Sir, I don’t think the memory wipe was completely successful.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Locus
Rating: T
Word Count: 876
Notes: I don’t know why I went here with this. I just did. That being said, shout out to drakesoldier‘s version of New Jersey, who is referenced in this story.
Hole In Your Mind
There are… holes in his mind. No. Perhaps that is not the proper word to use for the situation. Because there is something in the back of his head that said if he laid out everything he remembered on a calendar, he could perfectly account for the years of his military service from his enlisting to his honorable discharge. Every last day accounted for in that hazy sort of way interspersed with intensely detailed experiences that stick in the mind like a burr. Cling until they are all that fills his head while he sleeps.
There is a ship in his dreams. A ship and so many people. He remembers a blur of technicolor armor that is not suitable for a battle field. Remembers himself in olive green, head to toe. Remembers a codename that he is certain he never had and never would have. But really, after a name like Montana, is it so strange to think he’d attach himself to Locus as well?
Felix, of course, never believes. Why should he? To Felix people exist from the moment he meets them, and cease to do so when they are gone. Well, Locus expects that Felix remembers them if he’s responsible for their deaths, but that is how Felix gets through a lot of things. Reminding himself how powerful he is and how powerless everyone else could be. But Felix exists in the now, and the here and the hole in Locus’s mind isn’t either of those.
There are holes in his mind. Holes plastered over with putty of other memories, a certainty of being in two difference places at one time. A battle on some besieged planet at the same time he was on an orbital station, clad in green, radioing in for pick up after taking out an Insurrectionist supply depot. Down time with his squad after losing their CO while he trains in a state of the art facility with the voice of a kind, gentle woman prompting him on. The eyes of Sangheili staring at him across a battlefield while a disapproving and haughty CO stares down from an observation room as he tries to squeeze just a few more points of rating on his sniper rifle out, trying to prove he’s cut for the A-Squad.
Control sends them a massive information upload when the target ship is inbound. About the tech on board, about the items and bodies that are priority one retrievals even in the middle of the genocide they are meant to engineer. That level of destruction has felt… strangely familiar to him since it started. The taking orders from a shadowy, questionable voice high above him and far away seems common practice. And the files themselves?
There are gaps, of course. Control only ever tells them what they need to know. How to identify the right bodies. How to recover an AI fragment for safe delivery. Where to deliver the Freelancer tech for the scientists to work on harnessing the potential of. It isn’t until someone starts messing with their covert operations that the personnel files on the people on the ship are sent over, each one highly redacted. There are no tidbits that explain anything beyond general combat abilities, because Control doesn’t know who it is.
It isn’t until the box canyon and the discovery of the Reds, Blues and Agent Washington that the full files are unlocked. The secrets of Project Freelancer laid more or less bare before him. And even then, it’s only the senior operatives and general information. No one lower than the top ten. No Agent Montana.
There are holes in his mind. The more Locus picks through the records of Project Freelancer, the more certain of it he is. There is a voice in his nightmares, darkness all around him, that says something over and over.
Sir, I don’t… memo… ompletely successful.
A nightmare of pain in the back of his head and hands shaking as they claw at armrests. Wrists bound, ankles anchored, unable or unwilling to move. Screams bubbling up through his throat and never breaking his lips. And darkness, so much darkness where there should be color and laughter and idiocy.
Kentucky used to make jokes about how their armor made them giant targets, or so he thinks. Vermont had a giggle that made Felix’s evil laughter sound tame. Jersey had a strange fondness for breaking into the kitchen at odd hours to bake, which had made him a fond favorite of the Alpha team. But none of that is real. They tell him, his mind tells him, his service record tells him that none of it is real. Ever was. Ever would be. That he’s not good enough, was never good enough, could never be good enough for Project Freelancer.
And the second the dark-skinned man steps onto the bridge of the prison ship, months and months and months after Locus has torn through every file he could get his hands on, he knows.
There are holes in his mind.
When this is over and they no longer have need of the man, Aiden Price is going to fill them back in. Even if Locus has to carve every last secret out of his flesh.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: February 23rd, 2015
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Darkness cannot drive out darkness.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Locus
Ship: N/A
Rating: M
Word Count: 653
Notes: Went for a rare first-person perspective. Sort of an envisioned origin story for Locus in canon?
WARNING: Child Abuse and Murder
Custom Made
Success is learned in the little lessons. Tiny steps that drag you forward with each day. Tiny victories that allow you to keep moving unhurt, unnoticed, unbroken.
When you trip and spill hot coffee all over his legs, you learn to watch where you’re going. If you look before you step, you won’t trip. When you take too long to get there and the coffee has cooled too much, you learn to balance caution with speed. Learn the route on the way out and you have a better chance of making it back without mishap.
Every morning is a new lesson. Every day a new pain. Polish the forks well, or he gets the belt. Take as little time on errands as possible or you’ll be accused of dallying. Again he goes for the belt. Don’t talk back unless you want a fist in your gut, across your face, doubling you over on your knees before you’re kicked.
Obedience. Promptness. Flawless execution and careful planning. Follow orders to the letter. Survive to see the next day.
Tell no one. Tell no one or you won’t survive.
He gives you a final lesson too. The one that sticks with you the longest. Maybe the others are unconscious, are ingrained so deep that no amount of sanding down the wood of your being will drive them out, but none compares.
Everyone has a breaking point.
Yours is when you’re in high school. When another kid half destroys your most expensive textbook. You’ve already learned by then never to raise your hand to another person. It only gets you beat. Thick leather belt with the metal studs that jut out and cut into the bare skin of your back. You had bled for hours, ruining a shirt in the process. He beat you for that too.
When you come home you show him the book, quietly tell him how much it will cost, start to explain…
Maybe you shouldn’t have done it while he was smoking. Maybe you should have given yourself more space to run. He’s always drunk this time of day and you can outrun him. You have places to hide. The beatings would be worse for it, but there wouldn’t be fire. But you don’t run. You don’t give him space. He grabs your hand, holds it in a strong grip, and you scream and fall to your knees and you can smell flesh burning.
When he lets you go you crawl away to tend to the wound. Slather it in cream. Wrap it with gauze. Go to his bedroom and take down the box on the high shelf that he thinks you haven’t noticed or maybe something else. You know where the bullets are too. Right in the chamber. Like hell he cared about your safety.
He’s still drunk when you go out to the living room. The gun burns in your grip, screaming pain up your arm as it settles in the palm of your burned hand. You don’t care. You call his name, he looks, and for a moment you see the horror in his eyes.
The horror doesn’t last long. Three holes in his chest will do that. You drop the gun. Grab your coat. Walk the five miles to the nearest recruitment outpost. They ask your name and you lie. What do they care? It’s a war where they need canon fodder. You’re willing to be stuffed down the barrel.
When you go off, you intend to take as many Covvies as possible with you. He’s taught you many lessons, and you’re certain they’re suitable for war. They will be, you know it. Just mark him off as your first casualty. A retroactive order that got you to the desk, to signing up, to fighting the war you were made for. A custom built soldier, just for the UNSC.
