Chapter Text
They were tense. He bet if he jabbed them in the shoulder all those little strings of muscle would snap apart like rubber bands. He was pretty sure that’s what they thought he was about to do when he put his hand there without warning. “Good?”
Their chest rose and slowly fell. “Fine.” They said.
He left them alone.
Their third was Crypto. He was one of the better ones; didn’t ask questions, could get his drone to the little corners Bloodhound’s ult didn’t reach, and was half decent with a wingman. He also paid attention to everything like the paranoid rodent he was. Useful when Bloodhound scouted ahead. All Revenant had to do was look at him and he said, “Loba’s mad at them.”
He scoffed. “What, they use her lipstick for their warpaint again?”
“They did what?”
Aw shit, wait. That was supposed to go under his NDA file. Maybe his stupid skinbag brain was finally rotting. “What’d they do?”
“You’re really going to ask me that? Meongcheonghan ssibal .”
“I can translate three hundred languages, you know.”
“I know.”
“So…?”
“You can use that tin can head of yours.”
“How about I just gut you?” He felt his leg move and looked down to see Bloodhound had, of course, returned right then and kicked him.
“No one is ahead, but there is a building on high ground we should get to.” They said.
“How about we go do something useful, like killing?”
“Patience, andskoti.” They waved their hand, Crypto retracting his drone and following. “Crypto will keep an eye out; the ring should pull them to us and we can fell them from a distance.”
“I don’t have a sniper.” He said.
“What?” They glanced behind them, their annoyance visible in the angle of their shoulders. “I advised you to pick one up earlier for a reason. ”
“Yeah.” He said, eyeing their triple take.
They didn’t even have to look at him. “Let this be a lesson.”
Crypto chuckled, even when Revenant glared at him. He took it back; Crypto might follow orders or whatever, but he was one of the most annoying of the skinsuits. Period. Except for Bloodhound when they were making him “learn from his actions”. Sure, he learned-learned that they’d be real pissed when they saw him in the field pushing whatever parties were moving in from the ring.
Except he didn’t do that, this time. Because they were definitely already in one of their little moods, and even though it wasn’t at him this time he didn’t want to risk changing that and dealing with whatever passive-aggressive bullshit they would unleash. So he stayed and bitched in the house on the hill, peeling wood off the walls with his fingers and wandering out the back door periodically in the hope somebody would shoot him.
Please, please somebody shoot him.
He blinked and he was on his hands and knees, staring at the porch. Black oil dripped from the cloth banding along his spine, falling in slug-like piles. He looked up as Bloodhound jumped out and started shooting, Crypto yelling, “Loba, kreber!”
Of course, it was that fucking girl.
He crawled into a corner as Loba and her team, Pathfinder and Wattson, descended. Bloodhound tried to empty a clip into her, but she dodged most of it while Path hooked Crypto and knocked his shields out. Wattson knocked Bloodhound in the back on her way to him, where she caught him in a triangle of fences, giggling. “Hope you weren’t too shocked , Revenant.”
“Fuck off,” he said. One eye was covered in oil, but the other was still clear, staring at Bloodhound and Loba. They were sparring, having apparently run out of ammo. Wait, no, he’d given Bloodhound like 200 light rounds earlier, they were just…fighting to fight?
Yeah, she really was wailing on them-and they were playing defense, blocking her punches with their forearms and ducking from her legs when she swung them. They’d get a good hit or two in, but their little human heart wasn’t in it, while Loba was out for blood.
Of course, that little asshole was right. They hadn't been subtle enough.
He died midway through his sigh, waking up in a utility closet that had been converted into, well, his utility closet. He didn’t exactly have many personal effects that he needed space for, though the Syndicate still made him one of those dumpy dorms everyone else had on the ship. He’d actually started setting the closet as his “deposit after respawn” point because it pissed the Syndicate off.
