InsaneJournal

Who: Katou and Wash
What: Katou recruits Wash to his tem
When: A few days after the Great Destroyers plot
Where: The Agency
Rating/Warning: Low/none
Status: Complete


Katou had never been particularly good at asking for help when he needed it. He’d gotten better in the last few years, but that didn’t make this any easier. After all, how did one explain such a monumental fuck-up? ‘Under the mattress’ seemed like a great hiding place at the time, but in retrospect, maybe the seventh seal of the apocalypse could have used more security. Though, he still didn’t know how anyone had found out about it. He hadn’t told anyone when it had shown up, not even Wendy and Jack. That alone had seemed like the best security he could think of. After all, who could steal something that no one knew existed?

Someone had, and Katou hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. He’d given Wash a couple of days to recover from his dream catastrophe, and he would have been happy to give Wash more time to recover, but when he saw him walking down the hall of the Agency, Katou decided that there was no time like the present.

“Hey, Wash,” Katou said, running to catch up with his friend. “What’s going on?”

Wash probably could have used an entire week to recover from Charon’s little invasion and the Temples that had decided to appear literally at random all over the county. He was stiff, tired and sore, but considering the most recent Crazy had come from his Dreams directly (his and Carolina’s to be fair), he felt as though he should be at work, filing out the necessary paperwork, giving the necessary debreifings and dealing with the general over-all aftermath.

He glanced over his shoulder when he heard someone rushing up behind him and raised a brow when he saw it was Katou. He slowed his walk so the younger man could catch up and fall into step beside him. He raised a brow at Katou’s question. “I’ve been giving reports all morning,” he said. “The who, what, when and why of the Temples and Charon’s mercenaries. This is literally the first time I’ve been back to my office since I got in.”


Katou balked. “Paperwork, huh?” he asked. “That’s a fucking bummer. Worst part of the job.” Not that Katou really had a whole lot of paperwork in general. He knew he was a grunt and he was totally okay with that position. Though, now that he had to get together a team to stop his own fuck-up, he could foresee a lot of paperwork in his future. Assuming he hadn’t just screwed himself out of a future.

“Well hey, last thing you wanna hear, but I might have more work for you if you’re down,” he said, nonchalant as always. “I’ve got a pot of coffee and some doughnuts in my office if you wanna swing by when you have some free time.”

“Paperwork, debriefings, statements…” Wash shrugged. He was as thorough as he could be in answering the questions from the higher ups within the agency. He did not mention his own personal experience with the Jungle Temple other than to state that he and Carolina had deactivated it as they had with the others. That particular vision -- the regrets and horrors both he and Carolina had been forced to see from each other -- those were personal and did not need to go down in any file, regardless of who had the clearance to see them later.
Coffee. That was something Wash needed. He’d already had two cups that morning and if he planned on remaining functioning the rest of the day, he was probably going to need a few more. He wasn’t so sure if he liked the price tag, however.

“You might have more work for me?” He asked skeptically. “Since when are you giving out assignments?”

“Since the bosslady made me Team Captain,” Katou said. He didn’t sound particularly happy to be thrust into that role. If he’d made it there on his own merits, maybe he would have been happy about it. But getting it because of possibly the biggest fuck-up of his life - and his life was full of pretty big fuck-ups - didn’t exactly sit right. “So I guess step one of being team captain is making a team or something.”

“You’re a team captain,” Wash repeated. He had no idea which Bosslady had made that decision, but knowing Commander Jane Shepard and/or Natasha Romanov, there had to have been a pretty damn good reason why Katou had been given the promotion. Add to that serious lack of gloating on Katou’s part and Wash had to admit he was curious.

“Alright,” Wash shrugged. “I’m game. I could use a cup of coffee at least.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Katou deadpanned. Though, he couldn’t blame Wash. Leadership was never Katou’s strong suit. He was much better at following orders than giving them.

“Follow me,” Katou said, leading Wash back down the hall. It wasn’t long until they made it to Katou’s office. It was sparsely furnished. A desk with a swivel chair sat in the middle of the far wall, and a filing cabinet was in the corner, next to the counter that held the pot of coffee Katou’d made and the doughnuts he’d brought. In fact, the only decoration that Katou had added himself was where his katana from his dreams was mounted on the wall above his desk. He took it him with him every night, but while he was at work, that was where it lived. He didn’t like to be too far from it. Especially now that someone had broken into his house and stolen not one, but two of his dream items.

