of anti-fascists to find him. Only he was less of a coward than Mussolini, and the lizard league should be struggling to tie a knot. It was like all his built-up control was crumbling away faster than he could grab it.
The Guardians were practically non-existent right now, Mark was having a tantrum, and Cecil was gonna have a fucking stroke. Even if the lizard league had bitten off more than they could chew by blowing open the Pentagon, they had no idea what was in the white room. All he needed was to minimize meeting any before he got there and stocked up on weapons. If he didn't he was likely screwed, so the dash through the facility had an extra motivational note to it.
The blaring red alarms were irritating him almost more than the lizard league's presence. He was seeing and hearing them a little too often recently for his liking. He shook his head and concentrated on where the hell he was going.
Five halls till the white room, two lefts, two rights, one left, door on the right.
Then a crash of wall exploded into his right side, and his body landed with a sick crack onto the floor. He coughed a pathetic little blood spray onto plaster. He shot his head up- Three of the bastards; a woman in the front. The ones in the back were squinting, so he bet on bad eyesight. He fumbled for the teleporter trigger only to find it was fucking cracked because of course it was. The woman tilted her head at him condescendingly.
"Poor human. No fancy technology left? Just subserviencccce to your soon to be lordsss? We had been hoping for more of a defense." She moued, tail moving in a hypnotic swaying motion.
Cecil struggled up to sitting and settled his mouth into a disgusted frown. It wasn't bad enough they had by dumb luck, chosen the time when the Pentagon was least able to defend itself, but now he had to listen to their monologuing? He felt the weight of the emergency gun in his right inner pocket and sized up how much attention she was paying him. Only one shot; the reaction time of the two in the back would be crucial. Better now than never. His hand darted inside his jacket, only to be cracked whipped by a tail.
Fuck.
His hand was suddenly something divorced from him, broken at a strange angle. Adrenaline unfortunately did not stop the pulse of pain up his shoulder. The leader started snarling at him.
"Well. We were told to only spare good candidatesss for followersss anywaysss" She muttered, holding up his gun like a newfound children's toy. Terrible grip. Shame a hit from two feet away was definitely going to kill him anyways.
Before his view was blocked by a familiar head of ginger.
“Donald?” No response. But at this distance, he could see his shoulders shaking as he breathed.
Which was all the warning he got before the three lizards were machine-gunned into lizard glue. He made a mental note to suggest a heavy Christmas bonus to the weapon engineers.
Donald wiped the viscera off his face as he turned, that permanent concerned look on his face. Cecil huffed out a cortisol induced laugh like he couldn't feel his heartbeat in his eardrums like a marching band.
"You alright, Cecil?" Donald asked, grabbing him by the forearm currently unbroken. Cecil clamped him back reassuringly with a curt nod. He ignored the first name, mostly because this was no time or place to lecture about respectability politics, and partially because Donald calling him sir was more formality than work place requirement. And he definitely earned it from the looks of the three remains. Pulp. Anyways, near death experiences were dime a dozen, time for reinforcements. He thumbed his earpiece.
"I need two Reanimen on hallway traced to my signal as soon as possible.”
"Alright, Donald, how do we feel about a field trip to the white room armory?"
They moved as quietly as possible, listening on edge for any signs of whirring or feet. The first couple hallways were uneventful; then they heard it. Just before they turned the final corridor, the sound of sibilant s-es and clacks of talons on the linoleum stopped them flat.
"How's that machine gun looking, Donald?"
"I may have gone a little overboard, it's almost out. Is there an ETA on the Reanimen?"
"They're right behind us, less than thirty seconds. We can wait it out." He said, before promptly slipping on the blood of some poor dead colleague and banging his (broken) hand on the wall. And if that didn't alert them, the aborted yell sure did.
He heard the clack of two of them approaching from around the corner, and saw Donald's face take on a determined look.
The reanimens are right behind us, don't do anything fucking stupid.
But no one ever seemed to listen to his thoughts. Had given up God, but he thought Donald was better than that.
He saw him step around the corner and wave a fist in the air, even as the metallic thunks of reanimen feet came into hearing range from behind them down the halls.
He started bullshitting something about coming to a surrender agreement. Even as Cecil saw him maneavur a handgun around the back of his shirt. The lizards laughed as though a surrender agreement with the Pentagon was chump change. They were out of time anyways, the Reanimen were right behind him, and Cecil knew they would disregard Donald as collateral.
“Donald, get down.” He yelled, before tackling him anyways. The whir of the power up, then a BWOM as Sinclair’s laser cannons turn the lizards into fried alligator bites. He could hear Donald breathing again next to him in the quiet.
