Chapter Text
Iris is so quiet at night.
Not a lonely quiet. The only pause of the bombastic nonsense on this planet is an expectant pause. It’s only a matter of time before someone is offended or someone’s shoes are in someone’s territory or someone finds a black hole leading to the center of the planet. But at night there’s a tentative truce. So long as no rooms are left or entered without explicit invitation, and Grif is left to believe that his secret midnight snack cabinet is a secret, nothing happens before six AM.
Carolina will not stand for anything else.
Still, there are exceptions to every rule.
There are nights where, for no particular reason, people end up in the living room. Splurging on UNSC apology money and Chorus resources finally hitting the galactic economy, there’s plenty to do here. Video games, movies, cards, board games, a corner full of gear for swimming in the ocean that more often gets used for indoor fort building. A sentimental piece of wood from the jungle mounted on the wall. There's no war to win or general to impress, so they hang out there a lot.
But most of the time, in the middle of the night, there’s no energy for that. When the battles are too fresh and Hargrove’s conviction trial too recent, their rooms -- one for each of them -- become too quiet. The beds too big. So one of them ends up throwing darts. Two of them sit, half-awake, at the table. One time -- and one time only -- some of the Reds ended up on the Blues’ couch.
No one is too big to fit under Wash's arm, not even Caboose. (Especially not Caboose.) No one is so prickly as to shift away if he drops down next to them and tosses his arm over the back of the cushions. There is never not a risk of some third party walking in, but at least once (definitely more than once) Tucker crams his face into Wash's shirt and tries desperately to fall asleep.
To anyone that listens, Tucker insists he doesn’t remember much from the end of the battle. There was a whirlwind of action, and the end is just flashes. The armor crashed and he took a hard shot to the leg. Yet he has no trouble remembering Wash kicking in the door right after and one-shotting his assailant. This and several other beats from the rescue he recounts in excellent detail to anyone he thinks will “finally” get Wash laid.
But not any other part, of course. Not Caboose getting his helmet wrecked again or Simmons losing his (cyborg) arm. Donut's concussion or Grif's cracked ribs. “Nothing to remember, anyway,” he insists. “You got ‘em.”
It still took four days (Wash counted) after their retirement for him to crack a "bow chicka bow wow."
Wash doesn’t interrogate him for the logic that, despite all that, they find themselves here, sitting on the couch. Four AM, Blue Base, Iris. Not for the first time.
"He wasn't in my head, just in the suit," Tucker says, not for the first time.
"I know," Wash tells him, not for the first time. They'd be having very different conversations, if he had been.
"It was really important to him that you knew that," Tucker says again.
"Just go back to sleep, Tucker," Wash says, again.
Tucker, sitting with his knees tucked against the back of the couch, digs his face into the bunched sweater fabric at Wash's shoulder. Wash goes back to scrolling through his datapad.
Kimball set him up with a secure feed to some of Chorus's still active military programs. Under no obligation to make suggestions or participate in any way, of course. Just to keep an eye on what he helped start. Mostly, Wash just likes to scroll for the pictures Matthews uploads (purely archival, of course.) Now that they're establishing open trade and getting relief help, there's finally enough gray paint for a squad.
The next post is something about temple activity. Something launched into orbit and far out of reach before Santa could confirm who was there. Or who wasn't there anymore. Not that it took a genius to figure out.
Wash isn’t sure if he can say he hates Locus. He couldn't agree with his methods or his mindset (can't trust him) but when he was handed a second chance outside of a jail cell, he took it.
They have that in common.
Tucker flinches, suddenly, and lifts his head. "Caboose?"
"Upstairs," Wash tells him, calmly.
If they're quiet for long enough, Caboose's occasional chainsaw snores will echo all the way down to the living room. Tucker doesn't bother waiting. He hums an "Okay" and drops his face back down.
No one needs him. No one to fight. Nothing to fix. Tucker sighs slowly. Deep breathe in, slow breathe out.
Is this what it was like for every other soldier after the Great War? They just… went home?
It's quiet again for a while, and Wash is sure Tucker's gone back to sleep when he makes a noise again. It's muffled through all the layers of fabric, and Wash doesn't catch any words.
"Hm?" he hums quietly, afraid to wake Tucker up, if he's just making noises in his sleep.
Tucker sits up, moving far enough away that he can lean his forehead on the couch and make faces at Wash. Not that he's emoting much beyond "tired and tired about it." It's also the face of a man who's misplaced his usual masculinity filter because he asks, "What was it like? For you guys?"
It doesn't occur to Wash to play dumb -- to ask who Tucker is talking about.
Wash realizes, at this exact moment, that he has not talked about this with anyone.
