Chapter Text
He almost did it. Almost.
He had stood over Byron's helpless body - seen pink-tinted eyes fill with the certainty of dying- and nearly, nearly done it. Alphonse never would have killed him, of course not. He'd made a deal, and he was going to keep it, even if only to the letter. But Byron was an unknown, a liability, a possible double-cross gambit. Byron was exactly the type of horrible thing Burkin might try to pull. He could have left. Should have left; it would have been the smart thing to do. Turn around and leave turncoat Byron Ford and his pink mitten to starve or freeze, be long gone by the time reserve forces sent their drones to track his trajectory. Keep moving, keep going, keep killing.
His instincts were all for it - and that was where Alphonse had paused.
Wasn't that what he'd come out here to forget? Wasn't that - stellar behavior for a COI agent - exactly what he had spent so long trying to leave behind?
If he let Byron die, even if indirectly, Burkin would be right. There's his box, right? Just the type of calculated move he'd been so good at, before. Was still good at, by the body count.
So Alphonse had wasted precious seconds looking down on Byron in the wreckage, thinking.
He'd considered his suspicions, first. Byron was still an enemy agent, mole or no. He'd kept things from Alphonse, albeit stutteringly. Flimsy excuses, nervous chatter - the difference between Byron with info and Byron with an agenda had been night and day. Comical even, if he wanted to be uncharitable. Incompetence could be just as dangerous as a backstab, especially with the raising desperation in COI attacks. And, of course - Byron was a traitor. In Alphonse's favor, yes, but for how long? He was looking after his own hide. He didn't really need someone from the platoons that ran headfirst into rifle barrels tagging along with him, whether or not he was an ally.
But then again, he had been smart enough to realize the danger Burkin was putting his forces in, and had chosen to go straight to Cerberus. He wasn't like most of his (former) squad-mates, who'd looked at the mountain of dead soldiers and thought 'but I'll be the one to take him out!' Byron had considered the odds and actually seen them as they were. Plenty of folks used seeming idiocy to make their marks let their guard down, and the fact that Byron had gone undiscovered for so long belied intelligence beyond a few stumbles of the tongue. Maybe that made him a snake, maybe not.
And - he was nice. In a kind of terrified, ass-kisser way sometimes, but genuinely, too. He'd been friendly to Alphonse beyond strict business. He spoke over the radio like we was chatting with a human rather than a living weapon with a body count probably approaching quadruple digits. Not that anyone but the loss-claims people were keeping count anymore. Byron had wished him well, even. I hope you make it through this, Alphonse. That counted for quite a lot, didn't it?
It would be dangerous, of course. Alphonse was barely days out from lying crumpled on his back in the snow, quivering hands slick and dripping with blood - too much blood. He had felt the horrible scratch of it when he'd yanked the branch out of his guts, but the pain had only caught up with him after he managed to get a good look.
The image had risen stark in his mind, undershirt pulling away from flesh with disturbing wetness to reveal the wound; layer on layer of raggedly torn fascia, broken scar tissue, and glistening organ meat sliding over itself with the movement of his heaving chest, blood still spurting out in pump-action bursts that told him an artery had been breached. His insides shifted, bulging like living things, threatening to spill from the hole punched straight through him, flecked throughout with what looked upsettingly like bits of bark. The iron stink of blood had covered him - familiar, but newly terrible from its source. So, so much blood. He was still cold from bone to skin with the nearness of the end, and still prayed every evening that when he unwound his bandages the skin underneath would not be swollen with infection.
A sick feeling had settled in his stomach even just remembering how the ache had reached into his throat, pulling out memories of desperation and cold steel in miserable wet winter nights somewhere far from familiar soil. What the hell had he even been out there to protect? Oil again, probably. He had learned that it was oil a lot of the time. Oil, or some poor country daring to resist their hand-imported puppet dictators. It didn't matter. Syria had been years ago - and just then all it had meant to him was that he was going to die without intervention. Intervention that had come at the cost of three entire platoons of soldiers - kicked and knifed and shot down in barely minutes, bodies lined up along the trail of blood he'd left behind.
