Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yujin bitches the entire time he’s taking off his armor. It’s quite the process, and Ajax has never seen it in its entirety. Bandoliers of medical vials, the chestplate, a dozen smaller plates that accumulate in a pile on the edge of the table. Yujin is still talking. “You would think that after this many runs, she would know to hide from the eye scanning the battlefield, but no. Just stands out in the open and I have to babysit her ass like a damn first-timer.”

“She gets restless,” Ajax says, watching Yujin’s hands fly over the buckles and belts of his gear. His own armor is hardly less of an ordeal, but it is a little less ... fussy. It turns out those gloves really do go all the way up to Yujin’s biceps. Ajax wonders what kind of look Yujin would give if asked to keep them on.

“She gets stupid,” Yujin says, starting to work on the gloves. Oh, well. It’s still a pleasure to watch him tug each fingertip loose, one after the other. Ajax tunes out the rant and takes the free strip tease, sweat and all, for what it is: an incidental apology for running late. He tries to ignore the niggling sensation that this conversation is familiar. It’s not his first time hearing Yujin complain about ... well, name your Descendant, really. Name your Colossus. Yujin bitches like he’s being paid by the word. But something wants to snag Ajax’s attention, and he’s not sure why.

Lucky for him, Yujin comes to a natural stopping point once he’s out of his armor and down to sweat-stained, clingy undershirt and leggings. “I’ll take a quick shower, if you don’t mind waiting a little longer.”

The tousled hair, the imprint of cinched buckles, the battlefield sweat and flush of exertion on otherwise porcelain skin. Ajax always feels naked out of his armor, but Yujin’s body, once revealed, is unbearably delicate and already looks debauched. “Skip the shower,” Ajax says, and wonders if he’s imagining the slight flicker of Yujin’s eyes and the twitch at the corner of his mouth. A suppressed smirk, maybe?

“All right,” Yujin says, with convincing nonchalance. He turns toward the table. “I should at least take a minute to stow my gear—”

Ajax puts his hand on Yujin’s wrist. “Leave it,” he says, and uses his grip to tug Yujin in close. Yujin doesn’t resist. His wrist is narrow, and feels warm and fragile in Ajax’s palm, like Ajax could break it by accident. It’s a lie, of course: Ajax has seen Yujin pull himself out of the most impossible of situations, and he could heal a broken wrist besides. But every now and then, at the end of a long day, it’s pleasant to conform to type, to let Ajax loom and let Yujin lean. It brings Yujin down to his height and then an inch under, enough for the illusion to take. Yujin, delicate. Tired of micromanaging the battlefield. Ready to let someone else call the shots.

They fuck on the bed, because Ajax likes the give and Yujin, in his youth, doesn’t care either way. After that lead-up, it’s not drawn out. It’s not that the sex is casual, even if the relationship is. But personal time is at a premium for everyone, and Yujin is riding the tender edge between deliciously tired and just plain exhausted. Ajax hasn’t been there in person, but rumors spread over comms and in the barracks, saying Yujin is vulnerable on the other side of his abrasiveness, and it can come out in tears. That’s not what either of them is looking for tonight. So Ajax gets his hands on the skin he’s been waiting to touch, and Yujin pants into his neck, and Ajax’s mind goes pleasantly fuzzy and blank for a little while. Rough and tumble, no frills.

After, they lie together, cooling down, and Ajax lets himself enjoy the tangle of limbs and Yujin’s breath against his chest. He tries not to think too far beyond that. Yujin is fun, but he’s not Aisha; no one is Aisha, and he’s never made any real effort to hide that. Open comms and close barracks, again: there would be no point. Yujin is starting to stink in earnest, but it’s not unpleasant. “What were you saying about that Colossus? Stunning Beauty?” He’s not sure why he asks, or why it matters. That niggling sensation has returned. Or else he just wants an excuse to linger in Yujin’s bed.

Yujin groans and buries his head against Ajax’s chest. “It’s not even a complicated fight,” he mutters. “It’s the simplest damn thing. Half of the lightning moves so slow that a civilian could see it coming. I can heal the rest, but...” Ajax puts his hand on the back of Yujin’s head and strokes his hair. The words are more muffled now that Yujin’s head is down. “... is that eye. She stands there and takes the hit, and then I have to...”

Ajax listens with half an ear, and that’s fine, because Yujin doesn’t need a full ear or even much of an audience to keep going. He’s young and earnest and, occasionally, bitching is a way to show you care.

Ajax is more familiar with the fight than Yujin. Much more familiar, since he’s usually HQ’s first choice to go into the Void. Not the Void Vessel, and that will rankle for a long time, but for an Intercept, always. He’s long stopped seeing Stunning Beauty in her discrete parts, the pieces to be dismantled. Like the terrain, fragmented, disintegrating, it’s easy to overlook the subtle details. Sometimes, it’s necessary. There is no fixed point to focus on in the Void, no one place where the eye can come to rest.

