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I mean he remembered who he was. And who he was just - he had all your memories. So he's you, before you were...before you forgot who you were.

[Wash suspects, though he wouldn't want to test this theory directly, that having a knife slowly inserted in between his third and fourth lumbar vertebrae would be marginally less painful than the effort of trying to maintain this conversation and look at Church and not succumb to the urge to bolt.]

You mean... [Isn't it amazing how a robot voice can simulate the sound of the tension of grit teeth?] It thinks it's Alpha. It--

[Everything feels like it's tilted sideways for a very sudden and sharp moment. Epsilon was the memory, it's how Wash knew, you knew all along, because the Alpha stripped its own memories of torture and torment and insanity to stay sane. Just plucked it out and tossed it aside. Memory is the key.

Ami is very concerned, but Church manages to get out from under her, scrambling to his feet. No, not scrambling. That sounds bad. Very calmly and gently rising to his feet. Sounds better. Less true, sounds better. Still, there is a tigerlily leaning heavily against his legs. He barely registers it.]

Caboose turned on the fucking tin can that thinks it's Alpha and, what, it started screaming bloody murder and self-destructed? After everything you said went on in your mess of a head--that's what happened, right?

He doesn't think he's Alpha. He just...has all your memories.

[There's a palpable spike in the tension in the room, and poor Ami is rubbing disconsolately up against Church's legs as if she can tell that he's in distress and is struggling to divert that in some sense. It doesn't look to be doing much good.]

[The armor lends Church the illusion of bulk and height that, when Wash is out of armor, instinctively locks up his shoulders and tenses his back and he'd force himself to relax if he could, but he can't.]

He woke up slower that time. He had Caboose to...walk him through it, maybe. I don't know. I wasn't there for that. I just remember that the first time I saw him since he tried to kill us both, he was implanted in this...floating alien artifact and he tried to incinerate me with a laser eye on the spot.

That's about the only thing you just said that I can actually believe. Caboose can't walk himself out of a paper bag; he can't just walk a bunch of fucked up memories in an alien can into doing anything.

Asshole probably tried to kill you because it remembered what it did in your head!

I was trying to detain him at the time, so he wasn't exactly wrong to.

[There's the other bit. The bit where Wash lived, and everything that came after.]

Look. After your buddies failed to do literally the one thing I told them to do, I took the fall for it. I waited in a UNSC cell for them to turn Epsilon in so that all of this - you, the Meta, everything - would be worth the risk.

But they didn't.

That's what we get for trusting those morons to do anything important!

[Morons he had missed being alone for fourteen months. Morons he missed even now in some fucked up way.]

[For a second, he's tempted to leave it like that. Just...let it burn off, impotent rage directed at a bunch of idiots who aren't here to feel bad about it, who aren't here to deal with the fallout of it.]

[But he doesn't. Of course he doesn't.]

Well, they woke him up. And he got a body. Like that would...replace what they'd lost.

[What Wash had taken from them.]

...

[One could imagine, perhaps, if they so wanted, Church's mouth silently repeating the word, or perhaps just opening and closing several times. His fingers feel both stiff and twitchy. How's that possible? Like he wants to curl and uncurl them but they also don't want to move.]

...Re- [It starts small and quiet and uncertain. And fuck that. Replace that, start again. Grumpier. Put some grump into it.] We didn't have any other bodies, that was a thing. [Okay. That sounds better.] Did they build another stupid robot body? I told Sarge I wanted a replacement when this thing eventually went up in smoke or actually exploded, but nooooo, 'we don't have any more robots'.

[See? See how much better this conversation is when he pushes the idea of replace aside to bitch about something inconsequential? It's much better. He knows to be angry about it but--but he's not sure where to start. Stall. Stalling.]

They raided some from Freelancer's supply. And that's when -

[This conversation, nominally, should be easier when one half of the parties involved are incapable of physically emoting. He's just staring at a band of golden visor, watching the mental gymnastics in real time through the subtle shifts and tilts and body language alone, and, nope, it's still just as miserable and painful as it would be if Church had a demonstrably human-looking face.]

[Wash forces himself to stare at him. Not to shut his eyes. Grind out what comes next.]

That's when he managed to...separate. Again.

Great. Did a fragment start fragmenting? Pulled himself the fuck apart? Super.

[Burn them all to the ground. Burn himself to the ground. Keep ripping and ripping and ripping out and pulling at himself until there's nothing left--it's the state of Churches, even if none of them seem to realize it. Self-destruction.]

