Chapter Text
"Spike defused. No need to thank me." Phoenix adjusts his jacket with a businesslike look.
Viper looks up briefly. Then she types something on her tablet. Killjoy beside her is silent, occasionally glancing at the screen and explaining something.
"Everyone here?" Viper looks around. Seeing only three agents, she exchanges glances with Neon and Killjoy and asks, "Where's Reyna?"
Neon, feeling the eyes on her, simply turns her head away and tries to pretend she knows nothing. Viper just sighs.
Reyna — that insufferable, overconfident, irritating Reyna — is dragging out their mission again with her need to collect as many souls as possible. She has once again ignored Viper's words that they need to finish the mission as soon as possible without any unnecessary delays.
"Brim will kill her if I don't do it first," Viper mutters, shoving her tablet and weapon into her bag with particular fury. Killjoy next to her wants to touch the other woman's shoulder, to calm her a little, but she holds back.
"Here she comes," Neon nods toward the broken automatic doors. Reyna wipes her hand across her forehead, smearing blood into a thick streak. Viper bites the inside of her cheek.
"Are you done already?" Reyna asks casually, seemingly addressing everyone, but she only looks at Viper.
"Yeah. And we could already be flying home if someone hadn't decided to extend her hunt again," Viper crosses her arms over her chest.
"What's the problem?" Reyna looks at the other's face, confused.
"The problem is you're risking your life and the lives of your teammates, you don't follow protocol and you don't listen to my orders."
"We need souls — I kill people," Reyna raises her voice.
"You're risking your life," Viper repeats. She clenches her hands into fists and takes a few steps toward Reyna. "We completed the mission. We need to get back as quickly as possible, but you," Viper raises her voice on the last word and jabs an invisible finger into Reyna's chest, "ruin everything."
Killjoy takes a step — hesitant and muffled — and immediately steps back, feeling Neon's hand on her shoulder pulling her back. Neon's gesture says, Better not get involved.
Reyna smirks.
"I ruin everything? You know what I'm doing all this for, and you have no right to say I ruin everything."
"You're risking not only your life, but ours. And your sister's too, how can you not understand that?"
The silence during Viper and Reyna's argument feels terrifying. Deadly. Destructive. A second before Neon decides to calm them down, Viper's back meets the brick wall with a painful thud, and her neck is loosely pinned by the other's hand.
"What's wrong with me trying to save my sister?" Reyna whispers. "I need souls, you need souls, everyone here needs souls. If you keep limiting yourself to just missions and don't learn to take risks, we'll never achieve anything."
Viper hisses something incoherent in response, trying to pull Reyna's hand off her neck.
"Hey, hey, hey," Phoenix puts his hand on Reyna's wrist and looks from her to Viper. "Don't kill each other."
Reyna lets go abruptly. Viper looks at her with a serious, slightly disdainful gaze, clutching her neck.
Viper is certain that if her neck meets the other's hand one more time, Reyna will definitely kill her.
➴
Viper is strange.
She tries to do two things at once: get enough souls and prevent losses in their team. Reyna smirks, watching her desperate attempts to sit on two chairs at once. It's stupid.
Viper should have understood long ago that to succeed, you have to sacrifice something. Looking at Sabine, Reyna says in her mind: Do you want no one to get hurt? Then we can sit at base all day, doing nothing. Then surely no one gets hurt. Do you want enough souls? Do you want to save my sister and Omen? Then learn to take risks. Viper could choose the first plan, but then she'd have to accept the fact that Reyna isn't going to sit around at base while her sister is in a coma.
Viper can't choose one thing, and so she suffers for it. After the mission ends, she sits far from everyone else, her forehead pressed against the cold window, silent. In those moments, Reyna also sees that Viper tries, and sometimes even cares. Thoughts come to her more and more often that perhaps she and Viper are a little more alike than she thought. They have a common problem, and only they can truly understand each other. But they never do that. They retreat to separate corners and stay silent. Reyna could go over and talk, Viper could also go over and talk, but they never do. Reyna knows that suffering together is easier than alone, but she still thinks Viper is better off going through it alone. And so is she. And they'd better not touch each other more than necessary, because it will lead to another fight.
