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Carolina had taken off, running the speed unit as soon as the doors of their pelican had opened in the Staff of Charon's hangar bay. It was objectively a terrible idea. Epsilon was with Tucker, so there was no AI controlling the equipment, Wash wasn't sure if her leg was completely fine yet, and the huge gash on her back from their fight with Felix and Locus probably wouldn't benefit from the strain, either.
But he wouldn't have voiced any complaints, even if she'd stuck around long enough to hear them. In fact, in this moment he kind of wished he had one himself, consequences be damned.
Instead he was stuck working at normal speed, picking off enemy soldier's methodically that Carolina had just zoomed by.
"I'm here, everyone's alive." Carolina's voice over the radio had most of the tension bleeding away from Wash, and he took out the rest of the guards in his way almost casually.
They were fine. Of course they were. All the worst case scenarios that had been playing in his head on the ride here weren't things that applied to people who could make life become slow motion just by sheer will power. They were the Reds and Blues, any and all odds crumbled into certainties when they were up against them. They'd just been up against Felix and Locus in the comm tower on their own, and Wash seriously doubted Hargrove had any more monsters like them on his payroll.
Except when he turned the corner, he found himself face to face with one such monster.
He skidded to a halt as he tried to process just what it was that he was seeing there. The golden domed helmet turned around to face him, and all of Wash's super soldier instincts were screaming at him to move, but he couldn't, not with the thousands of thoughts racing around his head.
The Meta was supposed to be dead, he'd been sort of out of it when the Reds had pushed the Warthog off the cliff, but he'd seen the Meta slide off the cliff, had heard the incomprehensible growling and had detected (imagined?) the note of fear in it. There'd been water underneath there, he'd read all the reports, the Meta's suit had been punctured, Tucker had stabbed him with his sword, Wash himself had hit him with a throwing knife, even taking into account the Meta's monstrous strength there was no way he could've gotten back to the surface fast enough, not with a car hanging off of him…
Seeing this helmet, this armor, it brought Wash back in time, examining North's body, getting shot in the back by South, talking the Alpha into destroying itself, dragging Doc through the desert and trying not to feel anything about the broken shadow of a man he was supposed to be working with, expecting a stab in the back at any moment and the odd sense of relief when it had finally happened…
"Wash, dude relax, it's just me." Tucker's voice snapped him out of his thoughts, and it couldn't have been more than a few seconds, but the Sim trooper knew Wash well enough by now to spot when he was frozen and needed something to ground him in reality.
It took him another moment to connect the voice he'd heard with the helmet in front of him, but when the figure reached up to pop open the seals, and he saw brown skin and the armor color flickering from blue to white, Wash finally realized what was going on.
"What the hell are you doing?", he bellowed, tendrils of white hot anger washing over his spine so viciously he thought it must've been visible from the outside.
Tucker's face emerged from underneath the helmet, and Wash wasn't sure what to make of that look of confusion, but he didn't really care, because Tucker had to know that this was Not Okay.
Wash had felt offended when he'd finally realized how CT's armor had ended up in the desert, but the stab of anger had fizzled out easily, difficult to stay angry when the person responsible for it was long dead themselves, buried namelessly in the sand.
"You can't be wearing that, what the fuck is wrong with you?", Washington snapped. Because now that he knew that this wasn't the Meta come back to life to attack his friends, the images the helmet dangling from Tucker's fingers conjured up in his mind were different.
It was a piece of fruit dropped wordlessly on his tray, because the supply ship was late, and everyone was rationed to only one piece of fruit, and Wash had been pining after the fresh vitamins. It was a rare voice complaining about the building being too high, which Wash had been forced to agree with when he'd had to jump off it himself just half an hour later. It was the countless times Agent Maine had saved his life in the field, and it was the long hours sitting at his bed side when the medics had sworn up and down that he'd be fine, but Wash wouldn't believe them until he'd seen it with his own two eyes.
He'd made his peace with the fact that the Meta hadn't been Maine anymore for a long time, and that the Sim Troopers taking him out was ultimately a good thing long ago, or at least that's what he'd thought right up until this moment.
Now, seeing Tucker in this armor that didn't quite fit perfectly because Maine had been a behemoth while Tucker was on the shorter side of average height, it almost felt like he was taunting Maine's memory. It was revolting, and Wash had to tighten his grip on his rifle just to stop himself from ripping the armor pieces right off his teammate. Friend, usually, but Wash had his share of experience with friends wearing that armor turning into enemies, it would barely even surprise him at this point.
"Take that off!", Agent Washington demanded, but he didn't stick around to see whether or not his instruction would be followed. He stormed off, entering the next available room, and it only belatedly occurred to him that there still might be enemies around, and he wasn't exactly paying much attention to his surroundings, here.
Luckily there were no enemies in the room.
At least, not alive.