He stepped out and turned around, glancing at the shelf near the ceiling. There was a bird skull. A beaded strip of leather with a black feather tied off at the end. A tiny black Nessie doll Wattson had put on the floor of his closet Christmas Eve. “She hates you,” Bloodhound had told him, “but I would try to be flattered. Caustic got a lump of actual coal.”
He didn’t know if he was flattered…but he’d kept it.
He came into the common room. Everyone else ignored him, usually. Mirage was always good for a little screech now and then, but the entertainment lasted about as long as cotton candy in the rain. Had he ever had cotton candy? Hm. He had the weird impression there’d been a fair, once, and a girl. But he let that slip away like all the rest.
Bloodhound was near the East exit across from him. As he approached, they nodded their head to the side, an offer to walk. He shook his head. They crossed their arms. Oh, don’t pout, he thought, half waving at them while heading left down the hall, toward the workout rooms. Loba was in the one at the end, standing under one of four stage lights, silently taking it all out on a boxing bag. If there was one thing he missed from when he was a lump of meat in a paper wrapping, it was sweating. It was the burn in the lungs, and the pull of muscles breaking and building and breaking again. He didn’t know when or for how long, but he’d done that a lot, and he’d woken up from dreams between lives thinking about it.
It was one of the things he hated humans for most of all.
“What the fuck do you want, demonio?” She threw a particularly brutal punch at the bag before turning to him. Her hair was out of place. It looked like she’d wiped at her eyes; then again, her makeup did just kind of look like that. “I said what do you want , demonio?”
“Source code, mostly.”
She wailed on the bag again, silent.
God, was he really doing this? Yeah, he was. He walked up to her, she stepped back, always keeping a person's length between them. He couldn’t kill her here, unfortunately. Source code aside, “Friendly Fire” was off on any Apex property since Bloodhound almost decapitated Caustic that one time. Heh. That’s when he’d first thought they might be different. “Why are you mad at Bloodhound?”
She stared, almost seeming caught off guard. “You can’t be serious.”
He stared.
“Oh my God, you’re serious?”
“I may be an undead immortal murder robot,” he said, “but I still can’t read your mind.”
She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead, staring at the ceiling. “I’m mad because the robot that murdered my parents is dating my friend.”
“We’re not dating.”
“Then what the hell are you doing?”
“We’re,” ah, fuck, “I don’t know.”
“Mm. Well they seem to find you interesting enough to hang around,” she said bitterly. “Even with what you did. And you seem to like them enough to tell them things.”
“Things?”
She put her hands on her hips, meeting his eyes. “Something about being human again. You decided you’re going to live forever and torture me then? Shall I throw away that source code?”
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoooa. They were not supposed to tell anyone that-especially not to his only ticket to sweet fuckin’ release. We’re gonna have a fucking talk, hunter…wait, shit, fuck, are we a thing? Fuck, fuckity-fuckin’ ‘ay fuck. He had to file that away, left feeling like he was at the bottom of the ocean on Gaea again, wondering how the hell he was gonna get out of this one. Then the water pressure had been so high he could barely move his legs, and right now that same weight was resting on the cogs in his head. He wasn’t sure which way to go first. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he said.
“I don’t even get it. I don’t. Not them, and especially not you.” Oh no, was she gonna do that little skinbag rant thing? Oh, she was. Ew, she was getting emotional. “I can’t believe they’d-they’d even entertain the idea of you on any level, but I can almost understand it. They’re so sweet…maybe they think they could change you. Though why they’d want to redeem a demonio like you escapes me.”
He almost said ‘they don’t know either’, but kept his mouth shut. She was smarter than most the skinsuits, but he didn’t care about her. She was interesting in bursts, then fizzled out like everyone else. He couldn’t give less of a shit when it came to Loba Andrade outside of what she had for him-except for the fact that she was Bloodhound’s friend. Their only friend. A friend who was mad at them. And, you know, for good reason; even he could see the logic in that. It was probably tearing them up to bits, and they’d probably bottle it up. Pretend. They did like to hide things in that little rabbit-beat heart of theirs, an ironic sound in the ribcage of a hunter that he’d always kind of liked cause it was easy to pick out. But that was irrelevant.