So-
Two injured men. Twice the target, twice the rations, a hundred times the risk. A risk he really couldn't afford to be taking - that his training screamed to leave behind. But, but. Again the thought: hadn't he tried to move away from 'Alphonse Harding, pride of the COI'? Hadn't he wanted to be a regular person? To be someone who wouldn't put bullets into the skulls of children in the name of the government?
So now here he is. Half dragging, half carrying Byron through the underbrush. It's agonizingly slow, agonizingly exposed. Every so often Byron would put a little too much weight on his freshly filleted leg and nearly take them both down with his pained jerk, and Alphonse would have to stagger in place for a moment to keep them from overbalancing.
Worries nag at his heels, brave talk be damned. What if he's making a mistake?
Byron hadn't even resisted him. Shock, most likely, but it was just another thing just-slightly-off to add to the pile. The normal response to a man you had thought was going to kill you rolling up your pant leg and pulling out a knife generally didn't begin and end with a dazed question. Even when the blade had gone in (woefully unsanitized, but razor sharp) there had been no attempt to stave him off. In the moment he had been glad - he'd had more than his share of holding down struggling soldiers in the field - but given a moment to think... well.
He feels Byron leaning heavily against him, now, lapsed into wheezing silence and entirely focused on keeping his uninjured leg underneath him. Why is he so compliant? Just minutes ago he had been goggling up at Alphonse like he was looking death in the eye - godsakes he had fucking begged! No trace of that now. Sure, he'd taken Byron's tracker out and had no motive to kill him later rather than sooner, but still. Alphonse definitely wouldn't be leaving himself so vulnerable if their positions were swapped, even after the whole friendship spiel. Byron has no other choice, if he thinks realistically. Certainly Burkin won't be sending help. Wouldn't have, even if he wasn't in the middle of a possessive rage spiral over his pet killing machine telling him to kick rocks.
So it's the mass-murdering defector or the highway, then.
Maybe - ideally - he's just being paranoid. Whatever. The choice has been made, and now he really needs to focus on making sure he actually gets Byron out of his woods alive. That, at least, he has to do. On to business.
With some luck, the loss of the helicopter (and about two dozen men, but at this point that was probably white noise to Burkin) would drive his forces to draw back at least a little, to regroup and reassess. Try and patch together plan B - or G or H, as the case may be. On his own, that prospect would have felt luxurious, but with Byron factored into the issue, it seems uncomfortably uncertain. Byron would need, ideally, a day for his leg to be weight-worthy, and a safe route to civilization that wouldn't send him straight into a platoon camp. He'll need supplies as well - food, money, a gun or at the very least a knife, fresh clothing... Not to even mention disposing of the biotracker properly. Alphonse makes a face. All taken it's a tall order, especially given the circumstances. A full day is a lot of time to be looking out for both himself and Byron.
A lot of time for Byron to change his mind about his allegiances and land a new stab wound in Alphonse's back. He brushes the thought aside.
It would be the first time in a long, long while he'd actually be in proximity to someone for more than a few minutes on purpose. Someone he wasn't intending to kill, anyway. There was a reason he'd picked up the habit of thinking out loud- not generally too many people to chat with when you're forty kilometers from the nearest real road. It might be nice. Silver lining, if nothing else. Certainly Alphonse had enjoyed hearing from Byron over the comms, although that could have been that he usually came bearing useful data on encampment locations. It had been refreshing to speak to somebody not fantasizing about blowing his brains out.
Anyway. They're still hazardously close to the remains of the camp, and a long, long way from anywhere Alphonse would even think of trying to bunk down in for more than an hour or two. It would be full dark far too soon, and given that a flashlight would be a dead giveaway on their location, it'd make for truly snails-pace progress. Nothing's ever easy, is it.
"Hop to, Harding," he mutters under his breath, mentally re-tracing possible routes and destinations, "day's not getting any longer."