liesdontfindyou | Databurst IC Contact

Yeah, I think we probably should. There's a cafe I go to that I don't think has randomly moved somewhere else since I last saw it, I can send you the location if you want to meet there.

That works for me. 30 minutes?

[ because carolina wants to get this over with, if at all possible. ]

30 minutes. Sending you the location.

[ Which she does, it comes attached with the message. After that, she starts getting ready and prepares to make a move to arrive a little bit early. ]

They're both early. All things considered, Carolina isn't surprised, although she would have liked a moment to settle herself before this conversation started. But that's a luxury she neither deserves nor receives.

The years Carolina has spent between that day at Longshore and now haven't been the kindest to her. She's a little more scarred, a lot more perpetually exhausted, silver creeping into the copper of her hair, although the neat, low ponytail she has it pulled back in is as typical now as it was during the Project. Her posture, too, is the same: straight backed, shoulders rigid, always moving as if she has a purpose.

She greets her former teammate with a stiff, uncomfortable nod.

"CT. It's–" Good to see you, she almost says, as if it isn't largely her own damn fault for how many years CT has been dead. Carolina pauses, tries again. "Thank you for meeting me."

CT has, obviously, barely changed at all. Her hair is longer on the long side, enough to be twisted into a messy braid, and there’s a vertical scar peeking out past the neckline of her shirt—it’s impossible to hide entirely, unlike the one on her stomach—but otherwise a few months don’t mean much by way of her appearance.

She’s not surprised to see Carolina’s arrived early, too—she probably should have expected it, even. The discomfort isn’t lost on her, either, but for her part CT greets Carolina with a polite, genuine smile and waves the thanks off.

“You’re the first person from home who I didn’t bump into entirely by chance, the first time.” She slides into a seat. “It’s good to see you here, I know Wash was really missing you.”

CT's greeting is so warm compared to anything Carolina was expecting that it visibly catches her off guard, surprise in her expression before she can force it back to... not neutral, maybe, but wary. Despite Wash's reassurances, she still doesn't understand why CT wouldn't hate her.

At least it's only a moment of being noticeably out of her depth before Carolina recovers, taking a seat across the table from CT.

"Yes, we've gotten pretty used to one another's company." Which is an understatement, of course, but easy enough to say. "He's really appreciated the time he's spent with you, though. I'm glad you could help him settle in a little."

“I was glad to. It’s been nice to spend time with him again, properly; to make up for the way things went back in the Project.”

She can imagine where that surprise comes from, what Carolina might have expected here. If she’d arrived earlier, she may have received exactly the kind of welcome she must have imagined—but it’s been almost four months, now, and though she’s not exactly over what happened, she’s... dealing. She’s on good terms with Texas, even.

“You know I was almost more wary of him turning up here than anyone else, for a while, but that didn’t survive first contact. He walked up to me in the diner and asked if I needed a refill, did he tell you that? That was how he chose to reintroduce himself.”

She’s smiling at the thought and shaking her head—she really isn’t letting him live that down.

It seems less likely by the second that CT outright hates her, which is its own sort of baffling to Carolina, after everything, but she's not complaining. Maybe this isn't going to be so difficult after all, even if now they're pushing back the explanations and apologies Carolina is determined to make before she leaves CT's company today.

But they can wait, when Wash is an infinitely better topic of conversation.

"He didn't tell me that," Carolina admits, a little of the tension draining from her posture, lips twitching into a brief, fond sort of smile.

"I appreciate you sharing, though," she continues, her tone obviously warm. "That's an awful conversation starter after all this time."

CT giggles. “It was the worst opener and I’m delighting in reminding him every chance I get. He came by the diner when I was pulling server duty the other day and I flipped it back on him, so he knows what he’s in for.”

Wash has quickly reclaimed the best friend position in CT’s life and she couldn’t be more relieved by it. There were a lot of bridges she burned back in the Project, and she regretted them all, but things with Wash had stung.

But he’s here, and he’s learned, and he’s still a total dork.

“The only bit of credit he gets is that it confused me so much it cut right through my wariness. But then he didn’t even give me the refill before we ditched the diner, in the end.” She tuts jokingly, amused glint in her eye and the matching smile still on her lips.

"And you're not going to let him live it down," Carolina surmises, although there's clearly no judgement in the statement. It's exactly the sort of thing she would tease him about too, after all.

"He deserves that. Wash saying something dumb has interrupted a lot of tense moments since we crossed paths after Freelancer again and I'm always glad when it does." Or glad eventually, at least, when he's unintentionally made things worse before they could get better. If nothing else, it's a sign he's doing okay, even if not necessarily good.

"I don't know how much he's told you, but he wasn't very much like himself for a few years there, so it's reassuring to hear him sound like he did before... everything."