Church. The first...part of you to break away?

[The words are heavy and iron, but he forces them out regardless. Lets them ache at the roof of his mouth. He doesn't remember, and this hedging and stepping around, that's not going to work. Can't be a cryptic motherfucker this time, Agent. Not for this conversation.]

That was Tex.

Fuck you.

[The words come out before he even thinks about them. Because it's not bullshit. Because he knows. He knows. She's like me. Church forces out a nice long sigh, almost like a hiss of air between teeth. His shoulders set, his arms cross.]

What about her?

[Don't address it, don't let it hit home. Just breathe and keep going because you owe him this, this is what you owe him so you'd better fucking explain before you lose your nerve. What's left of it, anyway.]

She was pissed to be back, I'll tell you that. Kicked my ass, and the Meta's, not to mention all your friends for being around when she woke up.

[Wash is being incredibly light on the details, and it rankles him.] Back how? She just popped into existence and took over a body? She would kick all of your asses; that's what Tex does.

[THERE'S A LOT OF GROUND TO COVER HERE CHURCH, OKAY.]

You don't remember it, but that's how it happened in Freelancer, too. She was just...there one day. We thought she was someone the Director brought on, but she was split from you and I don't think either of you remembered that.

Of course I don't remember it.

[Ami lets out a sound that demands attention, and for a brief moment, he looks down at the cat. Right. Breathe. Continue.]

Jesus. Okay. So. So Tex just spontaneously formed out of Epsilon. And rightfully kicked ass. Go on.

[For a second Wash startles, glances down at the tigerlily who seems to realize that something's going wrong but can't quite parse what, fully. She knows enough to want to help.]

[It's just not something she can really help with.]

I had one last shot to get out of the whole mess. The UNSC would give me an out if I could retrieve Epsilon. So they paired me with the Meta, and we...well, we didn't get Epsilon.

[He braces himself.]

We got Tex.

You teamed up with the Meta? The Meta that we were, like you and me, supposed to kill. Giant hulking white walking motherfucking one-man apocalypse with a head on fire. And you teamed up with whatever could possibly have been left of him and caught my girlfriend like Ghostbusters.

Yeah. I did.

[The back of his throat tastes like gasoline. He doesn't reach too far back into how that felt - that knotted-up dread and disgust and exhaustion and the weight of his own apathy, and how little he cared about anything, the ghost of an old teammate that no longer lived in the shell the Meta left behind.]

That was my out. My last shot. So I took it.

[The words vibrate with something - disgust or dismay or regret. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what he did, or how he feels about it. That won't change any of what happened.]

The Meta caught her. Tex. Trapped her in a memory unit. And Epsilon, he didn't feel much like taking chances with me, so he went after her.

Your buddies showed up to drop the Meta off the side of a cliff not long after.

I should fucking hope he didn't, you were trying to shove him in a thermos or whatever. I'm going to pretend to know what a memory unit is. It's a thermos, right? It's like the thing you use to trap ghosts in. So...guess you got 'em both, huh.

It's what...you saw it, Church. It's what Epsilon was kept in, when I showed him to you.

[He's not sure when he made that shift - thinking of Epsilon as him. But it must've happened not long after Carolina took all that time to retrieve him. Or maybe after he met him, face to face, for the first time since he ignited Wash's nervous system in a symphony of electromagnetism and acid.]

Okay. Tin can. So he, it, whatever, went back in his tin can to be with Tex. Man, the Meta must've been really fucked up for those assholes to get the drop on him.

...yeah.

[The Meta was. Not Maine anymore, he knows. Not at that point.]

So that's when - well, my chance at getting out of everything was shot, at that point. No way I could bring back a sealed memory unit and expect the UNSC to believe that Epsilon was really inside it. I was fucked up, the memory unit was fucked up, and your team decided to...take me in, at that point.

[Church Replacement #2.]

Wait, you had Epsilon, the thing they wanted, the thing they wanted when we did our stupid plan, and Tex, and that wasn't good enough?

I didn't. Not really. I had a locked up memory unit that the UNSC put in storage because they didn't think anything important was inside it, and there was no way to get it open again.

[Your fault. Rigged it so it was one-way.]

If someone gave you a locked box and said that something really valuable was inside it, they promised, but you couldn't open it up to be sure of it, would you believe them?

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