liesdontfindyou | Databurst IC Contact

"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."

CT's assurance has Carolina giving a faint, forced smile, hopefully conveying some gratitude for that even if the words aren't there. It's not like she hasn't told others about the Project, after all, but some things don't need to be shared

And it's easier to follow the shift in conversation anyway, now that the worst of it seems to be over.

"Command definitely should have seen that coming. I don't think I'll ever understand how taking a bunch of soldiers half a step from being court martialed and letting Price at them was a good idea."

Carolina smiles again then, but teasing instead of uncomfortably grateful as she adds, "You were all bound to be trouble at some point."

A mischievous little glint flashes across CT's eyes, corner of her lips pulling into a smirk. It's not an unfamiliar expression on her face, but it's one that is more Connie than CT in a lot of ways. Though there's the slightest edge of danger to it now, it's much more like the cheeky look she used to get when she was being a little shit than the sharper, bitterer thing that it morphed into as CT became more closed off.

"They thought it would buy them loyalty. What they didn't count on is the loyalty of a bunch of troublemakers being harder to keep than they thought," she says, light and full of trouble in itself. "My loyalty's hard won and kept, and they put everything I cared about at risk. That's where they really went wrong, boss."

For a while, she did let it blind her. She tried to turn away, to pretend she didn't see the glaring flaws in the Project. But as soon as she let herself see, that was it; her team (her friends) and humanity's survival came well above any fear of prison time that they'd hoped would keep her in line.

That look on CT's face is endearing, something that speaks both to the attitude that helped her fit in with Carolina's squad and the fact that she's managed to find some peace here. And that's good, that's the least the universe owes CT when Carolina is never going to be able to fix her mistakes.

Carolina's about to respond, point out the fact that the Project was full of people whose loyalty she had to win over because they were every bit as stubborn as she was, when CT's last word registers. Boss, casually tossed onto the end of a sentence, the way she used to hear it when her squad was confirming orders or it just fit the flow of a conversation easier than Carolina did.

Except she's not used to hearing it anymore; Wash had used it less and less the closer they got over the years, Maine never said anything he didn't have to, and if the Reds and Blues ever used it, it was only to sarcastically point out that she wasn't actually the boss of them. CT should have no reason to use it now, after her very valid reasons for leaving, after Carolina dropped her end of the unspoken bargain of loyalty she'd always had with her teammates by letting Tex kill her. If her loyalty really was that hard to keep, CT wouldn't have used it, Carolina's sure.

Or maybe it was a mistake, a slip of the tongue. Carolina tells herself that must be it and takes a deep breath before she tries to figure out just what it was she wanted to say, even if it comes a few seconds too slow.

"I... don't think the Director ever realized he didn't actually know what loyalty was supposed to look like, so that's on him. You were all too stubborn for how he thought it worked."

The delay in her response, that deep breath, isn't entirely lost on CT, but she's got enough tact to not ask or point it out. There's just the slightest raise of a brow, before her expression settles again.

If she knew what Carolina was thinking, CT might have said something—because it wasn't a mistake. Because Carolina is the CO she respects the most, out of all of those she's served under in her time in the military. Because for all her faults, for all the way things went wrong, CT means what she said: she's not angry anymore, and she doesn't blame Carolina anymore than she blames herself.

Carolina's changed. Carolina's apologised. That alone says a lot, in CT's book, and if CT wasn't willing to move on from the past, she wouldn't be sitting here talking to Carolina at all.

But she doesn't know, so all she says is, "The things that made us good at what we did were the same things that made us royal pains in the asses when we wanted to be."

Carolina's grateful that CT doesn't say anything about her reaction, about the fact that no matter how hard she tries to keep her feelings suppressed, she's softened over the years. She's too easy to read, now.

"They sure were," Carolina agrees, at least okay with sounding a little fond there, even if she's looking away again.

"You were all just as capable of pissing me off as you were clearing your objectives and I always liked that, about all of you. Even when I was annoyed."

“We certainly knew how to keep things interesting, didn’t we?” CT giggles—just slightly, but it’s another glimpse at the mischief that once defined Connie in a lot of ways. “I like to think I, at least, learned to read when it was worth it to push my luck a little. Now, the rest of the motley crew on the other hand...”

She shakes her head. In a lot of ways talking about the squad like this is bittersweet, but she’s focusing on the sweet part, not the sharp aftertaste right now. Because it’s good to talk about them in a context that isn’t just all the ways things went wrong, the ways either of them feel like they failed the people they cared about.

Even if they were, herself definitely included, total pains in the ass sometimes.

"It was always worth it to push their luck, as far as some of them were concerned."

Which made sense, that they'd all be just as intense as she was but in different ways. It's one of the reasons they worked so well, even if it was one of the reasons things were always going to end in disaster, too.

"At least Maine was quiet about it," Carolina continues, letting her lips twitch into a fond smile. "Which is a lot more than I can say for the rest of the squad."

"No kidding. I don't think 'quiet' was even in a lot of our vocabularies," CT says, lips quirked in an amused little smile. South and York come to mind, for different reasons. Herself for another, she'd always been outspoken in words and action even before she started acting deliberately inflammatory.

Man, she really does miss them all. At least some of them are here—which is a funny thing to think, when a few months ago she'd been scared of the idea of others turning up. How things have changed.

"We had to have someone who balanced that out a little, clearly."

Databurst IC Contact

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject