Chapter Text

For Agent Washington, change is an instantaneous thing.

It does not creep. It does not crawl. It is not a slow and steady realization- a setting sun, or veins slowly warmed with wine. It is an iron train, slamming into him, with the promise that things will never been the same again, Wash. They have already changed. You blinked, and-

It's hey, I'm David to you have been assigned code name Agent Washington. It's come on, Connie to call me CT. It's crashing his skateboard through the halls of the Mother of Invention and curly straws and laughing the loudest and the longest to you have been matched with the Artificial Intelligence Program Epsilon. It's his mind going from ONE to TWO (don't say good-byes I hate good-byes Allison ALLISON AllisonAllisonAllison he lied he lied he twisted us tortured us we are pieces help us Agent Washington help us helpushelpus).

Change is cold, and hard, and unforgiving.

So when the Meta picks up the Epsilon unit and cloaks himself and becomes a part of his surroundings-

something inside of Wash clicks, switches, transforms, and he hears himself scream, "Doc, you have to protect Epsilon!" (protect him from what, Agent Washington? From Meta? Or from you?) and he's jumping onto the Meta's back and-

Blurry, everything is blurry. There is blood on his gloves and blood in his mouth and when the Pelican crashes in a spectacular shower of snow and sparks, he quashes down the absurd feeling of joy and relief in his gut, tells himself firmly: they are not here for you, they did not come for you they came for Church they came for their friend-

But the calvary is here, nonetheless. He can't go back to prison, he won't go back to prison, but there's blood seeping through the torn Kevlar on his ribs and he can't tell if he's been shot or hit by shrapnel or both and he thinks, well, it might not matter after all-

(I'm sorry, did something about my actions indicate I expect to survive?)

"I can't. I'm done," he says to Sarge, and he means it in a way that he has never meant it before. He pushes the grappling hook into Sarge's hands. "Here. Take this. You know what to do."

Wash is delirious with blood loss and exhaustion and Christ, he doesn't know what he's saying- how can he expect these Simulation Troopers to know what to do when he himself has no fucking idea?

But he remembers a Warthog smashing through a cliff wall, and a Pelican drifting, diving, dropping into the snow and he thinks, they are better men than you. Change is a hard and howling thing, and it is splitting his life apart.

Agent Washington collapses into the snow and raises his bloody hands to the sky, reaching for something to hold- his gun? Where is his gun?

There is no sound for snow falling. There is only the quiet, and the blood rush in his ears, and the way the flakes melt like tears down the slope of his visor.

He lets his palms fall, and the snowflakes wink into stars before turning black.