He had signed off on the noise of that breathing. On the width of the bronchi and the amount of cartilage rings around his oesophagus.
He scraped a hand through Donald’s hair and huffed.
“Threat neutralized, you fucking self-sacrificing moron. Let's get ourselves patched up soldier.”
He lumped the arm over his shoulder and started on. He had to give it to the engineers, they had left very little out of the human experience in Donald. His legs were still full of adrenaline shakes for fucks sake. He had made a little pet project out of observing the tiny differences. Speaking of, he was just now noticing that Donald was currently bleeding synthetic blood out of a talon puncture in his abdomen.
Cecil touched the hole before thinking about it. Always the Doubting Thomas. Donald stiffened, and looked sideways at him. He looked like he was weighing up four separate things to say, before he landed on.
“Sir? If I can be remade, why would you tell me to get out of the way? Does the budget run out at forty Donalds or something? I mean, it would've eliminated the risk of them getting to you.” Cecil huffed through his nose.
“… Every time we remake you there’s a risk of losing something upstairs, whether it's memories, or emotional nuance. Hasn’t happened yet- that we know of- but I don't see the point in you losing anything metal when you're already made of wires. And to be quite frank Donald, it’s a pain in the ass being alone without you in the Pentagon. You should see some of the chumps they try giving me when you're recovering from something." He paused for a second. "And it sure as shit ain’t cheap."
Donald nodded in thought, having taken this mini diatribe in stride. And for a moment there was just the silence of the hallway and them walking it together.
“You ever try Thai food, sir?”
Cecil almost laughed.
“Why Donald, I had no idea you had such a way with words.”
“I do what I can, sir.”
“I think we can drop the sir for now, Donald. After we tend to our flesh wounds how about we abuse some teleporters and go to Bangkok."
“That sounds nice, Cecil.”
Donald landed in his quarters with a sigh.
Small standardized bed, Ikea adjacent desk, and two sad little chairs with sad beige cushions. He was never in his quarters long enough to complain, the room did what it needed to. Even if he had seen nicer prisons in Scandinavia. But the week had been hectic, and damn if he couldn’t use six hours. Apparently his tiredness WAS real- the tech was just as liable to entropy as his original body. Whenever the hell he’d had that last.
What a week. Mark Grayson was now actively resisting supervision by the GDA (Cecil’s neck was still bruising, though in Donald's opinion, his de-escalation skills were atrocious enough to have had it coming), the Lizard League breaking in again. He fell on the bed and put his head in his hands. Having penultimate security clearance in the movies was way cooler.
The Lizard League event was the most strange for him. He still could not quite grasp why Cecil had balked at him buying him some time. He didn't quite buy the 'risk of losing something upstairs' thing. 39 times was more than enough for any risk to present itself, and while he was biased, he couldn't detect change. And it couldn't be the cost- he’d seen Cecil abuse the teleporters, and their taxpayer burden, for the littlest things before, so the logic (or rather the illogic) of him trying to stop Donald’s self-sacrifice was just that: strange.
It didn't help he could still hear the director's heavy breathing in his ear clear as a bell. Or being pushed to the ground by him. The whole 'physical contact' thing as a whole wasn't exactly Cecil's modus operandi. Sure there was the odd approving hand on the shoulder here and there. But being tackled was another ballpark entirely. He banged the back of his head on the wall. Getting hot and bothered from being tackled should probably result in him being shot like a sick horse.
He was only vaguely embarrassed— in that way all attraction was tinged with embarrassment after your thirties. It was the general feeling that you were too old and weary to feel such a debasing emotion. He scanned the room walls, wondering yet again if his room was actually private. Fifty-fifty odds Cecil had crossed yet another social contract line and installed either a Big Brother-esque thought tracker when rebuilding him, or had Truman Show cameras in his room. But he only half thought that. The real horror was that, in order for his sense of self to have continuity, everything about him and his mind would have had to be unspooled and put back together again. Disseminated and reconstructed under Cecil’s supervision. Donald figured it was quite fitting. Cecil was already in his head. If it wasn’t so mortifying he’d be amused.
There was a knock at the door.
Donald sighed. It was Murphy’s law that the minute he tried to sleep, something went wrong. He thought about the big brother thing with a bit of reconsideration. Especially because there were two things that were unsettling. The first, that only Cecil would know and knock on his assigned quarters, so whatever it was was GDA top priority; and second- what the hell could it be that Cecil was knocking instead of calling or doing a radio check-in…
He took a disconcerted breath to himself. In, and out: and went to open the door.
