the decoy raid || pax & orson
It all happened so fast.
One minute he was being “asked” to do an extra round of groundsweeping alongside Pax—probably because they still didn’t trust him not to ‘run off’ again, because they still didn’t fucking believe him that he’d never ‘run off’ in the first place—and he was agreeing because it was one of those offers he wasn’t permitted to turn down. They were keeping up the pretence of free-will, only there wasn’t one.
He probably shouldn’t have been surprised by this. And he didn’t have the patience, or maybe the nerve, to ask why him. To point out that it seemed awfully convenient and shouldn’t he be finishing his training first? That’s what he and a handful of other survivors were all out here on the fields to do, anyway.
But he should have known better than to think that he’d gotten away without any punishment after Pax had pulled him up from the hole he’d fallen into and taken him back to the Colony. They’d put him in the infirmary to check for a concussion, and called it a day. And he’d accepted it probably because he believed that’s what he was owed. He hadn’t run. He’d been on a chore rotation and he’d been left. Forgotten about. Abandoned. It was the Colony’s own God damn fault that they’d had to send Pax on a one man search party.
So he was being escorted out the side gate, Paxton on his heels as his babysitter, apparently—though he wouldn’t complain about the company. He’d rather venture outside these walls with an ally, than by himself. Ally? Friend? Was Pax a friend? He certainly wasn’t foe—and Orson had felt somehow indebted to him since the ‘search and rescue’ incident—but he didn’t consider anyone a friend, and that was less because he didn’t trust anyone and more because he didn’t trust himself. Couldn’t see himself knowing how to get close to anybody, not from any angle. Friends were people you talked to. Friends were people who trusted you and whom you trusted. Friends were people who knew you. No one knew Orson. Not really.
The alarm had sounded just as he was stepping out the gate. For a moment, he’d actually thought it was some kind of cruel joke, or moronic mistake—like Important Person A had forgotten to inform Important Person B that civilians would be leaving the grounds, and now he’d be in some kind of triple-loaded trouble.
Seriously, Orson was a quiet person, even in his frustration, but the way things were going recently, he was almost ready to boil over. Actually earn punishment for once.
And then he saw them. He couldn’t tell how many, at first, but in his shock and rising panic, they seemed like a lot more than the six that they turned out to be.
The first thing he remembered noting about them was their filth—it was like a bone deep filth, one that you could tell was so just by looking. They were hard, grimy and worn at all their edges, cuts fading and scabbed across skin the faded colour of earth and sweat. They were gaunt, all of them, starvation in the hollows of their cheeks and desperation in their bloodshot eyes. They wielded weapons over their heads, taut muscles strained and spring loaded, cries of war flooding the wind.
And they were so close. Orson hadn’t even seen where they’d come from, or how no one had noticed them until now—but maybe they had, because suddenly there was a wall of security Elites forming at his back. A presence he felt more than saw, because he was too busy staring like a deer in headlights, rooted to the spot and realizing he had no weapons, no means to protect himself, and no idea what to do.
Despite months of training and hypothetical ‘games’, apparently none of it translated when it was the real thing.
