Agent Carolina (topoftheboard) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-05-20 15:42:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !complete, agent carolina, agent washington |
Who: Wash & Carolina
When: End of April, after the bodyswap
Where: Wash’s place
What: Carolina’s nightmare causes her to drive to Wash’s place in the middle of the night to make sure he’s not dead
Rating/Warnings: Medium for fighting, (dream) character deaths, typical nightmare scenarios, suicidal thoughts, unhealthy drinking, a bit of feels at the end
Status: Complete when posted!
”I'll do whatever it takes. You've given me everything. I would do anything for you.”
Anything.
Green eyes closed in deference to the man in front of her. The Director. Her father. The man who had torn both of their lives to shreds searching for something that he would never be able to replace. People were not replaced with projects, or A.I.s, or even other people. Once they were gone, they were simply gone. The only thing the living could do was figure out a way to survive with half a heart and try to move on. Move on...move...move...MOVE…“MOVE UP, LANCE CORPORAL!” Carolina shouted over the roar of the semi-automatic machine guns. She was back in Afghanistan, crouched behind an upturned car in a market place. They were taking fire and her side was pressed up against the heated metal as she continued to yell orders to her men. She hoped there was enough metal between her and the insurgents to block anything that might make it through her vest. It had worked well so far, but she knew better than to rely on that for too long.
As if dodging bullets were not enough, she was dealing with a soldier who had frozen in his first firefight with the enemy. Calling his rank seemed to have shaken away part of the ice, but not enough. He turned to look at Carolina, fear painted clearly on his face. The box of fruit that Mitchell was hiding behind was getting shot to pieces. It would not last much longer. It was a miracle it had worked in the first place.
“Move, Sam!” Carolina tried calling his name this time. It worked. She motioned would cover him. The man nodded back at her, preparing to dodge through the rain of bullets to get to where she was. “On three! One! Two!” Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted something flying over her head and behind Mitchell. She did not even have time to yell a warning before-
BOOM!
It was a grenade. Carolina ducked her head as shrapnel and wood went flying around her. Something large and heavy slammed into her but she kept her head down, waiting for the debris to finish falling. Where was air support? They should have already been here. Thankfully, whatever had knocked into her had taken the brunt of the blast. Once she was sure it was safe, she opened her eyes to see what had shielded her - and stared directly into the glassy, lifeless grey eyes of a gunnery sergeant that should not, could not, have been there.
No! That’s not him! That’s not what happened! Carolina pushed the body off of her, the weight far lighter than it should have been. A moment later she realized why. The lower half of the man had been shredded by the grenade. Sam Mitchell was supposed to have died there, shielding her from the blast, but the body in uniform beside her was wrong. Those stripes belonged to a gunnery sergeant. It was Wash’s uniform. She found herself shrinking away in horror, away from the safety that the car had afforded her until now and straight into the middle of the market.
“Sir! Sir!” Her ears were ringing, but she could hear her new XO in the background, calling her name. She turned to look at him, her head still spinning, and saw an enemy come up behind him. He was still calling her. He had no idea someone was behind him. She was not aware of lifting her gun, or even of pulling the trigger, but she felt the recoil like she had been the one who had been hit. She saw the bullet enter the forehead of an insurgent that could not have been more than ten, killing him instantly. The kid fell, the grenade in his hand falling with him. He had grey eyes.
“NO!” Carolina tried to get up, to run forward, to do something, but she was blown back by the explosion as the grenade went off.
A bright light blinded her and she raised a hand to shield her eyes. A flashbang? When she opened her eyes again she was walking down a deserted street in an abandoned desert city near their base. She was on patrol. The marketplace was nowhere to be seen.
Of course it wasn’t. That had not happened yet.
“Sir! Look what I found!”
Carolina turned and found herself looking at her squadmate holding up a large coffee can with candy bars on the top and wires coming out of the bottom. From the grin on his face and the way he was holding the can at an angle, it was obvious that Private Andersmith had not seen the wires. Her blood ran cold. “STOP! Dont. Move.”
Andersmith’s eyes went wide as saucers, but his body froze. Carolina slipped the strap of her rifle over her shoulder so that her hands would be free. Each step brought her closer to what she suspected was an IED. “Careful, marine.” It had not exploded yet, so they had that on their side. Careful not to touch the wires, Carolina studied the device. Her mind was screaming a warning, but she could not stop her body from backing away and giving Andersmith a nod.
