Change in Perspective (WashCT)
[AO3] [Ko-Fi in Bio]
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 2025
Summary: It had been their willingness to question things that had brought them together. It was her willingness to act that had pushed them apart.
Notes: Finally emerging from long-fic hell to churn out something for rare pair week!
There had been a time, before the leaderboard, before the Triplets went missing, before the Project started to fan the blaze that obscured itself with billowing smoke into an inferno, that their healthy scepticism had been a part of what had brought them together.
She’d never been anything less than outspoken. From the day she set foot on the Mother of Invention, she questioned everything. It was part of her charm; it made her who she was and he had loved her for it, then. She had the words for things he would never say, no matter that he thought those things just as often as she did.
He humoured her questions and enabled her discussions, but he never said anything unprompted. He never gave himself anything less than plausible deniability.
He was scared. She wasn’t.
But they had worked, for a time. When the questions were nothing but hypotheticals or the kinds of offences that one could ignore, in pursuit of a nobler goal. The war was the driving force behind every action and reaction, every moral choice and decision about the future was made with the knowledge that humanity was on the brink of the abyss that seemed to grow darker with every passing day.
The urge to not just survive but to live had been what drove them into each other’s arms.
Surrounded on all sides by the black expanse of space, perched on the edge of the Mother of Invention’s observatory deck, her questions about the Triplets’ disappearance had turned into questions about the stars. He didn’t know the answers, not in the scientific sense, but perhaps they had never been the kinds of questions that needed them. She had asked about lightyears and the relativity of time. Did the glassed worlds, still burning somewhere tens of lightyears across space, still live on if you looked at them from far enough away?
Could you pretend, if only for a moment, that things hadn’t changed?
“No,” he’d said, “I don’t think so. The past… the past is done; viewing it from another angle can change your perspective, but it can’t change what happened. All you can change is the future.”
She had nodded and fallen silent, her knees to her chest and her chin on her arms. Her hair fell into her face and somehow, in that moment, he had realised what he wanted his future to be.
And still, somehow, it had still been a surprise when she kissed him first.
She had laughed at his bewildered face and kissed him again, and again, and again, and he had fallen into her like a diver in freefall, eyes closed and heart open. One of the few things left unsaid between them had reached the open air at last and they revelled in it, for a while.
They had months, like that; or, at least, it had seemed so at the time.
In hindsight, it was easy to see the ways in which her questions had changed tone, to see where her frustration with him had bloomed as he refused to follow her lead. Where she grew bolder, he grew reticent. For every flaw and hole and lie she unearthed, he found an excuse. For every question she asked, he had a rebuttal, a dismissal.
Until, finally, he crossed a line.
Connie became CT and they became…
What had they become?
She still slept in his bed at night, or him in hers. She still kissed him and she still touched him, in the ways she always had. She still teased him and smiled at him, but the smile rarely seemed to reach her eyes.
Oh, he had known, of course. He had always known.
Internals had chosen him to talk to for a reason; but he didn’t give them what they wanted from him. He lied through his teeth, with the convincing demeanour of a man who didn’t want to lose his second chance. They believed his lies because they believed that he would not lie, because they thought that they had him under their thumb.
Perhaps they had. Perhaps it had only been the hand she still held that had escaped the crushing pressure from above, that made him too afraid to let the seeds of the doubt in his mind bloom into the forest they could have been.
Or perhaps he had simply been selfish, protecting himself from the scrutinous gaze that would have turned his way should he have revealed what he knew.
He liked to think it was more the former than the latter, that he had done it for her and not for him. He liked to think that telling her, one night, about how he had been talked to by internals had served as a warning for her.
He liked to think that she had known that, despite it all, he was on her side—at least, so far as he didn’t want her to die.
So he turned a blind eye to everything he saw—the conversation with the man in the hallway; the disappearances on missions; the glow of her screen, casting her features into shadow, in the early hours of the morning—at the same time as he turned a blind eye to the flames that had begun to whip itself into an inferno around their feet.
Hypocritical, that was what he was.
Somehow, though, he was still surprised when she left without him.
At the time, he had wanted to scream that he would have followed, that he would have taken her at her word and followed the lead of the person who he had told himself would be in every version of his future. That had she simply told him what she’d found and laid it there in front of him, outright, he would have thrown aside his selfish desires and gone with her her, wherever she may have led him.
