Work Text:
“I need you, Epsilon.”
“I can do it,” he insists, voice hot with anger.
“No,” Wash tells him. There’s no arguing with that tone. “The only way you can help her is if you come with me. I need you.”
Yes, but how much, he wants to ask, how much do you need me, are you willing to give up everything you are, are you willing to give up your last shred of hoping you could ever be human, are you at your wits’ end, are you that desperate to have me?
He doesn’t ask any of those things.
Instead, he nods tersely, shouldering the capture unit onto his back, and it’s like he never made the mistake of wishing her out of his head in the first place.
--
They’ve been on the run for a week now, and nothing seems to have changed.
The Reds and Blues are still nattering to themselves in the background, but it’s he and Wash that are set apart, shouldering forward, knowing where they’re going but not knowing how to get there. The Meta is still alive. He’s on the hunt. Epsilon knows it deep in his coding – can tell that he’s reaching out, even from so far away, to have him and everything else that’s in his precious algorithms.
He can also sense the emotional wall that Wash is building around the two of them, insulating them into one unit just the way they used to be, trying to protect him from anyone that could do him harm. And somehow, even though Epsilon’s not in the confines of Wash’s head, it’s much more claustrophobic than it ever was before.
--
“I’m not a piece of evidence.”
Everyone else is asleep; it’s just him and Wash on watch. It gives them time to be, separate but together. It’s nice, for once, to be near him and not have that constant prattling of his stream of consciousness, the threatening undertow of his overdeveloped sense of shame.
He can feel Wash stiffening as if he was inside him. “I know that,” he says softly, his tone mitigating the bite underneath his words. “Whatever you were before – whatever you are now – you’re a person. He has no right to demand this from you.”
And neither do you, Epsilon wants to snipe back, but he doesn’t, keeping the bristling feeling caged behind a firewall. “What’s going to happen?” He shouldn’t have to ask. He should know, as intuitive as if it were his own train of thought.
“He’s going to see you. He’s going to see the capture unit. And then I hope to God he lets you live.”
Epsilon is satisfied with the deep regret he can feel in those words. Behind them, the fire is dying, and overhead, the sky is dark enough to show the stars.
--
She’s fitful, restless. She wants out, he can tell. She’s attacking the protocol that are keeping her inside the unit, fighting to get inside his head again.
He doesn’t have the heart to fight back.
Wash does, though. “Give it to me,” he asks when Epsilon starts lagging behind the rest of the group.
“Go to hell,” he tells him, hand reaching for his back to make sure the two of them are still connected, somehow, some way.
He can’t see behind the visor, but he knows the way Wash’s face is twisting. For a moment, he resents her. For the rest of the day, he mulls that over, tasting the feeling again and again, wondering where it came from.
The whole reason she’s in the unit in the first place is because of him. Because he couldn’t get her out of his head. Because he couldn’t handle her running rampant in his thoughts. Because she was too strong for him. Because deep down, in the parts that remain that are not his alone, he loves her. Because no matter what she had tried to do to avoid this fate, he had let her fail. And now he has to pay the price.
He wants her out of his head forever. He wants to be able to forget. But he’s forced to remember her, bear her as a burden literally heavy on his shoulders, knowing that he’s the only one she will accept. She’d kill the others. And one day, she will be the death of him.
--
“You’re not the same.”
“Yeah, well, neither are you.” It comes out without him bidding it to. He thought that he had more self-control than this – that he could finally mediate the things he tells Wash, put them through a filter and never let him know how much he hurts.
“I can’t read your mind,” Wash admits, tearing off his helmet and taking a deep gasp when skin meets air. “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
Epsilon hears the unsaid longing. “Frustrating, isn’t it?” he goads his partner.
“I wish –” Wash cuts it off so violently that he bites his own lip. Epsilon knows him too well. He will never say anything he regrets, and so he prefers not to say anything at all. But to his surprise, he continues. “You got so deep inside my head that I don’t know how you ever got yourself back out. But no matter what, I can’t get inside you. I can’t crawl in your skin and see in your mind and know what you’re feeling.”
“You’ve never been able to,” Epsilon points out. The empathy resonates with him so hard that he can’t find it in him to be sarcastic or hurtful. “And you never will.”
“You could open up to me,” he says bitterly. “You could let me in. You could tell me everything.”
“Bitter won’t win me back,” he tells him.
Wash just looks at him with those piercing eyes, mouth open in surprise. “How do you remember that?”
He doesn’t know, so he doesn’t say.
--
It’s like he’s being pulled in two.
He can’t get her off his back – literally. She’s always there, even now that she’s separate from him, always in the back of his mind. He feels a certain perverse sense of obligation towards her. It’s his fault. He should see it through. They’re derivatives of derivatives, and even though the relationship might have diluted through all the permutations, they still remember. They still remember Leonard and Allison, they still remember Church and Tex, and it muddles with everything that they know about themselves.