"Oh absolutely; I think it's my duty as his friend not to let him live it down, honestly."

He has plenty enough on her already if he wanted to retaliate, and she'd take it in stride if he did. It'd be fair.

"He's been filling me in on things slowly—obviously, it's a lot of time to cover." She glances around the cafe and, finding it as empty as it usually is of actual people, continues: "He told me about what Epsilon did to him, about his revenge plan, about the time he spent hunting those sim troopers... and about how they took him in, and the broad strokes of what came after. I think I'm mostly caught up, even if I don't have all the details and he said you'd have even stranger stories to share."

She's still kind of in awe, of a lot of it. At all the crazy things that have happened to Wash and Carolina.

"Which is a very roundabout way back to... yeah, hearing everything that happened makes me glad to see he's still got that dorkiness in him, too." Her expression is both thoughtful and warm. "We've all been changed by our experiences, but for everything that changes, something stays the same."

A lot of time to cover is a massive understatement, but earns a little nod from Carolina as she listens to CT. Knowing Wash's history with Epsilon and the way he was eventually taken in by the Blues are the most important points, as far as she's concerned; the end of the Wash they knew in the Project and the beginning of Wash as he is now.

"And if you're lucky, it's one of the good things that stays the same," Carolina agrees, that faint smile briefly crossing her features again. "Not that there were a lot of good things about Project Freelancer, but—"

She cuts herself off, knowing better than to get into that. Things are going so well with CT right now and that topic could change the tone of the conversation too easily. So Carolina clears her throat, redirects.

"Wash tells stories about the Reds and Blues a lot better than I do, but I was a little further along than he was, before either of us wound up in the place we were before, so I suppose I do have the most recent idiot stories. They're... quite the bunch."

CT doesn't show any sign of being thrown off by the brief dip into talk of the Project, but makes no move to follow that line of conversation, either.

She's sure Carolina has things she wants to say, because everyone has—the thing about being the dead one is that the people who outlived you tend to have amends to make, it's been true of both Tex and Wash so far. She won't begrudge anyone that.

And she has things to say, too; things she needs to be honest about, to avoid... mishaps, like what happened with Church. But the time for that will come.

"That seems to be putting it lightly, from what I've heard," not all of which has been from Wash, admittedly, because Church has his own stories to tell when she's not pissing him off. "You guys sound like you've had a crazy time. I keep telling myself I can't be surprised by anything else I hear and then I hear something else and I'm proved wrong."

"After a while, you start to accept the fact that the most predictable thing about them is that they'll always find trouble you never thought possible, and they'll always find their way back out of it."

Which would have annoyed the hell out of Carolina back during the Project, even still does sometimes, but she's never been that good at keeping affection out of her tone when she's complaining fondly about her teammates. For all the Reds and Blues irritate her, she misses them, and how brief the time she got to spend with them between being practically alone on Chorus and waking up in New Amsterdam just makes it worse.

"And the arguing," she adds after a thought, shaking her head. "I've never heard anyone bicker the way they can, at all hours of the day. But despite that, they've been very good for Wash and I'm grateful for that."

As if they haven't been good for her, too. As if having a team she can trust as much as she wanted to trust the Freelancers hasn't helped her heal. As if the obnoxious family she inherited from Church hasn't made her a little less of a terrible person.

"It sounds like they've been good for both of you."

CT doesn't have to have spent long talking to Carolina to realise she's different. Wash's word had been a good starting point; he cares for Carolina in a way she could feel, when he showed her how the empathy bond works, and she trusts his judgement. But more than that, the woman across from her isn't the same woman from the Project; the way she's talking, the fondness for these simulation troopers...

Carolina's changed, too. Like they've all changed, in one way or another.

"I'm glad you both found them, and found each other. Truly."

"That's— Thank you, CT," Carolina says, a little stilted because that sentiment is absolutely not one she deserves and smooth reactions to overly nice words aren't something she's ever been good at, either.

She does appreciate the thought, though. More than she could ever find words to say.

"I know how fortunate I am to have them, to have Wash after everything I did." Maybe now still isn't the time to lead into the apology she needs to make, but this won't be the first conversation she's screwed up while trying to make something better and it wouldn't be the last, either. Carolina's gaze drops to the table as she continues, "I don't deserve a new team, after the way I let you all down, but I try to remind myself to be grateful anyway."

CT’s voice stays even, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a matter of deserving, Carolina. There’s a lot of things that happened that none of us deserved, but those are the bad things, not the good.”

She presses her lips together, considering her words. These conversations are never exactly easy, but it gets easier to articulate herself, every time.

“When Wash got here, he said something like... he asked if it’d make me feel better about the fact he never listened to me if I knew it came back to bite him, that he suffered for it. And the answer to that was no; I did what I did because I didn’t want any of us to suffer at the hands of the Project more than we already had.”