➴
"Cover my back," Reyna says, quickly climbing the stairs. Viper follows her unhurriedly but anxiously, occasionally looking back.
Reyna pulls out a heavy rifle, rests it on the windowsill, realizing there are about three enemies left against the two of them. Omen and Sova are wounded, and Sage is tending to them in cover.
Setting up the rifle, Reyna muses: how strange that first they fight with Viper, and then, when it comes to missions, they can calmly trust each other. Maybe it's a special kind of relationship.
Aiming, Reyna hears Viper manage to shoot an enemy trying to approach them from behind. One down — two left. Reyna trains her sight on a corner and waits. Her hands tremble slightly, and she swears in Spanish.
"Mierda… calm down," Reyna shakes her head and aims again.
"Want me to take over?" Viper is still turned with her back to Reyna, watching carefully to make sure no one approaches them.
"N-no. I'll… I'll do it now."
Reyna doesn't know why she's so anxious. Probably the stress she's been ignoring for days is catching up with her.
"It's completely fine if I take over, if you can't," Viper says in a calm voice, a stark contrast to how nervous Reyna feels.
"I can!" Reyna wants to defend herself, but Viper cuts her off.
"If you can, then do it. If you've done it before, you'll do it now. Just calm down. Breathe in and out."
Viper sighs in unison with Reyna.
"Not to rush you, but it'd be better if you got back quicker," Sage says over the radio, untimely.
"Don't listen to her. We'll make it."
Viper's words give her confidence. Reyna relaxes her shoulders a little and waits patiently. A minute passes, and the enemy carelessly steps out from behind the corner, immediately getting a shot from Reyna. Reyna smiles smugly and even turns to Viper for a second, wanting to make sure she saw it.
A mistake. A huge mistake.
Reyna's shoulder is scorched by a bullet. Viper spins around sharply and, seeing the scene before her, rushes to Reyna. She rummages through her bag, finds a tourniquet, and carefully tightens it above the wound, all the while watching Reyna's face to make sure she's more or less okay.
"Finish him," Reyna hisses.
"Quiet," Viper hisses back. "We need to get out of here."
"Finish him, or I'll kill you later," Reyna digs her fingers painfully into Viper's shoulder.
Viper looks at her incredulously. Reyna, to convince her, almost shouts:
"I'm not going to die from a shoulder wound! Go, kill him."
Viper blinks and only then grabs her weapon from the ground.
"Be careful," Viper places her pistol into Reyna's hand.
A few minutes pass, which feel like an eternity to Reyna. She listens to every sound and reluctantly admits she's more worried about Viper than herself. If someone attacks Reyna, she can fight back even with a pistol, but Sabine — Sabine, who's rarely been in one-on-one combat — might not survive this fight.
Reyna thinks she should have gone herself. If Viper dies, that weight will be on her shoulders.
A gunshot shakes the walls, alarming. Reyna sighs heavily and looks at her shoulder. Terrible, just terrible. She grips the gun tighter with her uninjured hand and looks toward the exit. She hears footsteps and raises the pistol.
"Viper?"
Viper breathes heavily as she climbs the stairs. She rummages through her bag for a long time and finally finds what she needs.
"Did you kill him?"
"Yes," Viper touches Reyna's uninjured shoulder. "I'll disarm the spike and come back. How are you?"
"I'll live," Reyna tries to smile. It comes out crooked.
"I'll be right back," Viper repeats.
She returns quite quickly. She packs everything into the bag and takes it in her left hand. She helps Reyna up from the floor and carefully takes her under her right arm.
"I can do it myself," Reyna slowly frees her arm from the other's grip. "My arm is wounded, not my leg."
When the two of them reach the shelter, Sage ignores them for a while, helping Omen get comfortable. Then, turning around and seeing Reyna's wound, she rushes to her, sits her down next to Omen, and carefully examines her shoulder. Viper sets the heavy bag away from the wounded and sits on the ground.
"Did it go well?" Omen quietly asks.
"Mm-hmm," Viper nods and closes her eyes. Her fingers tremble even more than usual.
"You did well," comes from Reyna.
Viper, without opening her eyes, says, "Thank you."
She doesn't see Reyna, but she feels her smile faintly.