There is no empty room in the base. No ground unoccupied. No heartbeat unaccounted for. There is nothing on Iris which is missing; nothing gone which had been there. It's what they'd wanted. Somewhere new. Somewhere nothing -- no one -- was missing.
And yet, the air is empty.
It was too fresh, after the capture and the escape and the rescue were over, to talk about. No one dared to ask. By the time that phase had passed, there was no one with want to talk about it.
No one dared to ask. Not even Wash.
And somehow, here, where the air is dark and empty, he wants to. As if that space could be filled again by some spare memory.
Wash scrapes the sides of his tired brain for the words. In the middle of the night, time passes imperfectly. He's not sure how long he has to think, but he's unwilling to say this in the wrong way. He's the only one of them left to speak for it. He doesn't know if Epsilon ever-- Church definitely never spoke to anyone about it. Wash doesn't even know how Church would say it, if he could.
If it's going to exist outside of himself, outside of a memory, Wash has to say it.
Eventually he decides, "It was kind of like… falling."
"Falling?"
"From really, really high up."
Tucker groans really loudly into the couch like he really doesn't want to ask but is going to. "For those of us who ditched English class?" he asks, anyway.
"The view is great. For a while you can move around however you want, do things you can't do on the ground." The swoops of terror, the exhilaration of surviving. For precious, fragile, moments, he'd felt free. An impermanent feeling of solidity and comprehension in a place where boundaries did not exist (for better or worse).
Wash pauses too long, caught up in it. All of that is barely comprehensible to 4am Wash, much less 4am Tucker. "But?" Tucker prompts.
"But the worst part of falling is that it stops." Suddenly, painfully, the second you're finally on top. "And you don't know how it stops until either the parachute opens or the ground hits." And the ground always, always, hits. "That's how it was with all of them, I guess. The AI…" he clarifies. "It was all so experimental. Any of them going haywire was always a possibility."
"And you signed up anyway."
"...yeah." He laugh escapes him. "I did it anyway."
Tucker shakes his head and pushes his face into the couch cushion. "You're crazy," he says.
For a comment like that, Agent Washington might have gotten up and left.
Wash just laughs again. "Maybe a bit."
Time passes again, sluggishly. Wash scrolls in futility through posts he's seen before. Tucker's forehead eventually loses friction on the couch and he slides in the last direction he was leaning. Ends up back where he started.
Still got some talk left in him. "Did you guys ever work out your baggage?" he asks.
Wash doesn't think about this one. "Yeah, Tucker. We were okay."
“You’re sure?”
“I didn’t realize you cared that much.”
Tucker mumbles a nearly incomprehensible, “I don’t.”
“I’m not worried about it, Tucker.”
“You worry about everything.”
Wash shrugs by way of response, jostling Tucker in the process.
Fixing his horribly cramped position, Tucker says, “Jus’ sayin’. It’d be nice to have in writing or somethin’.”
As if Epsilon would ever put his feelings to written word. A blaspheme in the house of Church. (Turned to a private joke with razor sharp edges for its lack of speaker.)
Just when Wash thinks Tucker's going to get comfortable again, he uncurls, flinging his body across the rest of the couch. Head just next to Wash's leg, because god forbid he make physical contact with anything other than the shoulder. He asks, "But what would you say to him, if you could?" Wash is only mostly sure he wasn't drinking before he went to bed.
Wash shrugs again. "I don't know. Hadn't thought about it."
"Not at all?" Tucker talks to Wash by talking to the ceiling. "You've lost like, a fuck load of people."
His tablet long asleep in one hand, Wash props his head up on the other. "I guess I just never get the chance to say goodbye to them. It's never been an option."
"God you are so depressing." One of Tucker's arms falls off the couch in exasperation. "How are you supposed to know that you were cool? That they know that everything was really fine and that you don't actually hate them for ditching you all the time?"
It is too early to crack open that egg.
Wash considers his own egg to crack. To dig up and sort through and pay a therapist about. To his own surprise, he doesn't find anything. There's a world of "maybe if"s but none of them hurt. None more than reality, anyway. Schrodinger's box is already empty.
He knows how they got here. (Point As to Point Bs, around impossible choices and life-threatening cop-outs.) He knows why they got here. (And he would not dare do Epsilon the disservice of painting him as anything less than he was for the sake of a maybe.)
For once in his life, Washington thinks about Epsilon, and he doesn't regret a thing.
It's a cheap answer, but he says, "I guess... you just gotta have faith."
"That's such bullshit." Tucker squeezes his eyes shut.
There's a rainbow of spots behind Wash's eyelids. "Yeah."
He takes a deep breath.
"Ain't that a bitch."