He poured them both a cup of hot coffee, then sat down behind his desk, fingers steepled. “So, uh, how ‘bout that weather last week?” he asked, as a way to stall. “It wound up blizzarding in my living room.”

Wash’s office wasn’t much different. Like Katou he hadn’t done much to personalize it other than a picture of his squad on his desk. Otherwise it was just as spartan. He accepted the cup of coffee Katou handed to him. He didn’t help himself to any of the doughnuts, though. He raised a brow at the younger man. He knew a stalling tactic when he heard one. “Yeah,” he answered as he doctored his coffee with whatever sweetener and cream Katou had on hand. “It was crazy.” With his coffee a little less pungent he turned full attention towards Katou, “so about this assignment?”

“Alright, so, the long and short of it is that someone stole this dream artifact called the Egg of Wormwood. If they can find a way to,” he raised his hands for air quotes, “‘hatch’ it, then it could trigger the apocalypse. You know, big burning star hurtling toward earth to wipe out all of creation. Maybe some other stuff. So I guess I gotta get some people together to find it and stop that from happening.” He frowned and leaned back in his seat. “And I guess find a way to stop that from happening if whoever it is manages to figure out how to do that.”

Wash did not respond right away. For a moment he just stood there, stirring the coffee in his cup. His grey eyes narrowed as they studied the younger man and attempted to determine if he was being fucked with or not. It took Wash a full 20 seconds to determine that no, he was not in fact being fucked with.

“The apocalypse,” he started, “is going to hatch from an egg.” Actually, knowing what he did about Katou’s Dreams, that the End of Days would spring forth from an otherwise harmless egg did not strike him as being all that strange. Seemed fitting, actually. “Okay,” he tossed the coffee stirrer into the trash, “I’m in.”

Katou didn’t like this silence. He wasn’t sure what Wash was thinking, but whatever it was was making Katou nervous. He swallowed, though when Wash finally responded, Katou grinned. “I thought you’d be,” he said cheerily. “It looks more like an ornament. A jade snake wrapped around an egg shaped stone.” Well, it probably wasn’t jade or stone, and instead some weird angelic substance, but Katou really didn’t know much about it. “Keep your ear to the ground. If you hear about any weird apocalypse cults around here lemme know.”

“So you don’t know who stole it?” Wash asked with a raised brow. That made things a little more difficult. It could literally be anywhere by now. It may not have even been in Orange County anymore, though Wash wasn’t willing to see if just being outside the county made the thing harmless or not. He had a bad feeling that wasn’t the case.

He took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “I’m assuming because you’re in charge that the egg is from your dreams, right? Are you sure you’re the only one from your Dream Verse active in Orange County right now?”

“Figured it out, huh?” Not that it was really a hard conclusion to guess. “Yeah. It seems like a mistake to make the person who lost the damn thing in charge of finding it again, but I don’t make the rules.” He really, really didn’t want to be in charge of this, but he knew he had to step up. Even though he didn’t have much information on the thing, he still had more than literally anyone else.

“As far as I know I am. I ain’t seen no one else on the network or wandering around on the streets.” And he wished he did, even now, two years after he’d finished dreaming. Setsuna or Kira would have a better idea what to do in this situation. He even missed Raziel and Kurai sometimes. And Uriel, well, he’d guarded the Egg of Wormwood for millennia; he’d definitely know what to do.

Wash shrugged. “Makes sense to me,” he said taking a sip. “You know more about the egg than anyone else would. Being a team leader isn’t easy. I managed to fuck up when I was in charge. It was in the Dreams,” he shrugged, “but I still managed to fuck up and somehow lost my leadership to a battle droid of all things. But I managed to figure it out and so will you.” Katou was going to have to. “Besides, I’m a lot easier to deal with. Unless they’re straight up stupid, I follow orders well.” He was a soldier, after all.

He looked thoughtfully at his coffee. It would be a lot easier if someone else from Katou’s Dreams had shown up. That would have been easy, but of course things could never be easy. “Alright,” he said after a moment. “Tell me again why you think a cult has it? How would anyone even know about it?”

“Ha. Well, so long as I don’t lose my leadership to a fucking robot, I think I’ll count myself lucky.” Of course, a battle droid would probably do a better job. “But good. You can give me a kick in the ass if you see me fucking shit up.” Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if he had Wash watching his back. “How’d you fuck it up? In the dreams.”