But he can unearth specifics, with some effort. He pins them to Yujin’s running diatribe, which is beginning to peter out. The eye. The eye in the sky. The fight is usually over long before that, but if it’s not... Ajax partitions the obvious, the actionable—put up a wall to cover a precision shot, easy—and remembers what it looks like. The golden glow of her frenzy. Red flash. The suspended, massive silver orb and the brilliant light of her electric sight.

Stunning Beauty used to be remarkable. Exhilarating, even, although that feels like a long time ago now. The shivering, disjointed way that she pulls herself upright, like a half-strung marionette. The focus in her, once she’s on her feet. Brilliant blue gaze, and then that sensor, all but all-seeing.

Yujin mumbles that he really should shower and does Ajax want a drink? and Ajax must say something to the affirmative because Yujin is walking towards the adjoining bathroom, and Ajax is left alone on the bed. There’s a ringing in his ears that he can’t attribute to the sex or the day’s work. Patrol. Ajax on patrol, and the H.O.U.N.D. team still sniffing around the Void Vessel, checking every corner, and Alpha clear that Ajax isn’t invited to that party. He’s too close to the situation and the best possible candidate for the job at the same time. Well. Fair enough.

He’s listened to every log brought back a dozen times. Drawn his conclusions. Lived the same grief and the same resignation all over again. He would call it closure, although he knows only that he will probably never know for certain. Aisha’s team died there, and what became of her after that defies answer. She’s gone and not; somehow, she found him, but she herself has never returned.

So she’s on his mind. Now, as ever. Ajax closes his eyes and he recalls another set of old, half-buried memories. Aisha’s face, concealed by her helm; Aisha’s face, unmasked and flushed. He searches for the color of her eyes in the dark. Blue, of course, but—blue? Of that brilliant, electric hue?

The Void, and Ajax’s memories of it, are hazy. No fixed points. No certainty of what’s true, or real. His time there took from him, took time, a decade; took his desire to teach; took her, her voice and her face, even as it superimposed her on that amorphous landscape, lifting him out, pulling him free.

They know too little. Even after his time there, the Void seeped and lodged into his armor, rewiring its workings, all he could bring back was impressions and a sense of loss. How does it work? The shadow spaces that H.O.U.N.D. and their would-be recruit report stand just beyond the Void Vessel’s fragmented interior are nothing like the shifting, aggregate, crumbling space of the Intercept missions are nothing like his personal purgatory except that he can feel the connection in his bones. Those shared landscapes—and how do they knit or shape the space between realities? How do the Colossi come to life? How do they remember, if they remember, persisting through death? They never seem to change and yet they grow one to the next, Seneca theorizes a marital bond between some, a mutation between others, and yet each comes, again and again, identical to itself and no more or less deadly, unchanged, to fight the same fights in that impossible space between.

Stunning Beauty. Silver eye, golden glow. She is the same woman, every time.

Ajax can hear Yujin singing to himself, tonelessly, in the shower, and he wonders in staccato succession if Yujin will want another round before Ajax leaves, if Yujin would be amenable to topping since a second erection seems unlikely, or if a nightcap and some more shop talk will see him out the door. Yujin’s tired, after all. And Ajax is, apparently, preoccupied.

He tries it out, under the white noise of the shower. “Aisha?” It’s an exercise in futility, and he knows it, and it still takes him by surprise when he feels his eyes start to sting. He wipes them. It’s ridiculous. His brain is grasping at an interconnection that would make Alpha, Seneca, and the Guide each in turn give him some variation of a delicate look: sympathetic, but with a healthy measure of pity. Information comes in scattershot, or so heavily encrypted that it’s unusable, especially when so many other problems press. There’s no time to waste on hunches and feelings and theories that can’t be tested.

But the blue. He’s not imagining that. The electric, pulsing blue. If Arche can imprint power into human flesh, if the Vulgus can trade and upgrade their capabilities and personality matrices at will, if all of these technologies are branches of a shared Ancestral tree, is it so ridiculous?

And Yujin’s own squad—more gossip through the ranks—were proof positive that human flesh could be a Vulgus breeding ground. What other transformations are possible?

Imagine it is possible. See the logs as what they are, not parallels to Yujin’s squad but predecessors woken from hibernation: Ancestor tech. Learn from the similarities but reject the temptation to generalize. Organic material, mutated? But the Colossi are inorganic entirely. And not consciousness overwritten; consciousness instead like Aisha’s hand reaching him, fixed in that unfixed space. The matrix of her memory, battlefield oversight, watching eye; combat aptitude, Arche; instantiated, printed, again and again—

The shower turns off and Ajax sits, abruptly, unwilling to lose the thread of his thoughts. He’s halfway to the table, still nude, when Yujin comes out. “Ajax? Do you need something?”