“And you-again, I don’t see it. I don’t get it. What about them makes you so-so…not you.” She furrowed her brow at him. “What about them makes you want to keep living forever?”
He made a face. Or, he would have, if he still had one. “Nothing makes me want to live forever, girlie.” He calculated his words, the risk. The reward. “But if I can go out a little less miserable than usual, I’ll take it.”
As expected, her eyebrows went high, and she stepped back, staring at him. Her words were clipped, “how very human of you.”
“Guess it’s the skinbag left in me,” he replied.
She was quiet for a while. “You never did tell me what you wanted.”
He sighed, knowing she could hear the huff of air flitting around his insides. “Forgive them.”
“No.”
He. Would. Not. Say. Please. “Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No, demonio. And you can’t force me.”
“Can I convince you?” God, he couldn’t believe that just came out of his voice box. But it might be working, cause she was doing that staring thing again. She pulled one hand to her chin, then slowly pointed at him with one of those blood-red nails.
“I will forgive them,” She said, slowly, “if, when the day comes, they’re the one to put the bullet in your stinking, rotting head.”
He could almost feel himself swallow. He knew she could hear it. He’d nearly forgotten how vindictive people could get. How when you weren’t angry all the time you had time to think, and thinking led to hurting someone worse than a bullet or a blade ever could. “That’s the only way?”
“The only way besides never talking to you again.”
He backed off, metal feet scraping against the concrete floor. “Fine. I’ll tell them.”
She only nodded.
He left.
Once you knew where to look, the “oh so mysterious and clever hunter” was easy to find. They camped, always, on one of three hills. Or, when forced to live on Olympus most of the week as they were now, holed up in a tiny, ugly flat in the bad part of town. The kind of place where, on Psamathe, Revenant was not worth even a blink. Somebody nearby probably fucked up was all people would think.
When he climbed through the window, he was met with a wingman to the face. It quickly lowered as he continued through the bars that he could just barely “spider-man” his way through, as they said. “Quit that,” they huffed.
“Doors boring.” He swatted Artur away-gently. He’d punted the little fucker once and Bloodhound hadn’t talked to him for two months. “Loba said she’d-“
“You talked to Loba?” Their eyes widened in surprise. They were blue, bright and clear so that they were nearly white. “But how did you know?”
You guys are obvious and the hacker, fuck him, is observant. “She said she’d forgive you.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“I mean, you have to…” he paused. “You have to be there when I die.”
They blinked, shoulders relaxing. They had a leather apron around their waist and a flint stone in their hand; they’d been carving arrowheads in the back. The thought of how much he knew about them suddenly felt weird, like a weight in his chest, when he thought about what Loba said earlier. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
They brightened, as much as they tried to dampen it. He wasn’t sure if they did that with everyone or just him. “Well I am already prepared for that so…so yes. Of course.”
“Tell her tomorrow.”
“I will.” They softened, smiling up at him. That weird feeling in his chest was hardening, and then dropped like a stone in his long-dead stomach when they said, “thank you, Revenant.”
He grunted.
They chuckled, scraping the flint against their apron. “You wish to watch me carve?”
He nodded, metal feet silent on the carpet as they crossed to Bloodhound’s bedroom. He sat, cross-legged, on the desk while they took to the chair. They settled a chunk of obsidian on their leg, angled it over newspaper scattered on the ground, and chipped it with the flint. They hit it again and again until they broke off a chunk, about palm sized.
That stone sat, heavy, unmoving. They were satisfied. Happy. And he hadn’t lied; they would be there when he died. Because they were going to kill him, yeah, but it’d be fine….
Who was he kidding.
This wasn’t going to end well.
Then again...was it ever going to?