Seeing the massive amounts of blood on the floor, and the broken bodies of a staggering amount of Hargrove's troops, startled Wash at least partially out of his rage. Doctor Grey was crouched next to Grif, Simmons hovering nervously next to them, his visor partially smashed, revealing his concerned face. Wash had no idea how Doctor Grey had even gotten into this room before him, but when he realized that one of her hands was vanishing into Grif's gut, he suddenly didn't feel like questioning it, anymore.
Caboose was huddled at one wall that was covered in trophy stands that were mostly empty, except for one with a black helmet with a shattered visor that Wash remembered very well, and the anger flared back up again. At least until he realized that the blue soldier had his helmet off and was sobbing into his hands.
"Caboose, buddy, what's wrong, are you hurt?", Wash asked, sinking down on his knees next to him, looking him over to see if there were any obvious wounds, but he didn't see any. Freckles was across his lap and looked equally undamaged.
"Church", Caboose sniffed out. "Church he's…" a sob interrupted him. "Gone. Again."
"Epsilon? Why, what happened?" Hadn't Carolina said that they were all alive? Considering how close Carolina and Epsilon were, Wash had just automatically assumed that included him.
"Um… he explains it better", Caboose said, and that was just confusing. So was Epsilon just absent and going to explain why, later? But then why would Caboose be crying about that. "He sent a message, and you can listen to it and then you know", Caboose explained in that slightly too fast way he sometimes did, that sounded at odds with his crying.
Checking his HUD, Wash realized that there was indeed an audio message waiting for him, so he opened it, while putting a hand on Caboose's shoulder in what he hoped was a soothing gesture.
The message had been sent to him, as well, but he oddly felt like he was intruding on something personal when he heard it. The whole tone was tinged with 'last words' but given Church's track record, a part of Wash's mind adamantly refused to believe that. A small blue figure in his mind putting a gun to its head had seemed pretty final, too, but look how that had turned out.
But when he got to the part about not being able to run the suit, Wash's perception of the situation suddenly got turned on its head.
The fragments I'll leave behind will have the strength to get you through this.
It hadn't been one of those improbable sim trooper victories, after all. He looked up to see Doctor Grey direct a bunch of medics who were putting Grif on a stretcher, took in all the blood on the floor, and finally it sunk in how hard they had actually fought, how easily it all could've gone wrong.
He'd looked at the Meta suit and seen memories of his long lost friend, had gotten angry at the memento being disrespected, but he hadn't considered how powerful that suit was. He should've, he was a soldier and he'd seen the Meta in action often enough. The Meta hadn't killed its former comrades without having anything to show for it, after all.
It sounded like Epsilon had thought that without the suit running properly the Reds and Blues wouldn't survive this.
And he'd yelled at Tucker about it, when the truth of the matter was, that if Tucker hadn't put on this suit and fought with it, Wash might be busy prepping his corpse for transport out of here. Tucker's normal aqua armor and his sort could've been mementos of a dead friend just like the Meta's suit and the brute shot were, now.
Epsilon had deconstructed himself to avoid that happening. Wash sucked in a breath when the implication of that hit him. He'd deconstructed himself while connected to Tucker. The word deconstructed sounded a whole lot nicer than attempted suicide but that didn't stop Wash from remembering that moment when a gun shot rang through his mind, tearing and twisting the foundations of his being to the point that Wash still sometimes woke up years later not knowing his own name.
The thought of that happening to Tucker was what had him spring to his feet and back out into the hallway where he'd left him.
"Are you okay?", he asked as soon as he saw him, sitting on the floor next to some dead space pirates. He was holding up his arm, while one of the medics Dr Grey was working on prying off the shoulder plating. It seemed to be stuck. There was a smell of something burnt in the air, that probably would've been much worse if not for Wash's helmet filtering most of it out.
"Oh, now he suddenly cares", Tucker said petulantly, turning his head to glare at Washington.
"Look, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have yelled at you, I jumped to conclusions…"
"Man, fuck you", Tucker exclaimed. "Church literally tore himself to pieces trying to run this fucking thing, and it still ran so hot it's fused with my freaking survival suit, now, I don't need you giving me shit!" All perfectly valid points, and Wash had never felt like more of an asshole. Not that he had never acted like a bigger asshole, he'd done plenty worse, but for most of those occasions it had taken a while for him to realize his assholery and by then he'd had distance between himself and the situation. Now he felt his own dickishness instantly.
"You're right", Wash agreed. "I'm really sorry, I wasn't…"
"Oh fuck off, I don't want to talk to you right now", the sim trooper said, turning back to the medic, and raising his other hand to half heartedly help with getting the armor off. Wash stood there for a moment, torn between wanting to apologize some more, and wanting to comply with Tucker's request and give him some space.
At the very least, he didn't sound like he was on the verge of an AI shattering induced psychotic break, that was good, then. Epsilon had probably been a bit more careful about this than he had been all those years ago inside of Wash's head.
"Okay, I'm just gonna… check on Caboose, then…", Wash stammered awkwardly, edging backwards. Tucker didn't look up, just kept his lips pressed together in a thin line.
Looked like Wash had really fucked up.