In reality, she could have asked him, “Come with me?” with her hand outstretched, hovering in the black expanse of space with nothing but their armour between them and the void, and he would have looked away.
It was better, that she hadn’t asked.
At least then he could pretend. At least then, she didn’t have to see him turn his back on her, in a way that neither of them could deny.
He’d known then that he’d never see her again.
The truth came for him, in time. Epsilon came apart in his head, screaming with the kind of all-consuming agony and rage and fear that he had never known, spilling memories that burned like the fire from which they’d come and forcing him to confront all the things that CT had done everything she could to show him, that he had done everything he could to ignore.
Memories that left him longing for a time when learning the truth would have been as simple as listening to the person he loved, instead of dismissing them.
Hindsight makes a genius out of everyone—what a lousy excuse that was.
Wash became Recovery One and with it, he became bitter. He realised, then, as he struggled to hide the truths he knew from the people that had the power to end his life with a word, how alone CT had been in the end. How she had balanced on a knife edge for so long that she must have forgotten what it felt like to be at ease, to trust.
How much it would have meant to her, to have someone.
Alone, he played Command’s games. He cleaned up their messes. He watched the friends he had known drop like flies, always one step behind, always just a little too late to change anything. He tallied them, one by one; the people he’d failed, the people he could have saved. He tallied them and every time he did, he started with her.
He’d been ready to mark off another, when the Level 0 signal came in.
Imagine his surprise, when he’d found not the corpse of another friend, but the very much living, breathing shape of a lover, not a drop of blood in sight. Perched on the driver’s side of a Warthog, staring right at him with golden eyes set into the deep brown metal of her helmet, CT saw him and the beacon stopped. Just like that.
“You’re late,” she said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “Your response time over that distance is usually less.”
“…I took a wrong turn,” he replied, once his mouth remembered how to move. His radio was dead, but he’d never turned it off. “How are you—”
“Texas is a surprisingly agreeable woman, when you’re on the same side,” she said, as if it explained a thing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know if we could trust you.”
“You couldn’t,” he said and heard her laugh, a sound that lit up something in his chest that hadn’t been alive in months. Defensiveness seeped into his voice despite himself and he asked, sharply, “What’s so funny?”
And she laughed again and said, “Nothing,” with a hint of a smile still in her voice. “I’m just… relieved. Any other answer and… I wouldn’t have trusted you now, either.”
“How do you know that’s not why I said it?” he said.
“I don’t,” she said with a shrug. “But if you were working with them, not just for them, you’d have killed me by now. They don’t need me alive, we both know that.”
As always, she was right. She was the only agent besides the Meta designated ‘eliminate on sight’.
His hand had never so much as gone for his pistol.
“Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to get in?” CT said, tilting her head. “They’ll notice your radio silence soon. We should be out of here before a secondary recovery team is sent.”
“Why are you doing this?” he said, the words toppling out like debris knocked loose. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Maybe not,” she said, simply. “But if I didn’t want to give you the chance to prove that you were, then why would I be here? I’m ready if you are.”
CT offered him an outstretched hand and he stared at it, at the second chance, third chance, fourth— whatever it was that she was offering him. He stared at it, and he said:
“I’m sorry, Connie.”
Her shoulders fell and she went to pull the hand away, but he grabbed it. He took her hand in his and he held on, until her smile could be read in every inch of her body and she pulled him close, their helmets knocking together with a sharp clunk.
“The past is done,” she said, jerking her head towards the passenger seat. He clambered inside without a word. “Viewing it from a different angle might change your perspective a little, but it can never change what happened. All you can change is the future. Remember that?”
Heart beating quick in his chest, he swallowed and nodded. “I remember.”
“Live by your own words, Washington. Help me change the future. Maybe that will go some way to making up for the past,” CT said, resting her hand over his. “But make no mistake, it’ll take a while. You really fucked up.”
Washington laughed, the sound as foreign in his mouth as her own laugh had been in the air. “Yeah. Yeah I did. Would it be a good start to tell you I have a plan on how to take them down?”
“Depends how good the plan is.”
So he told her everything. He told her about how he knew everything now and she squeezed his hand, knowingly. He told her about the failsafe and how he’d been biding his time, waiting for his chance to end it all. He told her how they could trick them and in turn, she told him all he needed to know.
She gave him the chance to prove himself a better, braver man than he had been.
The past was done, but the future was only just beginning.