“Don’t worry, Private. It looks inert. Just set it down gently and back away.”
“A-Are you sure?”
No, she was not sure. She was the opposite of sure, but she knew that would not help Andersmith. “Just set it down, marine.” The man obeyed, carefully bending his knees and lowering himself down to the ground. The seconds felt like hours as he bent down to the ground. Carolina held her breath as first the wires, then the can touched the ground. Andersmith righted the can, holding it in place for a moment before pulling his hands back. They both breathed a sigh. The private looked back up at Carolina and grinned.
“Looks like it was a dud, Boss.”
Boss? Carolina’s eyes widened as the person kneeling beside the IED was no longer the Private that had found it. “Wash? Wait, how-” Just as it had in real life, the unstable IED exploded, instantly killing the man who had found it and sending his CO flying backwards.
She flew back, back, back until her shoulder hit a dirt wall. Carolina looked up and found herself staring up at a night sky somewhere in the Nevada desert. Her mind spun, the heat of Afghanistan melting away into the chill of spring back home. She looked down and immediately had to dodge the fist aimed for her nose. It only took a heartbeat for her hands to go up in a defensive stance and even less for her to move in to retaliate. Even in the dark surrounding them she could recognize the figure of the woman who called herself Texas. The anger and betrayal she felt at that figure was no surprise to her, even if the woman had yet to earn the all of those feelings.
All Carolina had to do was to keep Tex occupied until York could get back to their base with the flag, but the need to win, to beat her drowned out her original mission. So they danced. Carolina lost herself in the ebb and flow of the fight, pushing her body to go further, to hit harder, to move faster than the woman who was gaining the upper hand little by little. It was a slippery slope and there was nothing she could do but get even angrier that she simply was not good enough to match the other soldier. She was so focused on Tex that she barely registered the exploding charge in the distance. If they had detonated the charge, that meant that Wash and York were in the clear. They had won.
”Man down! Man down!” York’s desperate cry in her radio cut through the red haze like a hot knife. Wash. The tone of her XO’s voice stopped her heart and her fists, and left her wide open for Tex’s left hook. Carolina went down hard, her head reeling as she heard the sirens sound. The call to stop the exercise was being sent on all frequencies now. She looked up, but Texas was gone.
Picking herself up off of the ground, Carolina grit her teeth, ignored the nausea and dread pooling in her stomach and ran. She ran as fast as she could toward the sound of York’s voice. The exercise, her training, Texas - all other thoughts were left behind as she sprinted through the desert. No! Not again! Dirt turned to steel as she ran, her pack morphing into teal armor.
Carolina was the first person through the training room doors. She was back on the Mother of Invention. York was in the middle of the training floor, helmet severely cracked. “York!” She tried to call out to him, to reach him, to try and help, but no matter how hard or how fast she ran, his body only moved further and further away.
”Come with me, ‘Lina.”
Warm arms wrapped around her waist, soothing her even as they held her back. She tried to keep running. She had to get to him. “Stay with me, York!” The arms tightened, draining her strength until she could barely move her legs. It was trying to push past a mountain. “York!” In the distance, gold armor began to dissolve, revealing the body of a wounded marine. The armor itself turned to dark sand, covering the marine as it began to spread along the ground. “Let me go!” The darkness raced back and tripped her into the mountain. It crawled up the sides of the room like a living, breathing creature. It hissed as it broke through the ceiling, thick smoke falling down and covering everything in a haze of fog and gunpowder.
“Let me go, York!”
“There’s nothing you can do for him, Carolina.” The invisible mountain solidified in front of her, the comforting arms now more forceful, restraining.
“You don’t know that!” The man’s normally blond hair was covered in his own blood and a veritable river of it flowed down from the wall beside him where the charge had thrown him. Carolina could not shake the feeling that if she could just reach him she could save him. She needed to reach him. His life - her life - depended on it. To keep him away from the grim reaper circling above his body. She screamed his name, ordering him to open his eyes, to stretch his arm out to meet hers. To save her from herself. From the failure she had become.
She cried out as the mountain abruptly disappeared, sending her sprawling head over heels into the marine. Carolina reached out to grab him, but her hand slipped right through as if she were a ghost. There was nothing to stop her, so she kept falling, falling, falling…