“Donald.” Cecil said, with a little dip of the head. He was posed as unconvincingly casual as he ever had. There was a weird moment of tension as Donald frankly struggled to remember when this had ever happened.
“Is there… a problem sir?”
“No, no direct threats anyways. Mind if I come in, have a coffee?”
Oh. Well that was a mark better than whatever GDA ending nightmares Donald had been imagining. He widened the door.
“Of course sir, come on in.”
Cecil walked into his room like he walked everywhere else in the Pentagon. Like he had made up his mind it was personal property and it not being so was more of an administrative oversight than a legal distinction. He zoned in on the coffee machine and picked up what he needed with one hand before moving to the two meager seats with an expectant hand movement. He looked rather grim, now that Donald thought about it. He chose to remain silent when he sat down. He wasn’t going to fall for the oldest trick in the book of saying more than needed just because you didn’t like a little silence. Even if the sort of silence Cecil brought about gave him a pit in his stomach.
“I’m essentially here to ask you how your mental wellness is holding up, given your very abrupt “ self-discovery ” last week.” Cecil said, never breaking gaze, even as he broke open sugar packets (Donald had given up on questioning the three packets a while back) and stirred them in. Donald’s hands tightened on his pants. He cleared his throat politely.
“About as well as I could be doing, sir.”
A completely true sentence, technically. Saying whether he was mentally well or not was like saying there was an invisible teapot orbiting the sun. It just wasn’t relevant unless it was going to make something else crash. Cecil huffed, a dry unamused noise.
“Yeah, that’s… about what I thought you’d say. But aside from the fact that neither of us enjoy thinking or feeling when it comes to work— representing the Pentagon, I’d like to make sure it doesn’t lead to… self-effacing behaviour.”
Now it was Donald’s time to scoff. Of all people to criticise self effacing behaviour. A mental health check up was always vaguely condescending, and it didn’t help that Cecil kind of felt a pathological need to be a bit of a liar about it. ‘Representing the Pentagon’ he WAS the Pentagon. Or at the very least, he was the tallest gargoyle on the Notre Dame.
“Sir as far as the… ‘Pentagon’ needs to know, I’m perfectly well.” And he meant every word. He didn’t see any reason to worry about it affecting his work.
Cecil sighed, and something raw and old escaped in it. He opened the hand that wasn’t wrapped around the coffee mug in an appeasing gesture.
“How about if I’m just representing myself then? Got anything rattling around in there I can take to the grave for you?”
Ah. That made the whole conversation feel a little less tortured. He always figured Cecil would rather die than admit a personal stake in any fight. But maybe that wasn’t fair. Bringing anyone back from the dead (over and over) was a repeat bet on a losing dog if nothing else.
“Penny for my thoughts, huh.” He wanted to talk to Cecil suddenly. To tell him anything and everything in a huge stream of consciousness. He looked so strangely open sitting across from him. It felt like everything that made him have nightmares and everything he repressed was bubbled right up to his skin. But, well practiced, he swallowed the feeling down, and picked apart the feeling until it could be sorted into cohesive sentences. “Just wish there was... more I could do.”
Cecil tilted his head.
“I know. Hard not to do what we do and not want that."
Donald looked up, and made a little furrow with his brow.
"It's not that I don’t logically know we're doing enough. Just… an irrational fear.” He paused for a second “And, as a side note, if I think about the philosophical implications of my consciousness for too long I start spiralling. So that’s being kept in a very organised subconscious box, sir.”
Cecil snorted.
"Never let it be said that you let a existential quandary get in the way of your comedic delivery Donald. How about I tell you something equally as contradicting— and just as funny.” He leaned forward as though he was about to share some contraband, complete with a lowered voice. “I was relieved when you showed up with that self-mutilated rectangle you cut out of your arm. It’s a real pain when someone confronts you with a truth they’re not supposed to know about, with not enough proof. Then you have to keep lying. But, there wasn’t much I could say about circuit boards."
Donald huffed affectionately. That was the most Stedman approved attitude towards the truth he had ever heard.
“Drastic suspicions call for drastic proof.” Cecil smiled wryly over his coffee, before his smile evaporated, and he leaned forward with sudden intention.
“Donald, in case it’s not obvious, I’m not rebuilding your body from scratch over and over to torture you. It’s because you’re invaluable; though you know that, don’t you. I-“ he put the coffee cup down suddenly as if it disgusted him. “I cannot stress enough how incompetent our entire department would be without someone with your character. You’ve not so much as asked for a raise in thirty odd years.”