She failed. She left, she got caught, she got killed. People suffered. People died. Sometimes she wonders if she made things worse, not better.

“You were in... a difficult position, I know that. You made choices that impacted us all, yeah. And like I said to Wash, too, I’m not gonna pretend that if you’d made different choices that things wouldn’t have changed. I’m not in the business of lying anymore. But the past’s the past, and I’m not here to hold anyone ransom to it as if it can be changed, you know?”

A difficult position. That reminds Carolina that if anyone ever connected her to the Director during the Project, it was probably just CT. It's bad enough she'd gotten used to using her last name again in New Amsterdam and wishes she hadn't, but confirmation that out of everyone who knows her here, the only one who doesn't know her name is the AI that answers to the same one isn't something she's ready to face just yet. She can ignore it for a little while longer, if she tries.

"You know, that's not really a popular opinion among people whose lives I helped ruin."

The dry humour there is slightly forced, Carolina genuinely making an attempt at being friendly with CT, but it's not like it's a lie. Ephemera wanted her dead far more than he wanted to live for so long, Temple devoted his life to torturing her teammates because of a training incident that should never have happened.

(She doesn't want to know what Maine would have thought of her if he'd known just how badly Sigma ruined him, not just stories and her shared memories. She doesn't want to know, either, if the version of Wash she left behind in their home universe really does blame her for his injuries, for everything he's suffered because of her.)

Carolina lets something inconsequential catch her eye across the cafe, not actually a threat or all that interesting, but something to look at instead of CT. It's easy to pretend she's just keeping track of their surroundings while she tries to pick out the words for what she wants to say next.

"Regardless of the choices I made, you were a part of my team and I wanted to believe I was protecting you, all of you," she continues, wanting to get this whole thought out now, to get it over with. "It should have been my priority and in the end, I didn't protect you from a damn thing, not the Director or Price's manipulation, certainly not Tex."

Because the last time protecting CT mattered, Carolina wasn't good enough to disarm her so they could just talk. She wasn't smart enough to realize quicker that Tex never intended to let their teammate leave alive and she was the only person with any chance of stopping that.

"And I'm so sorry for that."

"I know," CT says, voice still steady and calm. Carolina's not the first one to apologise to CT and who knows, maybe she won't even be the last, but that doesn't mean CT doesn't listen just as closely as she did those previous times. "I can tell, and I believe you, and I accept that. And— I don't... blame you any more than I blame anyone else, Carolina."

Herself included, but offering up her own guilt here doesn't feel like the right thing to do. It feels unfair, somehow, when Carolina has this weight on her shoulders.

"Before Wash got here I expected to be... so, so angry at him, if I ever saw him again. I tried so hard to get him to listen to me, to hear what I was saying, and at every turn he froze me out. After that, I stopped trying to get any of you to listen. I wrote you all off as people I couldn't turn to and went it alone. That was my choice. Not— not just because you were all unlikely to listen, but because if I worked alone, it was less likely you'd all get hurt."

Ha. Like it mattered, in the end. Two survivors out of a squad of ten, and who knows how many casualties in the lower ranks.

"I made my choice. I put a target on my own back. There's as many things I could have done differently to save myself as there are things you could have done to protect me." Her hand twitches as if to move, but it stays on the table. She picks at the scar across her palm. "I know nothing I say will make you feel less like you should have done more, like you didn't protect me, and this isn't me trying to convince you otherwise. This is just me... telling you how it was, from my perspective. I was angry at all of you, at the end, but I've had time since then. I'm not angry anymore."

CT says she doesn't blame Carolina more than anyone else and Carolina finds herself pressing her lips together to keep from interrupting, from pointing out that she should. She's the one who should have tried to do something about the Director's behaviour before it got as bad as it did, she's the one who ignored too many red flags to count, she's the one who threw off the implantation order not once but twice. She's the one who couldn't get to CT in time to make that mission end the way she wanted it to.

But CT was quiet while Carolina said what she needed to, so she forces herself to return the favour, eventually dragging her eyes away from basically nothing to settle her gaze on her teammate's face. She does appreciate what CT has to say, giving a little nod when she seems finished, acknowledgement that Carolina knows it's her turn to talk again, she just needs to pick something actually useful out of all the emotions she's trying to make sure stay stuffed away.

"I'm sure that wasn't an easy change," she says eventually, hesitance in her tone. There's a fine line between compassionate and patronizing and it seems finer here than usual, when CT isn't her friend but Carolina still cares about her, is still a little proud of how her teammate's obviously processed things in a way that seems closer to healthy than anything Carolina herself ever did.

