Work Text:
we were raised by wolves, and we are still wild
(lively)
Delta flits from side to side on York’s shoulder, watching the mail truck.
(remorseful)
She has won, Connie thinks, won in every way she wanted to when she started tearing the project apart to find the core of it.
(dismiss)
Theta flinches at shadows in the narrow hallway, until Delta explains to him about alarm systems and particles and waves of light.
(heavy)
They found the place furnished, although unheated and uncooled; the red-orange couch stays where it is near the front window, sinking in the back but still puffy.
(forward)
They make careful plans in case someone asks questions at the supermarket or on the street, fabricated, disarming half-truths to answer “where do you live” and “what do you do.”
(prowl)
Wash paces the tiny yard sometimes, looking for gaps in the tall, brown fence, Leonard Church’s memories like a mouth full of broken teeth.
(cut)
Epsilon is a faultily made machine in all ways now, pieces left behind on what remains of the Mother of Invention, and, more often than the others are comfortable with, he regrets that death and separation.
(compromise)
“It was kinder than what had been done to him already,” Connie said.
(hush)
Connie puts her arms around her knees and her nose down in her dusty sweater, and remembers that she isn’t on the ship any more, and that she doesn’t have to hide anything except their mail and their armor and their IP addresses.
(morals)
Murderer’s hands, she thinks when Wash unwraps the scarf from around her neck.
(engage)
York and North throw a ball in the back yard while Carolina watches. Each hold it tight to their chests before they let go.
(voice)
Because Connie’s bedroom is on the third floor she can’t hear voices from the kitchen until she reaches the second floor landing in her slippers, but then she can pick out all five of her Freelancers. There must be something better to call them - her charges, her returnees, her deserters, her friends - but despite it all, the trifecta mark still defines them.
(awkward)
Theta is not so reassured when Delta tells him all the ways in which the AI are their agents’ alarm systems, but he also takes to marching a determined perimeter around North’s head, humming a facsimile of an anthem.
(lower)
North closes the curtains in the room he shares with Wash against the morning sun, and from the other bed hears a “so it matters when Theta can’t sleep?”
(plead)
(I’ve won, right?)
(caring)
York brings them food as a sign of his affection: chocolates, steak meant for the grill, granola and salty pretzels that Connie stashes.
(believe)
Part of Carolina still believes that if she had gotten an AI, if Connie had just waited to break all their lives open after she returned from the scrapyard, Carolina could have proven that she could beat Tex. The other part tries so hard for it not to matter.
(found)
A motorcycle roars and throws gravel in the street, and York, Connie, and North all look up at the living room curtains at once. They know it’s Tex, though, screaming by on wide patrol like a cross between the grim reaper and a post carrier, giving them the message - I’m still alive.
(impulse)
Wash reaches out to the sound of the bike one morning, wakes up looking at the back of his own hand with the edges transparent in the yellow sun, and Connie touches his arm.
(shield)
North looks at his armor, stashed neatly upright in the shed, with pride; Wash with admiration; Connie with disapproval; South with aspiration; Carolina with disappointment, and York with satisfaction.
(open)
When York returns from a shopping run at night, Connie, sitting on the couch unable to sleep, asks whether he chose night time so that no one would see. No, York said. He’d just forgotten until then.
(tactile)
Cutting the grass, Carolina shoves the old mower into gear and smells the richness of the broken stems.
(journey)
North watches superhero movies that roar and crash on the antique screen in the living room.
(scowl)
Carolina and York toss a ball of rubber bands across the living room, and Connie, feeling prickly and catty corner on the stairs, stands there, infiltration specialist backed by the finest of fading brown tactical wallpapers, and freezes.
(hero)
Every once in a while, they find ways to thank Connie. Often it’s just with looks of realization, interruptions during daily domestic chores that say, with wide eyes and slack faces, that they remember she freed them.
(defiant)
South likes to come and go, to have Tex-swagger and CT-secrecy when she travels, but she’s also a professional runaway, and checks in at the house every night.
(powder)
Carolina reds her cheeks in a cracked mirror, trying to avoid her father’s stare.
(decent)
Sometimes, in the quiet moments of which there are too many, Connie wants to go back.
Freelancer was corrupt and cruel and capricious, but it was a proving ground, and some proved themselves and some didn’t. There’s value in that measurement, wasn’t there? She could have joined some other army, could have kept fighting instead of running away.
Then she thinks of the friends who ran with her and the long, long time it took to slough off the leaderboard like old skin, and there’s something valuable and bitter in just cutting the grass, in turning one’s face away from the big war.
(grateful)
Once, Carolina makes it four steps down the overgrown sidewalk before she stops herself, watches Tex’s feet tip beside the smoking exhaust pipe on the black bike, and reins in her desire to race, to win, to prove something that no longer needs to be proven.
(union)
They pile breakfast on the table, eggs and toast and tea and York’s tall coffees, and sit with their backs to the doors.