[psl] Tex & Connie Espionage AU

[a_shadow]

Timeline • Tex finds Connie's dog tags in her locker • Scrapyard mission • Connie approaches Wash

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Scrapyard Mission

[liesdontfindyou]

It’s not long before the delayed mission is finally back on the schedule. In the back of the Pelican, Connie finds herself nervous for entirely new reasons. She’s filled with a restless energy that has nowhere to go and as the group’s standard fare of teasing, gossip and unspoken tension rattles around the bay, she can’t help but worry that Texas won’t make it, somehow. That she’ll reach the rendezvous and have to move on alone, throwing her back into the situation she had started in.

She pushes the worry down. Many plans had fallen through, but this wouldn’t be one of them.

When the bay door opens and 479er flicks them out of her bird, Connie reminds herself that if there’s anything she should be nervous about, it’s these unsafe jetpacks failing. Somehow, that thought keeps her focused as she moves off course from the others and heads deeper into the scrap.

[a_shadow]

Tex has deployed in a Pelican, separately from the rest of the troops, as usual. All there is to do is wait for the Director's orders to call her in. She paces the back of the bird for a while, but the longer she waits, the more she's starting to realize that if said orders didn't come soon, she'd miss her rendezvous with Connie.

"Open the hatch," she calls forward to the pilot.

"What? You don't have orders to deploy yet," the pilot says.

Tex stomps forward to the cockpit door. "Open. the. hatch."

"All right, geez," the pilot says, opening it.

Tex launches herself from the back of the Pelican, aiming for the outside of the ship near the rendezvous point. She finds the entrance point and slips inside.

[liesdontfindyou]

The artificial gravity of the scrapped ship still works in places and Connie's grav boots don't have to do much to keep her upright as she paces in the hallway beneath the entrance point, waiting.

Her contact is waiting, too, on what remains of the ship's bridge, but she refuses to go ahead until Texas arrives. So, she paces, until finally she hears movement at the entrance and turns to greet Tex.

Her shoulders slump noticeably in relief when she sees her. "You made it."

[a_shadow]

"Seems like they were too busy on the bridge to think about me," she says with a little half-shrug. Hopefully her little move of deploying herself wouldn't cause her any trouble.

[liesdontfindyou]

"Good," Connie says, nodding slowly. "The fighting should keep them occupied long enough for us to slip in and out."

She reaches into her ammo storage and pulls out a standard project data drive with a sigh.

"My contact is up on the bridge. I just need to hand this over to him and tell him I'm going back. With you there, he hopefully won't argue about it."

Hopefully.

[a_shadow]

Tex nods, then draws to Connie's side as they start making their way to the bridge. Stealth is important in this instance, so Tex doesn't try to make conversation. She wants to know more about what's going on, and how it all came to be, but this isn't the right time to ask.

[liesdontfindyou]

It's... strange, in a way, to be doing this with someone at her side. There's no sense of discomfort, quite the opposite; Connie isn't used to feeling as safe as she does walking through the long-abandoned halls of the ship with Tex beside her. Not after everything.

She can't help but glance at her out of the corner of her eye every now and again, though she does her best to hide it.

She holds up a closed fist when they come up on the bridge's entrance. The doors aren't open and muffled voices can be heard on the other side, but Connie stops before they reach it.

Instead, she gestures at a hole in the roof and signals Texas for a boost up. Over a private channel, she talks in a hushed voice: "I'm going to drop in on them. Can you trigger the door on my cue?"

[a_shadow]

"Roger," Tex says, putting her hands together to boost her. It seems unnecessary, but they're Freelancers. Unnecessary dramatics are what they do.

She stands back and out of the way afterwards, preparing to trigger the door.

[liesdontfindyou]

Another Connie appears in front of her a second later, repeating a short motion of drawing her weapon on the door. Up in the ceiling, Connie prepares to drop in and signals Tex with a sweet and simple flash of an acknowledgement light on her HUD.

The hologram freezes the second the doors are open, gun aimed into the room, until its destroyed by a burst of frantic gunfire.

She doesn't let more than a beat of silence go by before dropping in on the leader and his guards, disarming them with ease.

"Your security is still shoddy," she says, tossing the leader the rifle she'd taken. "We crept up on you easily, someone else could have to."

The leader huffs.

"I hardly think that— wait, we?"

[a_shadow]

"Yes, we," Tex says, stepping out of the shadows.

[liesdontfindyou]

The two guards automatically go for sidearms they're no longer in possession of and the leader raises his newly acquired rifle.

Another hologram appears in front of him, faster than Connie could move, and it makes his aim falter long enough for Connie to wrench it back out of his hands.

"Who is this?" the leader snaps, as Connie steps up to stand between him and Tex herself. Her steps seem a little shakier. "You're bringing other Freelancers here now?"

"Yes, I am," Connie says. She pulls out the data and tosses it over; he barely catches it. "She's an ally. You remember me telling you about Texas?"

"...the AI woman?"

Connie stares at him. "Really? What if she hadn't already known, Jarret?"

[a_shadow]

Tex does know, of course. She knows it more than she knows anything else in life, at this point. So that comment shouldn't bother her.

It does, though.

She steps into the room with Connie and draws up to her side.

"Be careful what you say about other people," she says. "But yes, she showed me. I know."

[liesdontfindyou]

Jarret looks between them, his expression lost under his visor. After a long moment of silence, he settles his gaze on Connie.

"How do you know you can trust her?"

"She came to me. You have to trust me to have made the right judgement call. If she was anything but trustworthy, I'd probably be dead right now," Connie says, frankly.

