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The memory scanner is slimmer now, a simple headset instead of an entire machine. When Agent slips it down over her glasses it still feels weighty, and she has to fight to keep her head from bowing under it.
Her head bows anyway, once the memory starts and she relives her failure again. And again, and again, and again, until the afterimages of flame flash in her vision when she finally takes the scanner off and puts it back in its place.
The motions are easy, rehearsed. It's simple as anything to type in the codes, 141515070109 to open the secure room the scanner's kept in, 1309201909 to open the box it's stored in, the numbers practically engraved on her fingertips along with dozens of others. Though, these are carved especially deep.
It's become a tradition, an attempt at absolution she knows she'll never earn. Once a year, on the anniversary of the day Agent betrayed a mission that runs deeper than her most basic code, she sneaks down here and reminds herself of exactly what she can never allow again.
She does her best to keep Vic from seeing her, but she knows it does anyway. Even if it doesn't see her in the halls, it sees her on the security cameras, on the spikes of energy consumption back before it was a headset, on the access logs now that it is. Vic never orders her not to, nor does it ever bring her little habit up.
And Agent's grateful for that. She knows she doesn't deserve this, shouldn't get to wallow in her own sorrow when she's the one who failed, she's the reason Mitsi's gone. She shouldn't get to grieve any more than any other employee, not when in the one moment she had to prove she was more than that, she just watched—and even worse, she ran.
She shouldn't get to, but still, Vic lets her.
With one last glance at the scanner, the silver marred and twisted by the flames still crackling at the edges of her vision, Agent closes the box. She resettles her glasses on her face, sets her face into an iron mask, and makes her way to Vic's office.
It's not silent, but as quiet as it gets. No one's talking, everyone's eyes on their work and only on their work. Even the mercenaries are nowhere to be seen—ideally, they're off doing the paperwork Agent assigned them to clean up their disastrous behavior yesterday, but she doesn't have very high hopes for that. But as long as they're out of the way today, she doesn't care what she has to deal with tomorrow.
So Agent doesn't delay. She walks right to the elevator and sends herself up, walking into the room as soon as the doors open.
It's dark, the lights completely off. Even the array of monitors is powered down, nothing at all to illuminate the space. But Agent doesn't need light to know that Vic is hunched over its desk, curled up in its chair. It might still be asleep; it slept through most of the day two years ago, it wouldn't be too far-fetched.
But no, as her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can see him sitting up and staring at her. When she takes another step closer, he sighs and swipes across his desk, clearing it with a sound like a hundred pieces of paper. Which probably isn't too far off. She'll have to burn those later, PR won't survive another incident of Vic's scribbles somehow getting published.
"Yes?" Vic asks as she comes towards his desk. His voice is cracked and raspy, and she's heard that roughness enough to know it's from a combination of not talking enough and crying too much. She would offer him water, but she didn't bring any, and besides, she doubts he'd take it.
"Just wanted to check in," she tells him. She swallows back all the questions Mitsi would've asked and leaves it there. It's not her place to comment on his voice, or on the drawings, or on the way he hasn't left his office in a week. Besides, he doesn't comment on the hours and hours and hours she spends in the Box, and that's a drain on company resources, even if she calls it training.
"It's today," Vic says, and that's more than answer enough.
Exactly six years ago, Agent got Mitsi killed. Exactly six years ago, she watched her boss disintegrate in a shower of green sparks. Exactly six years ago, she had to get saved by the stick she was supposed to protect. Exactly six years ago, she watched as Mitsi tried to help someone else and did nothing, watched as Mitsi got trapped under rubble and did nothing, watched as those attacks got closer and closer to her and did nothing, watched as her murderer came down from the sky, and Agent had lost her belt but the stick next to her had a gun, she's a good shot even without the zoom tool, she could've grabbed the weapon and tried to do her damn job but instead she did something worse than nothing—
Exactly six years ago, Agent ran away.
Exactly six years ago, the Outernet lost the kindest, most ambitious, most brilliant stick it'd ever had. Exactly six years ago, Rocket lost the stick who invented cloning, who set up stick-only internet, who built a machine capable of reading the most intimate lines of someone's code with nothing but the scraps her partner stole from a god.
Exactly six years ago, Agent lost her only chance.
Exactly five years and three hundred and sixty-four days ago, Agent wrote her letter of resignation. She still keeps it in a pocket on the inside of her jacket, just waiting for the moment she can be certain that Vic can walk on their own, the moment she knows that they don't need to keep relying on a failure like her, the moment she can finally pay for what she did.
