#blue team entry

He’s standing in the middle of Hargrove's trophy room, gripping his sword tightly. The Meta's armor is too big for him, tailored for a bulky frame. The teal color is comforting, but it feels unnatural, wearing the suit of a dead man. His alien plasma sword is glowing a shining white, and looking at it for longer than a second makes his eyes burn.

Sparks are flying from the door as Hargrove's soldiers begin to cut it open, and muffled shouting comes from behind the heavy metal door.

Epsilon hovers over his shoulder, pale sky-blue armor glinting in the harsh false light. Tucker glances at him, a grim smile on his face. He knows how this ends. He’s lived it more times than he can count.

"See you on the other side, Church," Tucker says to him.

He blinks, and Church is gone. It's not that he's retreated into his armor; his presence has faded from Tucker’s head. His mind feels hollow and empty, and even though he knows how it feels, knows what to expect, it’s never prepared him for the reality of losing his friend in the blink of an eye.

(It’s happening again.

What loop are we on?

I don’t know.)

Hargrove’s soldiers burst through the door. Tucker steels himself, lifting his sword in preparation.

(They come from the left.

Watch your back.)

A soldier fires a burst of gunfire, and the armor actives, a bubble shield forming around him. He stabs through it, and hits the soldier in the gut, all the force of the Meta’s strength enhancement and of his rage and sorrow and fear pushed into the blow.

The guard retreats, and another takes his place. Tucker stumbles sideways, into another one of Hargrove’s forces. He hasn’t memorized where each soldier is, and sometimes they catch him by surprise. He always manages to mess something up, no matter how hard he tries not to.

A glowing bolt of energy hits his armor, and the armor’s bubble- and over-shields short-circuit, leaving him defenseless. His active camouflage turns on, distorting his armor’s colors until they match the area behind him. The soldier looks around in confusion, shooting blind.

(We can do this.

Maybe this time, we can save them all.)

He dodges shot after shot, hearing gunfire and shouts ringing in his ears. He pushes back the stream of panicked thoughts that bombard his mind and focuses on the fight, focuses on eliminating the threat, focuses on the fact that this is easy, he can do this.

He’s so focused on what’s in front of him that he doesn’t pay attention to what’s behind. A whimper of pain meets his ears and he whips around, to see Caboose scrambling backwards from a soldier in dented and scratched armor.

Tucker dashes forward, cutting through lines of enemies to reach the blue soldier. He lowers the sword and helps Caboose up, forgetting to check for enemies around him. There’s a sharp cry, and he sees an alien sword protruding from his chest, cutting jagged lines through his armor. As his vision dims, he sinks to the floor, eyes burning.

(So this is how it ends, this time.

I don’t think it’ll ever end.)

His sight goes a stark white, and he cries out in agony, a searing heat tearing through him. He clutches his chest, gritting his teeth as the world dissolves around him.

*

When he opens his eyes again, slowly, painfully, he’s right back where he started. In Hargrove’s trophy room, Epsilon hovering above his shoulder.

“Hey, uh, I just want you guys to know that, out of everyone I've ever met... I hate you all the least.” Epsilon tells them.

(Yeah, well, it’s a little late for that now, isn’t it.)

Tucker closes his eyes, focusing on the burning red behind his eyelids. “See you, Church.”

He opens them, and Epsilon is gone.

It’s worse than dying, watching Church fragment himself, over and over again. Hargrove’s soldiers don’t give him enough time to stop, to take a breath, to rest. To grieve. They just attack and attack and attack and soon there’s nothing left but ashes and blood and a wisp of a memory, disappearing as the world fades away.

(He tried to tell them, once, about the loops. They didn’t believe him.)

The battle goes quicker, this time. He’s down on the floor, a bullet through his shoulder, and blood staining his teal armor. Caboose is crouched over him, and he smiles weakly at the cobalt soldier.

“It’s okay,” Tucker tells him softly, as Wyoming’s enhancement flares up around him. “It’ll all just-”

*

“-reset,” he finishes quietly.

Epsilon turns towards him, looking concerned. “Tucker, you okay?”

Carolina suppressed a small smile as she finally made it to the meeting room and opened the door.

The room was empty.  Carolina frowned.

“Wash,” she called out on their shared channel, a relic from Freelancer but still useful for private communications as long as they didn’t think too hard about the ghosts on the line.  “Did this afternoon’s strategy meeting get moved?”

“Uh… yes,” Wash replied after an oddly long pause. “Auditorium Two.  Sorry, we forgot to tell you—how did we forget to tell you—”

“Auditorium Two?” she asked, changing direction.  “Any particular reason?”

“We needed the space,” Wash answered.  “There’s… well, a few more people got invited.”

“To the strategy meeting?”

“Yeah, um, it’s—Caboose!  Not yet, if you set it on fire—”

Wash cut out.

Carolina picked up her pace.

The door to Auditorium Two wasn’t burning when she got there, so that was one for Wash’s newfound talent as a babysitter, she guessed.  There was an awful lot of whispering going on inside, though, not quite audible and abruptly stopping as soon as she opened the door.