“When did Stunning Beauty first appear?” Ajax says, and he knows it’s an inappropriate tone and question and that he should be in his pants at the very least. But he’s not, and Yujin is just standing there, wearing a towel and blinking. “The first warning. When was it?”

“What?”

“Sorry.” Ajax scrubs a hand over his face, scratching his beard. “I need to go.”

“Now?” Yujin looks down, at his towel, and back up. Ajax starts pulling on his clothes. He makes himself pause and take a breath, and he goes to Yujin and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“I had a great time,” he says, and it’s still true, even now. “But I think I’m onto something. I’ll make it up to you, another time. Drinks?”

Yujin looks tired, maybe disappointed, but he nods. “I get it. I hope you find your answers.” Ajax kisses him, and pulls his shirt on.

He’ll start with Seneca, who will be the least rational but also the least likely to see desperation for what it is. He’ll unearth a similar theory, musings on the humanoid Colossi and their use of Arche, something, something like that.

No: the Guide. He’ll go to the Guide, see if his theories can inform her decryption, narrow her scope or perhaps shape the ongoing H.O.U.N.D. expeditions.

It’s a long shot. It’s no shot at all.

But Aisha, his Aisha, with her brilliant blue eyes. If she’s out there, even an imprint of her, he needs to know. Aisha, dancing upward in jerky, staggering motions, a body new, made new each time, machine where she was golden flesh. Aisha, her eyes fixed on the battlefield below. The long flow of cables and crimping as Aisha once wore her ponytail, dark, almost black. So beautiful that HQ named her for her appearance instead of her tactics or the danger she posed.

He came for her. She came for him. She found him. She liberated him and he will spend the rest of his life trying to return that favor. Even if the best he can do is bear witness.

“Me, too,” he tells Yujin.

Bear witness. Wouldn’t that be fitting, under the deadly beacon of her blue eye?

***

The Guide delivers the decryptions directly to his Ecive. Tucked within the privacy of his helmet he reads and rereads them, untangling them, his scholar’s acumen feeling rusty after its long disuse.

“...shedding the organic matter and becoming more advanced...” “transcending one’s existence...” The Guide’s appended note urges caution with her usual grace. Her confidence in the translations is low. The logs are fragmentary. Still, he was right to go to her. No one else has better trusted the Descendants to draw their conclusions and to act responsibly. She understands the price of service.

“...this research is too advanced for our current knowledge and the technology is incomplete...”

It is every instinct half-confirmed, and then buried again under a new layer of uncertainty. “...its range has exceeded expectations ... the self is unstable.” This is what happened to Aisha’s squad; that’s impossible to mistake. But the technology was incomplete. If the Ancestors on that ship were trying to build from their flesh the Colossi, they failed. And yet, Stunning Beauty…

There’s no new evidence to suggest that Aisha took the serum; no indication that, if she had, it would have worked. There’s no evidence she died. Or escaped, or hangs suspended between. There is no evidence at all except his own: her hand, reaching to pull him free. No evidence but his memory of blue and his projected recollections.

He catches Seneca alone, impinging on the end of his shift to minimize the chance of an interruption. Seneca, bless him, doesn’t even attempt to hide his disappointment at seeing Ajax instead of his dinner; so the man does have corporeal needs, after all. Ajax begs a transport code and waves away Seneca’s concern. He promises to be careful, not boasting in his confidence. He could survive this fight with nothing but his armor, and has, a stunt that seems disrespectful, now.

Standing on that shifting terrain, Ajax silences his Ecive, he holsters his weapon, he waits and watches. His shield arcs a translucent barrier above him. Stunning Beauty, as ever, is the same woman. She stutters and she rises. She moves with intelligence but without mind. She rains down familiar ball lighting that does nothing but crackle, harmless, on the shield’s surface. After what feels like an interminable wait, she summons the eye and Ajax stands, fixed, and lets it wash over him. He sees the light, brilliant, blue.

And he knows. And it is no answer. And it doesn’t change anything about this mission, or any of the others. As long as the Colossi threaten Ingris, they must be fought. He aims a handcannon at the iris and he fires, and the eye explodes in a cascade of sparks; the rest he finishes in moments, and this iteration collapses, shatters, and lifts in a sudden gust of wind.

But it is Aisha, he knows it. Aisha, her consciousness in that eye, that sensor, looking out, looking over the battle. And it was Aisha in the paneling of his armor, her hand reaching out and through him, Aisha pulling him free. Aisha, not in the Void but of it; Aisha, Void-stuff. He can't substantiate it with dates or formulae, could not hope to teach it, but he knows it, he recognizes it. He sees her. And he will see her again. In this form, or another.

Ajax triggers his return transport, and steps across the concourse to speak to the Guide, who only looks at him and nods serenely. He heads off to find an adjutant to help him change out of his armor, and contemplates a quiet drink, or maybe a drink and some companionable griping, seated where the open panels of the barracks lounge overlook the distant mountain, just beginning to glow with the gold of the setting sun.