Exactly five years and three hundred and sixty-three days ago, Vic grabbed her by the tie, ripped off her glasses, and told her their plan to kill a god. Exactly ten seconds later, they passed out, having not eaten or slept or had anything to drink since the party.
So the letter sits, and Agent comes up here every year even if she has nothing to say.
"It is," Agent agrees. Her hands are idle, and they twitch to fiddle with the tools on her belt, but she makes them stay still with all the practice a decade of being a statue has afforded her.
Vic nods, their head bobbing up and down like they don't know how to stop now that they've started. What little Agent can see of their eyes is blank, staring aimlessly down at the desk they've cleared off. Aside from their head they don't move a muscle, hands clasped in front of them in the exact pose Mitsi always held whenever board meetings started pissing her off.
It's awkward, standing here in silence, but Vic hasn't said she can go, so she won't.
She made that mistake four years ago, assumed that just because it hadn't said anything meant it was fine, that she could leave and take out some of her frustration in the newly-constructed Box. She checked in a few hours later to find that it'd broken both its hands punching the wall, and she had struggled to set a shattered wrist from the other side of the injury.
Agent learned her lesson. She doesn't leave until Vic tells her to, and even then, she stops by every hour until whenever it finally decides to leave the office and go home for once.
So today, she watches it nod and resists the urge to pull out a weapon, because she never knows how it'll react to something like that on this day—or ever, really. It's getting better with each training session Box, but it still flinches unless it's the one to gesture for the weapon.
It'll need to be better, by the time the Box can actually serve its true purpose. Vic won't be able to flinch at all, can't afford to, not if the Angel of Death will be in there with it, not if Agent has be outside, unable to do anything that isn't on a control panel without potentially undermining Vic.
But he knows that, so she doesn't have to say it. It wouldn't be her place to even if he didn't.
Eventually, three minutes and twenty-four seconds after Agent started counting in an effort to keep herself focused on something besides the desire to move, Vic stops nodding. He shakes himself a bit and, for the first time since she entered his office, looks up and actually seems to see Agent. "Status report?"
He could be referring to the stocks, which are all still crashing, or publicity, which every indicator marks as just as bad, but he has other sticks to tell him that. He could be asking about the workers' productivity, about any updates on the new batch of clones, about any bugs or defects in any of the machines, but he has his cameras to tell him that, even if they're off right now.
He could be asking about Agent, but he's not. And anyway, she doesn't deserve to not be fine; today is a day for her to reflect on her failure, not a day to grieve.
No, she knows exactly what Vic's asking about, and it's not any of that. It's about the job he's told her is her new life mission, a job she's privately and selfishly decided comes as a second priority to the job she already had and half failed at.
It doesn't matter that if she'd been successful, Vic would've heard about it instantly. They still want an update, even if the update's ultimately the exact same as it's been for the past five months.
"We encountered the Angel of Death at approximately three in the afternoon yesterday," Agent rattles off, recalling the exact details of this incident from the pool of all the others that are nearly duplicates. "She was in a disguise—brown cloak, red mask—purchasing corn dogs at a stand parked at the intersection of Styx and Net. The stall's owner managed to stall her after calling in the tip, but an attempt at a covert arrest failed—"
Ballista insulted Primal's aim, who then challenged her to a shootoff and managed to obliterate the wall of a clothing store and alert the Angel of Death to their presence in the ten seconds it took Agent to realize what they were doing and try to stop them.
"—due to a minor accident that will not occur again. She took off into the sky and, with the head start she had, managed to evade capture, and we lost her out in the fields. I was able to land a strike on her—" and cursors, how good it felt to nail that shot and watch her stutter in midair and start to fall, very nearly hitting the pavement before she caught herself, she might not have faced justice but at the very least Agent got to hurt her— "which will likely increase our chances of apprehending her in future encounters."
Vic nods, and for a moment Agent worries they'll get stuck in that loop again, but they pull themself out of it after only a few seconds. "Understood," they say, and she knows she's not imagining the flash of gritted teeth as they say it, the sudden tenseness of their still-clasped hands. "Was the stick who made the call compensated?"
"Yes." That corn dog seller would not let her forget about that reward, seemed far more concerned about a few hundred bucks than the fact that he'd had a full conversation with a known terrorist. "And the legal department is pursing reimbursements for the damage incurred in the incident."
"Thank you," Vic says, and Agent swallows the instinctive reaction to refuse it. "What's the plan for next time? I don't want her getting away again, not when I'm so close."