That really brought out a little amused grin out of Donald. A raise! Next thing you know they’d have mortgages and the like.
“What would I even spend it on, Cecil. Everyone above white room clearance is either at work or asleep. And I enjoy the work for the work’s sake. Same as you.” He couldn’t help but turn the mirror slightly. The hypocrisy WAS growing drastic.
“My point is, anything you want, ask for it. As far as I’m concerned, the only administrative power I have over you us bringing you back from the dead as needed.”
Donald was, frankly, stunned. Cecil had said a bunch of unspoken stuff real quickly and it was strangely nerve inducing. From a control freak, this monologue was downright romantic. Donald wanted to laugh suddenly, at this stupid bureaucrat of a man who apparently did peptalks now, looking as serious as ever, as if the whole thing wasn’t absurd.
The stifled humour must’ve been as clear as day on his fave, because Cecil started mirroring it.
“Yeah yeah, real gay shit, I know. But what would us old dogs know about that, huh.”
“Sir, you’re after coming into my bedroom and telling me I’m allowed to boss you around. Would the GDA psychoanalyst care for any of that do you think?”
“Donald if you breathe a word of this to any psychological members of staff, my resignation would be pending within the hour.”
Donald grew somber at that.
“I think the GDA would be… irrevocably worse, if you weren’t here, sir.”
Cecil sighed.
“Well the feeling is, unfortunately for both of our healths, mutual.”
Donald nodded. As absurd as it was, it had also been the boringly mundane reality for decades. Both of them would more than likely die before retirement. Himself apparently as many times as needed. Cecil’s coffee was almost finished. He got up and fished around the desk drawers for biscuits. Another mundane factor of life. Cecil always had a biscuit after a coffee, and never during. And they were both going to die before they left the GDA.
Cecil traded the coffee cup for the biscuit packet.
“You might as well finish what’s left” he mentioned, breaking open the packet. Donald tossed the cup back.
Donald hadn’t voiced any other opposition to keeping Conquest while they were down there, but Cecil could sense it growing even as they walked away from the bloody pulp of Viltrumite. Could see it in that permanently furrowed brow Donald had. He filled in the silence by muttering about other backup plans and logistics of the prison, but by the time the elevator had arrived down, he had run clean out of material.
The elevator up was in silence. Cecil wasn't mad. Donald was irreplaceable because they disagreed on matters. Still though, he had a stubbornness in his gut about this not even Donald could dissuade. Conquest was the most impressive cut of viltrumite meat they'd seen thus far, and damn if he was going to let the insurrectionary college kid defend the planet by himself. The doors opened.
Ah, Mexican sunshine, how long had it been. Though, his Doctors had made a large stink about exposing his sort of reconstructed skin to too much UV. As far as he was concerned, if he ended up dying of skin cancer, he wasn’t doing his fucking job.
He motioned at Donald, who was already perspiring.
"Come have a smoke with me. Now's the only boring five minutes the planet’s had in a year.” He said offhand, already getting his items out of his pocket. Donald shuffled over.
"Sir, why do I get sweaty." He all but panted, pulling at his shirt collar desperately.
"Be weirder for you if you didn't."
Lucky Strike Cigarettes, limited edition soviet lighter, and the satisfaction of the *Clink* of it lighting. Beautiful rituals. He savoured five lung crinkling puffs before handing it off. He had a complex about giving Donald things he'd started. Drinks, projects, cigarettes. He liked watching him take what he gave him. Some psycho-sexual thing he had no plans to examine.
Donald looked like he was deeply appreciating the smoke. Cecil stared at him, despite Donald looking out into the desert; completely unashamed, and feeling that old impulse to eat him alive. Well. Wasn’t his fault there never seemed to be any time. He firmly believed whatever weird thing he and Donald had going on was mutually understood. Why should he look away? He suddenly got the irrational urge for Donald to look at him.
"Donald."
The man in question looked up, with the cigarette burning away to nothing in the corner of his mouth.
"Sir?"
"Forget the cigarette." He said, moving his hand under the blazer to telegraph his intentions, and pulling him in with the shirt. Donald caught on half-way, and let out a startled 'Hmpf' before settling his elbow around the crook of Cecil's neck.
The stupidity of two old men making out in the dessert, above an alien that could kill their planet with one hand tied. They both ignored it.
Cecil grabbed possessively. His. His to rebuild and order around and to be yelled at by. Donald made noises in the back of his mouth every time Cecil moved. Needy little fuck. Cecil pulled back with a playful shove.
"Any qualms for HR Donald?"
"No sir."
"Good. Replacing you is a bitch.”