Katou shrugged. “It makes the most sense, I think,” he said. “I mean, who the fuck else would want something that’d destroy the world unless they were some weirdass apocalypse cult or something? As for how anyone would know about it, I ain’t got a clue. I never told anyone about it. I guess by magic or something, maybe.” That was something that was still bothering him. Maybe under his mattress wasn’t the best defense, but it should have been for something that no one knew existed.

Wash smirked faintly. “I’ll be happy to add kicking your ass to my list of responsibilities for this assignment,” he said. It was a joke. Mostly. In some ways Katou reminded him a little of Tucker. He had a lot of skill and could do anything he wanted if he just believed he was half as good as he really was. A not so gentle shove in the right direction may be called for. It had certainly worked for Tucker.

Wash sighed and set his cup down. “Honestly? I fucked it up because I didn’t know what I was doing,” he admitted, “I’d never been in a leadership position before. I’d never had anyone relying on me for survival before. The Reds, Blues and I crash landed on what looked like an abandoned planet. Carolina and Epsilon took off shortly after. Epsilon…” Wash frowned. He still didn’t quite understand his feelings towards the A.I. that had once been his and had, for all intents and purposes, ruined him. Now Epsilon was with Carolina and it was as though the incident with Wash had never happened. No one spoke about it. No one even acknowledged that Epsilon had, temporarily, driven Wash insane.

The marine shook his head. “The relationship between Epsilon and the Blues is extremely deep and complicated and something I didn’t understand,” he said. “And I didn’t really understand how they way he’d left had affected them. I tried to fill that empty spot without really knowing what it meant. On top of that I was trying desperately to keep us all alive. People were emotionally damaged, tensions continued to rise and finally they just exploded. Almost quite literally.” Wash rubbed the back of his neck. “In the end I had realize that just wanting what was best for my men wasn’t enough. I could either be a part of the team or not. I couldn’t be their leader without actually being one of them. So I sucked it up and stopped being a Freelancer - a stiff paranoid soldier - and started being a Blue - one of them. Now...I kind of walk a line between both, depending on the situation, depending on what they need me to be.”

He poured himself another cup of coffee, but he didn’t drink any and just held the cup. “You have a good point,” he said. “About the cult, because you’re right, who else would want it? Magic does exist here. For us. So if magic was used by the thief, can magic be used to find it, and therefore the thief?”

Katou nodded, mulling over Wash’s story. He didn’t think he had much of a problem being one of the team, especially not with the team that he wanted to have put together. Still, he felt better knowing that Wash had some experience in this kind of thing and wouldn’t be shy about smacking sense into Katou if he made bad decisions. “Well, I’m glad you’re gonna be on my team,” he said. “And I’m glad you ain’t some paranoid stiff either.”

“I’ve got a tracking spell set up,” Katou said. “First stop after telling Natasha was hanging out at that magic guild until someone showed up. It hasn’t come up with much yet, but I’ll be the first to know if it does pop up. There might be some kinda cloaking spell or something on it.” Because of course nothing could be as easy as using the magical equivalent of GPS.

Was that even possible? Wash thought about the types of video games and comics he’d read. Then he thought about the kinds of magic users he’d come to know in Orange County. Yeah, a cloaking spell of some kind wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility, especially if the thief had used magic to acquire the egg in the first place. A frown tugged at the corners of Wash’s mouth as he thought. He’d read some fantasy comics and played his fair share of fantasy video games, but that hardly made him an expert when it came to magic. Far from it.

Wash gently rolled the cup of coffee between his hands, letting the warmth travel up his arms to the rest of him. “I don’t know anything about magic,” he said. “I’ve seen it, it’s even been used on me, but how it actually works? Not a clue.” His hands closed around the cup. “The person who cast the tracking spell? Have you asked them to join the team?”

Katou snorted. “Yeah, you and me both. I figure I’ll let the experts deal with the magic shit and I’ll just reap the benefits. As for asking him to join the team, not so much. I don’t think he’s got the stomach for the nitty gritty stuff.” Amycus had once had a dream where useful sounding spells had made their way from the dreams into his mind, and he’d been sickened by the idea of killing or torturing someone. He couldn’t even see how something like that could be useful.

“They don’t have to do any of the work,” Wash said with a shrug. “That’s what I’m for.” If it came to bloodshed, it wouldn’t be Wash’s first rodeo and when it came down to keeping the world from ending, Wash had no qualms about doing whatever needed to be done.