Agent understands where it's coming from, she really does. It took them years to build the Box from the doodled designs Mitsi had drawn, and when construction was finally complete, it'd felt like they were finally getting somewhere. When that worker saw the Angel of Death and that cursor hovering next to each other, everything seemed to fall into place—Mitsi's murderer would lead them to Vic's, and everyone could get what they deserved.
But whenever Agent summons flame a few inches from Vic's head in the Box, it still flinches. Its form is perfect when they spar, each punch well-calculated and each kick perfectly aimed, but it's still a little too slow, hits just shy of strong enough. It uses its weapons like extensions of its limbs, but in the heat of battle, whenever Agent pushes just a little bit more than it's used to, it gets overconfident.
In the Box, it's good enough to beat her in a spar, nine times out of ten. It's good enough to beat any number of workers, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Agent doesn't know if that's good enough against the Angel of Death. She doesn't know if it really is close enough to be able to force a superpowered terrorist to answer interrogation about a god.
She hums in agreement. "Ideally, we'd hire more mercenaries." She doesn't have to say why they can't—even paying the three they have now is a strain, especially with all the destruction they seem obligated to bring everywhere they go. "Perhaps we should consider cloning—"
Vic's hands finally move, slamming down on its desk with a bang that very nearly startles her, if she wasn't already used to movements like this from it. "I barely have the formula for the workers correct. I'm not—" Agent sees his head tilt, sees the flash of a something on one of his fingers, something he hasn't taken off since he first put it on— "I'm not her."
Everything broke when Mitsi was killed. Everything. The obvious, the stocks and public opinion and earnings and non-cloned workers willing to work. The almost-hidden, the way Vic stopped eating and the sudden crash in the amount of sleep he got and his bruised knuckles. And then, a few months into Vic's plan, the things none of them thought would ever be an issue, the fact that Mitsi was the lead behind the cloning project and her handwriting's sometimes worse than Vic's and the simple truth that no one else is Mitsi.
Agent certainly isn't.
She continues on like nothing happened, before Vic breaks too. "Of course. I'd recommend we stick with the current plan. The tip line's working well, the mercenaries get better each day, and our equipment's top-notch. Eventually, even the Angel of Death will get tired, and that's when we'll catch her."
Vic's hands move like he wants to fold them up again, but instead, he digs his nails into the metal of the desk. Agent doesn't so much as blink at the awful screech that rings out, even as Vic flinches, hard, but keeps doing it.
"I hate her," he whispers. He's told her a thousand times before. Each time he says it, Agent still hates just as much along with him. Mitsi's murder was Agent's fault, yes, but her failure wouldn't have mattered as much if the Angel of Death wasn't there to take advantage of it. So Agent hates her.
She doesn't say anything in response, and she doesn't have to. If Vic thought she didn't despise the Angel of Death exactly as much as them, she would've been thrown out of her place by their right hand six years ago.
(The letter of resignation sits heavier than a rock. There are three things Agent hates most—the Angel of Death, her failure, and that letter. The last two are one and the same, and since she can't get rid of her failure, she can't bring herself to destroy the letter.)
"I hate her," Vic continues, falling into a spiral Agent's been familiar with for years. "I hate her, I hate her, I hate it—couldn't it have just let me live? Did it know that I loved her, that she was my only chance, my only—"
Agent was Mitsi's bodyguard, and she was and still is Vic's, but six years ago that felt like the exact same job. She didn't mind, it made it easier, but—
But sometimes she was watching, and she wondered. Wondered awful, beautiful, traitorous things, wondered at how they each had one open hand even at their closest.
She doesn't wonder anymore. She knows.
Vic's nails are scraping against the desk and they're shuddering at the sound, but they can't seem to make themself stop. Their words loop just like their nodding did, again and again in phrases Agent knows they mutter in their sleep.
It's not her place to do anything.
Last year wasn't her place to do anything either.
But Vic hadn't eaten in two weeks, hadn't left their office in one, had the elevator shut down three days into their isolation. On the anniversary, Agent weighed her options, went with the priority she'd decided was her first, and hacked into the elevator to let her do what she decided she needed to do.
She didn't have real food to guide Vic into eating, just the flavorless bars packed full of nutrients she'd been eating for the past five years, but that was better than nothing so she sat with Vic in the dark and made them eat. Just until they were themself enough to stop rambling (five years five years five years I knew her for less than that five years), to go still as a corpse, to say clearly and firmly that they wanted her out and didn't want to see her again until the next day.
So there's precedent. And Agent is selfish.