Carolina stared.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGENT CAROLINA!” Caboose shouted, and threw a handful of confetti into the air.  She watched it flutter to the ground, and half the occupants of the room appeared to be holding their breath.

“Birthday,” she said.  “It’s not my birthday.”

They breathed out.

“Yeah, we know,” Tucker said, and she could hear him rolling his eyes.

If they knew it wasn’t her birthday they didn’t seem to care.  The large room was bedecked with handmade streamers, paper chains made with red and blue links.  Someone had scrounged up actual party hats and done an impressive job of tying one to Caboose’s helmet and, yes, she noticed, to Freckles as well, the paper cone resting at a jaunty angle on the gun’s barrel. The table at the front of the room had been draped with a festive tablecloth. On top of it was a white upside down bucket with what looked like signal flares taped to the top, their fuses still unlit.  The Reds had congregated nearby, Donut busy making another paper chain.  Above the whole arrangement was a banner that read “Happy Birthday!” written meticulously in what looked like pink glitter pen.

Tucker, Caboose, and the generals Kimball and Doyle were standing directly in front of the door.  On the other side of the room stood Dr. Grey and Wash, the former Freelancer leaning against the wall, his shoulders shaking.

Carolina read the banner again, just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

“Would someone care to explain?” she said flatly.

“Ah.  Yes, you see,” Doyle cleared his throat, and then launched into what sounded like a speech. “In light of the way you have helped shaped the course of history on our beleaguered planet, we agreed,” he glanced at Kimball as though the very idea was unprecedented, “to hold, in your honor, a small service, which has… err, that is, what we had intended—”

“We were planning to hold a ceremony to formally thank you—all of you,” Kimball interrupted, her tone frustrated and puzzled but the faintest bit fond, “for what you’ve done for Chorus.  Then the word ‘party’ started getting thrown around and… I’m honestly not quite sure what happened after that.”

“Caboose happened,” Tucker snorted.

“And Church helped!” Caboose said happily.

Epsilon flickered into view by Caboose’s shoulder.

“I don’t know if helped is really the right word,” he murmured, not quite looking at Carolina.

“Yeah, it really isn’t,” Tucker complained.  “See, when people started talking about parties Caboose remembered that we haven’t thrown you a birthday party yet, even though we’ve known you for like, two years.  We tried to tell him that it wasn’t your birthday, but then this asshole wouldn’t tell us when your birthday actually was, so it’s not like we could prove Caboose wrong.”

Church still wouldn’t look at her, and Carolina wondered if he was thinking about birthdays and silence, if he remembered late nights at an empty table, a slice of half frozen store-bought cake without a single candle, and the sound of typing filtering in from the hallway.

“Dirty Blues, keepin’ secrets,” Sarge muttered loudly, and Carolina turned to him, glad for the distraction.

“And the Reds are here because…?”

“Can’t go letting the Blues have secret meetings without us, missy!” Sarge said as though it were obvious.  “They’re already withholding information, who knows what dastardly plans they’re cooking up!”

“Speak for yourself, old man,” Grif said.  “I was told there would be cake, and I want to lodge a complaint with the caterers.”

“Cake?” Simmons scoffed.  “Seriously? We don’t have the rations for cake, you know that.”

“Yeah but there isn’t even a crappy substitute for cake,” Grif whined.  “All we have is a decorated bucket. There aren’t even any cookies!”

“That’s because you ate all the cookies two weeks ago!”

“I don’t know, I could probably scrounge up something for a cake,” Donut mused. “Does anyone know where they keep the baby oil?”

“Jesus,” Simmons groaned.

The Reds devolved into bickering and speculation on baking materials, and Carolina glanced at the next person in the room.  Dr. Grey cocked her head to one side.

“I’m just here in case of party casualties!” she said cheerfully, and Carolina decided maybe it was better not to ask.

She turned to look at Wash.

He shrugged.

“This is… a thing they do,” he said, his voice rueful and tinged with an exasperated affection that seemed to be reserved for the soldiers in red and blue.  “Probably better just to go with it.”

“Yeah, you don’t really get much choice,” Tucker chimed in, “not unless you want to give us the real date, which I’m guessing you don’t because of dramatic Freelancer secrecy bullshit.  So I hope you like your new birthday, because this is going to be it from now on.”

“And it is going to be the best birthday ever!” Caboose cheered.

“Caboose, you say that every time we throw a party.”

“Well, it’s always true!”

“Dude, the very first birthday party we gave you ended with a metal table on fire,” Tucker said, and then the Blues were off bickering as well.

Except for one.

Epsilon looked at Carolina for a moment and then his projection blinked out again, jumping from Caboose’s armor to—not to her armor storage but to her implants, something he rarely did without good reason.

>Happy birthday, C, he said, and she could feel him there, at the back of her neck, a warmth that flickered like candlelight.

Carolina hadn’t had much reason to celebrate her birthday for a very long time. Still, she looked at the gathered Reds and Blues, all arguing over the smallest things, at the confused generals, the cheerful doctor, and at the relaxed line of Wash’s shoulders.  The old day didn’t mean much to her anymore, she thought.

Maybe she could do with a new one.

Carolina smiled.