She's come close enough times lately, so she'd be lying if she said that the possibility of the tags on Tex's locker backfiring hadn't crossed her mind before Tex approached her.

"We're not here to argue with you. I'm here to hand over the data to you and then, once you've checked it, we're leaving."

That piques his interest. "You think you can go back safely after disobeying direct orders and abandoning your squad?"

Connie Approaches Wash

[liesdontfindyou]

Connie doesn't remember the last time she talked to Wash without the buffer of other agents, or without being hyper-aware of the threads of tension that hung between them.

What she told Tex hadn't been a lie; there was a time where she thought she could trust Wash to listen, but it had been a long time since she'd given up on that idea. Letting herself believe it again took a few days, but so did finding an opening to talk to him—the introduction of a new AI always stole everyone's attention and Theta had been no exception.

She finally catches him alone in the locker room, as she comes up from running drills on the training floor.

"Hey, Wash," she says, as she walks to her locker. Second sentences formed and fell apart in her head, so she left it there for now; talking to him at all might come as surprise enough, after all.

When was the last time she'd even said 'hey'?

[hardwearing]

There was a time when Wash would have said Connie was one of his closest friends, but that was before she started asking questions that made him uncomfortable, before he'd lied to command about who'd been making unlisted calls out. Before she'd demanded to be called CT and he felt like they'd drifted, like she didn't want to be around him anymore. So yes, it's a surprise when she greets him. He blinks, turning towards her curiously. Does she want to talk, or is she just being polite?

"Hey, CT," he offers back, grabbing a fresh t-shirt from his locker and pulling it over his head. He might not know her mind, but he's going to make an effort. "Good session?"

[liesdontfindyou]

"Could have been better," she says, beginning to strip out of her armour. "Trying to make back up my numbers, but... it's easier said than done, you know?"

She nods her head towards the leaderboard at the head of the room; her name has been invisible for a while, even before her recent demotion, but it gets the point across.

Facing her locker, she opens her mouth to say more, but closes it again. When did even making small talk with him become so hard?

She knows the answer, of course, but knowing doesn't make it any easier.

[hardwearing]

Wash glances at the leaderboard and the fact that Connie isn't on it... yeah. He wants to offer to train with her like they used to, back when she taught him how to throw a knife and he taught her how to take a hard fall, but doesn't know if that's what she'd want. If she'd find it insulting. He can't read her anymore and that bothers him, not knowing if something he says will set her off.

Things used to be easy between them and he misses that so much.

"You'll get back on there," he settles for, grabbing fresh socks and sitting down on one of the benches to put them on. "The rankings change all the time."

[liesdontfindyou]

All of her armour removed, Connie starts hanging it back in her locker.

"Not as often as they used to. These days, if you go down, getting back up isn't so easy," she says, hoping that the comment won't scare him off.

Glancing back over her shoulder to look at him, just for a second, she adds: "Higher stakes, and all that," just in case.

[hardwearing]

He isn't scared off by that, just considers the facts of the leaderboard, and what the big deal is with it. He's never been all that invested in being The Best, not like Carolina is, not like South, and apparently not like Connie. There's only one perk to being higher up, that he knows of:

"Do you want an AI that badly?"

[liesdontfindyou]

She does, or at least, she does to an extent—just not for the reasons Wash might be thinking. A fragment would be undeniable proof of what the Director was doing, the crimes he was committing, but obtaining one is all but impossible.

Of course, she can't exactly say that outright. Not yet.

"Kinda," she decides on. "Mostly, I just don't want to get demoted so far I'm off the squad. You guys are my team."

It's not a lie. The numbers don't matter to her in any other sense; she knows the board for what it is and there's no connection between the rank and her self-worth.

Though she knows how it sounds from the outside. How a platitude like that may come off as cheap, from a person who has been so distant.

[hardwearing]

"I don't think that'll happen," Wash tells her, though he knows he says as much from the comfort of being visible on the board. He doesn't actually know her rank offhand -- he's stopped watching it, focusing on his training.

What he wants to bring up, though, is kind of... well, he's not sure how to. She's been so distant, so self-isolating, to say that they're still her team.

"You're chatty tonight," he settles on, sounding curious more than anything. "I was starting to think you didn't like me anymore."

[liesdontfindyou]

A lump rises in Connie's throat and she finds herself staring blankly into her locker, meeting the golden eyes of her own helmet, as she strips out of her kevlar on auto-pilot.

How do you response to something like that? He can hardly be blamed for thinking it. She's given him no reason to believe anything else.

"I'm sorry." The apology feels heavy on her tongue and it falls free before she can stop herself. "I've just... had a lot on my mind lately. I know that's no excuse, but... it's the truth."

[hardwearing]

Another hesitation and Wash lowers his voice even though they're alone, because he has to make sure Connie knows he's on her side in.. whatever's going on. Whatever's on her mind, because he has a feeling if shit comes down it'll affect all of them.

"You know I got questioned awhile back, about the calls you've been making. I think yours, anyway. I didn't say anything."

[liesdontfindyou]

Connie startles herself by letting out a relieved laugh. It's a confirmation of exactly what she'd suspected, exactly what she'd been relying on.

She strips out of the kevlar as quickly as she can and pulls on her clothes. Then, she turns to look at him properly for the first time since she walked into the room.

"Thank you, Wash," she says, genuinely. Her voice shakes, a little, as she speaks; by giving thanks, she admits that he's right, too.

[hardwearing]

It's a subtle confirmation on both sides: they're on to her, whatever it is she's up to, which is obviously something if she's thanking him. Wash pulls his sneakers on and closes his locker still sitting, then turns to look at her fully as well.

"Are you okay?"