She steps forward, further into the darkness, and lays a hand on Vic's shoulder. It goes silent the moment she touches them, its hands stopping in the same instant. This time, it doesn't go completely still, but leans a bit into her, and she refuses to read into it.
After a long few seconds, Vic finally breathes again for the first time since she was close enough to tell. "Six years," it says.
"Six years," Agent agrees.
"The Angel of Death will be apprehended before seven." It's not a request, not even an opinion. Vic's just stating a fact. "There will be justice before next year."
It said that on the second anniversary, and the third, and the fourth. The first and fifth it wasn't talking enough to say it aloud, but Agent could read it in Vic's eyes both times.
She knows a lot of things about Vic. She doesn't know if it's lying to itself each year. And she doesn't really want to know either.
Even if Vic's lying, her job is still to carry out the orders that have been spoken. She's not supposed to read into anything, or make decisions based on her own judgment. Agent is first and foremost Vic's right hand, and the status quo is the same as when she was its and Mitsi's shadow.
So it doesn't matter whether or not she thinks it's lying, because it said it wants the Angel of Death captured before the next anniversary, so that's what she'll do.
Vic hasn't shaken off her hand yet, or told her to leave, so Agent stays exactly where she is, close enough to be touching but a step too far to be considered actually close. "The Angel of Death will pay for what she did," Agent promises.
And she will, before the seventh anniversary.
(Or maybe after. Agent's already failed, and she learned a different lesson from that than the one she knows Vic thinks she did.)
(She could've taken the shot, or she could've kept Mitsi from running out into the open. One would've avenged her, but the other would've saved her.)
(Agent was never going to turn in her resignation. She escorts Vic home each night then goes right back to Rocket and powers on the Box, runs through each function of the control panel and each tool on her belt and each move she wishes she'd taken six years ago.)
(While practicing the motions she could do in the sleep she doesn't get, Agent pretends she's trying to not love Vic.)
She will. Because—
"Mitsi was everything," Vic admits, tells her right to her face. He's the only one in six years who's managed to meet her eyes through the glasses every time. "She was everything."
Agent doesn't know what's worse: that Mitsi was half her everything even though she was never supposed to be anything more than a shadow, or that Mitsi was only half her everything.
She should be it all, as a reminder, but she's not.
"She was," Agent agrees. Vic finally looks away, staring back down at his hands, and shrugs in an unspoken signal for her to let go. She does, and steps back, back to professional distance.
"Anything else I need to be aware of?" Vic asks, voice settling back into the tone he uses every other day. He's much faster at it now than he was on the fourth anniversary, faster still than on the third, and Agent can't help but think that it's progress.
Though, progress towards what, she doesn't know.
"No. Aside from yesterday's incident, everything is running smoothly." She waits for him to ask for specifics. He doesn't.
"Thank you, Agent. That will be all."
That's her cue to leave. Agent doesn't take it. He's never been able to act this much like Vic so early into the anniversary. Normally, she's in here for hours, running through protocols and the plan again and again until he's certain everything's in place.
A few minutes is odd. She doesn't trust Vic—
Well, no. She trusts Vic with everything. She trusts Vic with Rocket, with the Box, with the cloning lab, with the memory scanner, with each and every one of the brilliant remnants Mitsi left behind—with Agent's own life, easy as anything.
She doesn't trust Vic with Vic. That shouldn't matter, but Agent has her priority.
"Are you sure?" she asks, even though touching them was already toeing the line.
"Yes," they say, allowing the slight. "Although, I do want you to bring up the memory scanner."
Agent's glasses hide the way she blinks. ". . .are you alright, boss?"
This shatters the line, but Vic's face stays as iron-hard as her own. "I appreciate the concern, but I'm fine."
Agent wants—it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that this is clearly unhealthy, that Vic isn't hurting themself any less just because they're unwounded and awake. Vic has told her what to do, so she's going to go and do it. She nods and walks back into the elevator, the dark tint of her glasses the only thing stopping her from being blinded by the sudden brightness once the door closes.
She heads back for the storage room, and makes it about halfway there before she's forced to duck under the spray of debris as a wall explodes without any warning. Ballista and Primal tumble out through the new hole, still having that same argument that made them lose the Angel of Death yesterday.
"Just because you think you're hot shit with your bow—"
"Do you seriously think that just because you can summon a few extra weapons you have better aim—"
"I'll show you—"
Ballista's head cracks open to reveal a missile and Primal's bow makes an appearance already loaded, and they're both aiming at another wall and cursors Agent cannot make Vic have to deal with any more destruction, especially not today of all days.