"Anger is just as hard to let go of as grief, I've learned. Maybe harder. So I really am glad you've had that time here to let it go, CT, for your own sake. You more than deserve some peace of mind."

If the gentle smile on her face is anything to go by, CT takes it as intended, not at patronizing. "Thank you. It's... I've been lucky, I think; I've met good people here, people who've helped."

One person more than others, and CT has this look on her face for a moment—a deep fondness—before she seems to catch herself and rearrange her features into something less sappy.

"It's all day by day, but I'm sure you know that well enough. There's still a lot I'm working through, but it's... well, a lot of it's things like remembering I can trust people. Remembering that I don't need to lie anymore, being... honest."

The hardest part is dealing with her mortality, but she's not going to bring that up now; Carolina clearly holds enough guilt over her death without CT reminding her that she's probably nothing but data.

"Which uh— I should probably be up front about some of what I know. About... you." This isn't pleasant for either of them, she's sure, but the last time she held back about knowing something like this about someone, it blew up in her face. So much yelling from Church... "Who you are."

Edited (missing word) 2021-06-25 00:37 (UTC)

Having people around willing to help with moving on is important, Carolina can agree with a little nod. She never wanted Epsilon snapping at her to let things go, no more than she wanted help from Reds and Blues, or Wash, or any of the people she'd come to trust in New Amsterdam. But she needed them and has no idea where she would have ended up if she hadn't had that company.

CT's expression suggests someone was as important to that process as Wash was to Carolina's own and even though it's not her business, she's glad for that, too.

And that's a much nicer topic than the one CT moves to, although Carolina knows it's important. Knows there's no way for her to avoid it, even if some small, selfish part of her wants to.

"I... figured as much. You knew what Tex was, after all." Carolina looks away again, trying to pull some better acknowledgement than that together. "I really thought that was all long redacted, you know. It wasn't until years after the Project fell apart that I realized any of those files still had my name, which I'm sure the Director hated. Loose ends, sloppy filing, not exactly ideal."

She pauses, presses her lips together for a moment before adding, "Wash knows everything, for the record. You don't have to worry about censoring yourself if some related topic comes up with him."

"For what it's worth, if I had any choice about it, I wouldn't know. I was always nosey, always... poking my nose into people's files when I shouldn't have been. I had to fess up to Wash I knew how he ended up in the Project, too."

She gives a bit of a self-depreciating smile. Look at her, the nosey hacker, reading people's files before she met them; practically a stereotype.

"But that— this, the stuff about you, wasn't that; I mean, I'm not going to lie and say I didn't try to look at your file when I arrived too, but I only actually found out as part of the bigger picture. You know?"

It certainly added context to... everything. Made certain actions by the Director look worse, made her understand some of Carolina's better.

"I just... I didn't want that sitting unsaid. You deserve to know I know, and I'm sorry I found out on terms that weren't yours."

"People don't always get to choose what they learn, I know that," Carolina says, as understanding as she can be. There are plenty of things she wishes she hadn't learned, after all, and plenty of secrets she wishes she could have kept.

"But it's fine, really. I made the... questionable call of using my name instead of an alias when I needed one in the place Wash and I were before this, so I hate the thought of that connection less than I used to."

She'd gotten used to using her name again for the first time since Project Freelancer started, enjoyed listening for 'Church' in reference to herself instead of just making sure Epsilon wasn't ignoring his teammates while he hid out with her. But she'd given it up once and it's even easier to give it up again, especially considering just who else is in this simulation.

"So long as Alpha doesn't learn any of it, it doesn't really matter at this point." Or Carolina is very good at pretending it won't matter, at least. She gives a little shrug, looking across the cafe again. "Besides, if you weren't so good at reading files you shouldn't have, I don't know how much worse the Project might have gotten before Tex talked York into helping her bring it down."

"I can at least make the promise that no one, Alpha or otherwise, is going to hear any of this from me. One of the people I've met here, Coda, I talk to them about the Project sometimes, but... only generally, or about things that affected me directly. This stuff, private things about the rest of you, I keep to myself."

The fake recordings from the Mall still bother her. That this place tried to make it seem as if she'd share such things with someone. That this place remembers these things and can use them at all.

She has to bite her tongue for a second when Carolina talks about how the Project may have gotten worse. Not because she's wrong, but because all CT can think about is how she should have made her move sooner. That it's clear, from what details she's gotten about everything that happened after her death, that not acting sooner let it get pretty damn bad as it is.

But she still doesn't want to unload her own guilt on Carolina. It just doesn't feel fair.

"You know, it sometimes still surprises me how Command didn't catch on sooner," she says instead, putting on a wry little smile. "They brought me into the Project before I could be court-martialed for leaking secure documents on a corrupt UNSC supplier. I really don't know what they thought would happen."

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