[It's not Sangheili brutes. It's not jackals screaming as they plunge from Covie dropships, but those are the closest equivalents Wash himself can readily access when he looks at the thing. It's more reptilian than it is insectoid, but it is large and sprawling and the clip he's palming into his BR55HB service rifle feels pitifully inadequate in comparison.]
[Odds have never not been shit. Not in the Great War, not against Insurrectionists. Not even when it was the Meta's one-man A.I.-gestalt burning holes into what remained of Freelancer's gut-fucked infrastructure. So right now it's just Wash with a heavy-barrel battle rifle and four full mags of rounds that look like they'll just rebound harmlessly of the unfurling green thing's scaled hide, and he breathes slowly and takes stock of his biocomms, steady as ever. They've smoothed over since the jag of adrenaline spiked when the rootwyrm abruptly made its presence known, crushing tree trunks like matchsticks as its heavy, dragging tail swished to and fro.]
[Wash takes aim and opens fire, igniting the scales between the thing's eyes with a hot spray of cordite and lead.]
pollen my leg ; memory is the key
Even after confirming the air quality of this particular planet and ensuring it wouldn't kill him within minutes of taking a lungful of unfiltered air - the chemical mixture checks out to support carbon-based life, mercifully enough - Wash isn't in the habit of removing his helmet on the fly, particularly in the middle of a situation that's so divorced from context that he can't tell if there's an actual threat level present. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have mattered: about two seconds into glancing, offhand, in the direction of some rich blue blooms nestled in the grass, he hadn't taken into account that the spores of pollen they released would be too dense pass through his helmet's filtration systems.
It takes about twenty, maybe thirty seconds for every carefully constructed barrier separating the lives he's spent years compartmentalizing to decay utterly. It burns through them like gasoline, like a viral injection stripping away firewalls, and the jerking whipcrack impulse to seize at his head only arrests him for a moment before the fog drops like a shutter over every lit-up section of his brain.
This is how you find a fully-armored space marine who walks like a civilian, talks like a civilian, and seems to have forgotten about the BR55HB SR hanging loose from one hand. This is how you find a space marine with two fingers pressed into the comm built into his helmet, snarling in a drawling Earther accent: "Agents Texas and Carolina, please respond," before dropping his hand with a muffled sound of frustration. This is how you find a space marine shaking his head frantically, as if that might be enough to clear it, murmuring phrases both broken and breaking, "I'm trying, I'm try - I need more time, okay? I just need more time, don't send anyone else in until I can clear the scenario first, please, just - these schematics are complicated and I'm fucking trying here, please, please - I just need more time, please!"
This is how you find a fully-armored space marine screaming his guts out in the grass, gripping at the sides of his helmet as though in terrible, terrible pain, struck with dozens of memories of having pieces of a digital soul being sheared and frayed away into displaced fragments.
This is how Agent Washington is ripped back to his howling lack of coherency in the days following Epsilon's implantation into his head, locked in the hardscrabble desperation of trying and failing to differentiate between Director - Alpha - Epsilon, trying and failing to decouple himself from layers of memory in triplicate.
This is how memory once again becomes a noose drawn tight around his neck, and threatens to burn him alive.
agent washington | red vs. blue
[It's not Sangheili brutes. It's not jackals screaming as they plunge from Covie dropships, but those are the closest equivalents Wash himself can readily access when he looks at the thing. It's more reptilian than it is insectoid, but it is large and sprawling and the clip he's palming into his BR55HB service rifle feels pitifully inadequate in comparison.]
[Odds have never not been shit. Not in the Great War, not against Insurrectionists. Not even when it was the Meta's one-man A.I.-gestalt burning holes into what remained of Freelancer's gut-fucked infrastructure. So right now it's just Wash with a heavy-barrel battle rifle and four full mags of rounds that look like they'll just rebound harmlessly of the unfurling green thing's scaled hide, and he breathes slowly and takes stock of his biocomms, steady as ever. They've smoothed over since the jag of adrenaline spiked when the rootwyrm abruptly made its presence known, crushing tree trunks like matchsticks as its heavy, dragging tail swished to and fro.]
[Wash takes aim and opens fire, igniting the scales between the thing's eyes with a hot spray of cordite and lead.]
Even after confirming the air quality of this particular planet and ensuring it wouldn't kill him within minutes of taking a lungful of unfiltered air - the chemical mixture checks out to support carbon-based life, mercifully enough - Wash isn't in the habit of removing his helmet on the fly, particularly in the middle of a situation that's so divorced from context that he can't tell if there's an actual threat level present. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have mattered: about two seconds into glancing, offhand, in the direction of some rich blue blooms nestled in the grass, he hadn't taken into account that the spores of pollen they released would be too dense pass through his helmet's filtration systems.
It takes about twenty, maybe thirty seconds for every carefully constructed barrier separating the lives he's spent years compartmentalizing to decay utterly. It burns through them like gasoline, like a viral injection stripping away firewalls, and the jerking whipcrack impulse to seize at his head only arrests him for a moment before the fog drops like a shutter over every lit-up section of his brain.
This is how you find a fully-armored space marine who walks like a civilian, talks like a civilian, and seems to have forgotten about the BR55HB SR hanging loose from one hand. This is how you find a space marine with two fingers pressed into the comm built into his helmet, snarling in a drawling Earther accent: "Agents Texas and Carolina, please respond," before dropping his hand with a muffled sound of frustration. This is how you find a space marine shaking his head frantically, as if that might be enough to clear it, murmuring phrases both broken and breaking, "I'm trying, I'm try - I need more time, okay? I just need more time, don't send anyone else in until I can clear the scenario first, please, just - these schematics are complicated and I'm fucking trying here, please, please - I just need more time, please!"
This is how you find a fully-armored space marine screaming his guts out in the grass, gripping at the sides of his helmet as though in terrible, terrible pain, struck with dozens of memories of having pieces of a digital soul being sheared and frayed away into displaced fragments.
This is how Agent Washington is ripped back to his howling lack of coherency in the days following Epsilon's implantation into his head, locked in the hardscrabble desperation of trying and failing to differentiate between Director - Alpha - Epsilon, trying and failing to decouple himself from layers of memory in triplicate.
This is how memory once again becomes a noose drawn tight around his neck, and threatens to burn him alive.