Ballista settles into the stance that indicates she's about to fire and Primal raises her bow, but Agent's faster, pausing them both in less than a second.
She grimaces at their frozen forms. She'll have to drag them outside so they don't destroy anything, that'll be a hassle—
"You're fast," Hazard says from behind her, and she turns to see her climbing through the hole in the wall, arms crossed. "Very fast."
Agent knows what she's implying. She pretends she doesn't. "Of course. I'm going to capture the Angel of Death, aren't I?"
Hazard tilts his head, eyes flashing yellow. "Are you?"
(She heard that brewing argument between Ballista and Primal yesterday, knew what would happen long before either of them pulled out their weapons. Even if she hadn't, pausing is instantaneous, and she's trained for long enough that throwing the pause is almost as fast. Ten seconds was more than enough time.)
Agent narrows her eyes, even knowing Hazard can't see it. Her hands twitch to go to her tools, but that looks like surrender, so she keeps them still. "Do not question me. We have an objective, and we will achieve it. You're getting paid, that's all you should care about."
A warning sign pops up, but vanishes before she can recognize the symbol. "Understood. Do you want them brought outside?"
And suddenly, Agent is tired. So fucking tired, but she has a job and today is not a day for her to grieve, today is a day for her to work twice as hard at minimum. "Yes. I'll unpause them later."
Hazard nods, splits in two, and carries the other mercenaries off to somewhere Agent won't have to deal with them for the next five minutes. As she watches them leave, she sends out an order to all nearby workers, directing them to abandon all nonessential tasks and clean this mess up before Vic sees it. As soon as the first of them arrives, a shape tool in its hands, she turns and continues towards the storage room, her pace the exact same tempo as it was before.
Her pulse is the same rhythm it's always been, her face is still held steady, her hands do not have to fight to not go towards her belt, or towards the pocket she hasn't touched in five years and three hundred sixty-four days.
This is betrayal, and Agent can't decide whether it's better or worse than the first.
Because her first betrayal killed Mitsi. Her first betrayal was cowardice, shaking hands and a broken mask and complete and utter failure.
But her second—
Vic has ordered her to bring in the Angel of Death at all costs. It doesn't matter that she has the power to rain flame and fury and death on anyone she sees fit. It doesn't matter that she's probably spent her whole life easily winning fights. It matters that she killed Mitsi, but it doesn't matter that she might kill Vic.
It doesn't matter, because they've ordered Agent to bring her in, and there was that look in their eyes that told her everything she needed to know about whether or not it matters if they survive.
It doesn't matter to Vic, but it matters to Agent.
She is selfish, and she doesn't know if that's worse than being a coward. She is a traitor, because she looked Vic in the eyes and agreed to bring in a monster at all costs, but she won't risk the cost of their life.
Mitsi wasn't hers to lose and never could've been, but still, Agent lost her. Vic isn't hers to lose and never will be, but still, Agent refuses to lose them to the Angel of Death too.
So this is betrayal. And Agent's spent six years failing to be okay with that and what it means.
Her fingers tap out the code to the storage room without hesitation, bring out the scanner without delay. And then, for just a little while, she pauses.
Her anniversary ritual only involves reminding herself once, because that's all she needs. But Vic's doesn't involve the reminder at all. So if he's breaking the pattern, what's the harm in one more time reliving it?
The headset goes over her face, and the world is set ablaze once again. Agent watches as she fails the first stick she ever swore to protect, watches as she stumbles away from the Angel of Death, watches as she has a chance but doesn't take the shot.
The memory loops, and Agent lets it.
The very first time she rewatched this moment, she swore she'd never fail this way again. By now she has a dozen times.
She's had the shot before. But if the Angel of Death is brought down, then Vic won't be convinced of anything besides fighting her immediately. And he's not ready yet.
Agent swore she'd never just watch as someone she loves dies again, and that's the one promise she hasn't broken. So when she has the Angel of Death in her crosshairs, she twitches the gun just a bit, enough so she still bleeds, but not enough to force Agent to bring her in.
She could've captured the Angel of Death yesterday. Could've stopped Ballista and Primal before they alerted her, could've aimed for the chest instead of the arm.
But if she had—
Today is the sixth anniversary of Mitsi's death. Agent refused to let next year be both the seventh, and the first anniversary of Vic's.
Yesterday, Agent failed. Someday, she won't. Someday, she'll achieve both her objectives.
But today, she fails and Vic lives.
Agent closes the lid of the case and heads back up to Vic's office, already steeling herself to be a traitor yet again.