And Wash is always in his face. Wash has always been demanding – physically, mentally, emotionally. Before he remembered, before he knew what he was, it was Wash whose mind had held him. He can’t betray that trust. The relationship feels strange, but it never felt normal to begin with. And as much as he’s obligated to her, he’s also obligated to Wash for the times he’s hurt him, for the words and thoughts that tore the two of them apart. And he can tell Wash is sorry, that he wants to rebuild what they had, that he wants to soothe and mend and try again, fresh and whole, but Epsilon doesn’t know if he can do that. Not now. Not with what’s happened.
They’re binary stars, dancing around each other, and Epsilon is caught in the middle, swirling around the edges of their gravitational pull, first on one side, then on the other, not knowing which one is stronger. And if he doesn’t get out now, as the dance brings the two of them closer together and shining hotter, he knows he’s going to burn.
--
“Take off your helmet.”
Wash has his own helmet off, staring at the reflection of his face in the visor. It’s a sign to Epsilon: he’s leaving his head vulnerable. He wants him to come back. He won’t – not now. “Why?”
“I want to see,” Wash says, and Epsilon knows he’s angry that he was questioned.
“I don’t know what’s under here,” he admits. Sometimes he feels nearly human. Other times, it feels so foreign to him that he wonders what he’s doing in this shell. Most of the time, he misses his laser face. He likes glaring. It would be nice if those glares could kill like they used to. Wash would be dead thousands of times over by now.
“Take it off or I’ll take it off myself.” There’s a note of hysteria in Wash’s voice, and he drops his own helmet, his hands shaking badly.
He doesn’t say anything, but his hands come up slowly, feeling for the catches in the armor. He’s not sure what to expect as he pulls it away – will his entire head go with it? – and so he’s surprised at the cool, light sensation when the helmet is finally gone. The wind ghosts over his skin, and his eyes water. His tongue darts out to lick his lips, and he can taste salt.
He brings a gloved hand up. Every contour is the same, and he knows that this is as human as he’s ever going to be, synthetic skin stretched over a humanoid frame underneath a suit of armor. This is what they’d call a residual self-image, the thoughts he has of his own appearance that nothing can erase. He knows this face, though he’s never seen it before. And he can tell that Wash knows it too – he’s been staring.
“Stay still,” Wash tells him, and he obeys. Every bit of him is tense, the anticipation fizzing in him, and Wash is coming closer, pulling off a glove. His eyes close. Wash’s bare hand strokes the side of his face, and it’s all he can do not to lean into the touch. And then Wash’s lips are warm on his, nose mashed against his face, and he can almost taste the desperation behind the sweetness.
He doesn’t quite return the kiss, but Wash holds there, and time suspends, just for a moment. Another short, chaste kiss, and Wash pulls away, sighing hard, staying close, foreheads pressed together. He can tell that Wash wants more, wants but won’t take, exercising that strange conscience that he has and testing his own patience. It’s strange to feel that intensity from the outside instead of the inside, so far away but only separated by skin.
Wash doesn’t say anything as he pulls his glove back on and puts his helmet back into place. He can’t think of anything to say to Wash, either, but he wishes he could – all the words on his lips stolen away before he could speak them.
He doesn’t realize until later that for once, she was quiet and still.
--
It’s almost like the way it used to be.
They’re on watch again. The fire died long ago. The only things over their heads are stars. Clouds are rolling in from the south, along with a cold breeze. They were supposed to be there weeks ago, but they’ve been dawdling. Wash won’t say why – when he’s pressed, he says he doesn’t want the Meta to find their trail – but Epsilon knows. Their faces are bare to the weather, the wind blowing their hair back; their hands are bare, doodling in the dust. There’s a certain tension in the air, but nothing that they haven’t felt before.
The only difference is that Epsilon has his own body now, and he refuses to share with Wash.
Oh, he could always leave, let the shell fall away and cross over into Wash’s mind, but what would happen to her? He could always get to Command himself, not let the others be under risk of an attack by the Meta, but she never shuts up unless he’s around Wash.
He’s beginning to understand, and when he leans over to finally return Wash’s kiss, neither of them are surprised.
--
“I never wanted it to be like this.”
They’re so far ahead of the rest that their voices wouldn’t carry, even if they wanted them to. Epsilon can tell that Wash is stalling for time, not wanting to get closer to Command, and he’s beginning to wonder if Wash is ever going to spit it out or if he’s going to have to crawl inside his head to figure it out.
When he doesn’t talk, Wash just continues. “I wanted to win. I wanted to save them all. But I had to make a choice, and it seemed so obvious. I chose you.”
“Don’t tell me you regret it,” he scoffs.
“I never could,” Wash admits. “I’d blow up the whole goddamn world if it meant I could save you.” The wording twitches up against one of the memories that he knows aren’t his, and ordinarily he’d follow it, but he pushes it aside to listen. “I just didn’t expect I would survive.”
