The sky is falling. Orange meteors streak through the inky black. The stars are nowhere to be seen; the friction burn of drop pods screaming into the atmosphere at hypersonic velocities drowning them out, noise overpowering the signal.
Douglas is in a city and he’s moving quickly through the streets. He’s following somebody - a woman, from the looks of it. Her armor’s a little older. It’s been upgraded to handle the rigors of modern combat - but modern combat is brutal nonetheless. She’s already been shot a couple of times; her chestplate is heavily damaged. It doesn’t look like it’ll resist the wind, let alone a bullet.
They’re talking. Nervous energy. Mostly Douglas, though the words can’t be heard specifically. Just mumbling. The woman seems reassuring, somehow. Confident. “I’ll be fine,” she says. Not really. It’s just more mumbling, but it sure as hell sounds like that; what other conclusions can be drawn?
Their Titans aren’t anywhere around. In the distance you can hear the thump of metal on concrete and the sounds of gunfire, and all it does is confirm that yes, there’s a war going on. If the cars ditched everywhere and the occasional body and the rubble haven’t already confirmed it. A firefight’s already swept through here, but the district is quiet.
They reach a corner. There’s a park nearby. The woman moves to cross it, but Douglas’s hand shoots out like a grappling hook and reels her back in. Words are shared. Forceful, irritated words, but eventually she relents and the two head back. A standard maneuver; get some speed via a run, get more speed via the odd interaction between a Jump Kit and the wall, then slide to safety. It’s simple enough.
Douglas heads out first. He pushes himself into a sprint and then kicks himself up and onto the wall. The Jump Kit flares, working overtime to keep him glued to it as long as possible, but after half a second of running he kicks off the wall, having accelerated to a speed only hundred-metre runners could hope to achieve. The Pilot sails through the air, bringing his legs up and folding his knees, before he hits the ground. The Jump Kit fires off, boosting him across the street; in a hail of sparks he slides into cover.
Douglas makes a noise of reassurance. It’s directed at the woman. But as he watches her back up, taking a second to look at her ass in a way that would have been perverted if it weren’t for the fact they’d had sex before, he repeats it again to himself. Like he’s the one that needs reassurance.
The woman runs up and kicks onto the wall. She runs across it and jumps into the air, as graceful as a swan, and then a sniper rifle cracks and a bullet shoots sideways through her chest. Her weakened armor can’t resist it. Douglas can’t tell yet, but the bullet’s punched through her spine, right through the nerves. The shock has already killed her. She crumples to the floor like a sack of meat instead of a battle-hardened warrior.
Grunts rise up from the woodwork. Against Douglas’s better nature, he opens fire. He’s got an R-101; a Frontier classic. He’d been hearing rumors of an upgrade package, but as he starts mowing down everyone trying to get close to his girlfriend those thoughts don’t even exist.
Another bullet hits the ground near him and he ducks back into cover just in time for the second one to pass through the space his head occupied. He can only conclude one thing, based on how fast and accurate that followup shot was; that the sniper up there is also a Pilot. He looks out towards Selene’s corpse, not wanting to leave it, but the frag grenade that lands next to him serves as a good motivator.
People are screaming at him over the radio but he doesn’t hear them. Their voices go in one ear and out the other. He’s got a job to do; he doesn’t even compute the fact that they exist. He breaks some glass and holds it out past the corner, and a bullet shatters it in his hand. That sniper has him pinned.
He yells something into the radio and somebody talks back to him. He tries to listen, but some Spectres round the corner and he magdumps into them. It takes care of the problem. He ditches the magazine. He doesn’t really care about it. You can 3D print your own or buy some spares. People are tougher to replace.
Fortunately, the person on the other end is nice enough to repeat herself. And this cuts through the haze of remembrance;
This operation’s a loss. Get into your Titan and get to the extraction zone.
NO! I am NOT LEAVING HER HERE!
Hammerhead, that is a god damn order! She’s fucking dead, her biometrics don’t lie! We are not losing another Pilot!
There’s stomping behind him and he grabs his Archer, turning around to sight it in on his Titan. A sage green Ogre, kitted just as he likes it. Douglas lowers the rocket launcher and runs towards the machine, its massive hatch opening up to accept him.
He knows, on a fundamental level, that he has to go. That staying here means his death. But he’s not leaving Selene behind, so he walks out past the cover of the building and over to her body. A few Grunts are poking around at it, and when they see Goliath himself start striding over they back the hell up and run to cover. He kneels down, looking at her, and then something clanks against his Ogre’s hull. He looks to the side and sees the culprit; a Pilot with a Charge Rifle flying towards him, grappling hook latched onto the side of his machine body. His Ogre is warning him about the grappling hook, but he can’t hear it over the sight of a smoking Longbow dangling behind him.
There is a moment of clarity unlike any he’s experienced as he wrenches the Ogre’s arm to grab onto the hook so fast he swears the man that killed his girlfriend double takes. The enemy Pilot charges their rifle and scores a hole in the Titan’s side, but Douglas pulls the cable and the man crashes into the Titan, falling to the ground.
Douglas lifts a foot and brings it down. He twists it, to make sure.
Then he kneels down. He passes his 40mm to his off-hand, opens the hatch, and reaches out with a giant arm, gently picking up Selene’s body and lifting it to the hatch, where it drops into his own awaiting arms.
Then he shuts the hatch and heads to the extraction point. Tears brim in his eyes. Selene lies against him. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. She’s almost like a destroyed Spectre, and if it weren’t for her smell and the fact her blood’s dripping down his chestplate he could almost be fooled. He almost wants to be fooled. But he knows the truth.
He makes it to the EZ. It’s a madhouse. He gets aboard the Widow, with the rest of Voyager firing out of it, and then the Titan carrier lifts off, heading to rendevouz with the Monaco and transfer the Titans onboard to it. He doesn’t notice the fact Selene’s titan is next to him. He’s too busy crying into her shoulder, having ripped his helmet off to try and take in as much of her as he can, because he’ll never get to do this or anything else with her again.
He doesn’t remember much else about the rest of that day.