He wants to say something, but there’s nothing to say to that. Wash is a dead man walking, with no purpose besides retribution and no sense of self-preservation to guide him. Once he lets go of Epsilon, he has no reason to live.
He nods to show that he’s understood, and everything starts falling into place.
--
They can see Command by now, buildings sprawling over the horizon, and all of it suddenly becomes very, very real.
Their last night in the wild starts quiet and brooding. There’s a full moon, with enough light that they don’t need a watch fire, and it turns everything into shades of gray, stark black and white. Things are never that easy, and they both know that, but it’s nice to pretend, for a night at least, that there’s nothing else to color their lives.
Wash doesn’t seem to want to talk. He’s worrying his lip, moon at his back, staring at his shadow. He has the look of a man waiting to die. Epsilon knows his own expression is mirrored there, and he’s picked up the same bad habit. Their fates are no longer their own, if they ever had been in the first place. The tension is still there, crackling electricity under Epsilon’s synthetic skin, and there’s a smell of desperation on the air.
“You really think he’s going to just let us go,” Epsilon muses. It’s not a question.
“The Chairman hates him as much as I do,” and there’s a certain venom in that pronoun.
“Well, then, we’re screwed, because I’m whatever’s left of him,” he says drily.
Wash gnaws at his lip again. “You have to know someone before you can hate them.”
“Yeah, same to you, buddy.” He wishes he could huff out a laugh, but without lungs, it just won’t come out like he wants it to.
“Really know them,” Wash continues, like he hasn’t said anything at all. “You don’t hate a person because someone told you to. You have to learn to despise people on a personal level.” He sighs. “You have to get in their heads, sympathize with them. You have to love them first.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I always hated you,” Wash says, his tone somewhere between resentful and regretful. “I always hated you the most.”
“Oh, shut up with your bullshit.” If he didn’t hate him enough before, he certainly does now – but now he’s questioning what that means, and he doesn’t want questions, he wants answers.
Wash certainly shuts up, but it’s because his mouth is now otherwise occupied. His tongue is soft in Epsilon’s mouth; he tastes like despair and futility. And then there are hot, frenzied fingers pushing down the collar of the black undersuit, and Epsilon can feel a tongue swiping along that synthetic skin, and he’s starting to wonder just how human he really is, because there’s a pressure building in his gut, a slow sizzle starting between his legs, a flash of lightning along his back.
He knows Wash’s body from the inside out, so it’s different seeing it from the outside in – or not seeing, as the case is now, hands fumbling blindly at Wash’s armor as his teeth worry Wash’s lip. Wash bites back, hard, and matches him move for move. Their armor is shucked away, piece by piece, shoulder and arm and hand plates littered in the dust, and it’s not going fast enough, can’t be fast enough. Wash rips away his chest plate, and he swears he can feel his own heartbeat for a brief second before Wash’s body is on top of his, codpiece pressing into the divot between hip and thigh plating, thigh coming up between his legs to nudge against something too deep for words.
“You don’t,” Wash is gasping into his neck, breathing harder now that his own chest plate has fallen by the wayside, “you don’t know how long I’ve – I’ve waited, how much I’ve wanted…”
“I do,” Epsilon insists, flipping the catch of a thigh plate and following the taut line of muscle down to his knee, his calf, his feet, each laid bare to the undersuit beneath in their turn. “I know, Wash, I know, I know better than anyone…”
“How,” he pants out, groping at both of Epsilon’s thigh plates at once, hands working in tandem to strip him, “how could you know that I wanted you like this…”
“So obvious,” Epsilon mocks him, laughing as he reveals what’s been hiding underneath Wash’s codpiece all this time, “every time you had your hand on your dick I could tell who it was you were thinking about…”
“It was you,” he whispers into his ear, voice ragged, torn by lust. He peels away Epsilon’s hip plating, and the smile at what he sees is malicious and infectious. “It was always you.”
They’re too busy for words as they wrestle with the black bodysuits, and the more that’s revealed of his body, the more Epsilon’s beginning to suspect that this wasn’t an ordinary shell. Everything about it is a little too realistic – there’s goosebumps on his forearms, the little hairs on the back of his neck are standing on end, and he knows exactly what it is that’s trying to tent the black fabric stretched taut over his crotch. He revels in the sensation as Wash’s hands push his bodysuit past the curve of his ass, presses back into the grope, delights in the feel of Wash’s cock under his bare fingers. The angle is wrong, not what he’s used to, flipped in the other direction, not seeing it through Wash’s eyes, but when his hand closes and he feels the groan ripple through Wash’s whole body, he knows this is right.
Wash’s hands are slow, unsure, learning, memorizing, and as they kick the bodysuits away, it’s suddenly obvious how very naked they are, bodies silver in the moonlight like two gods of living marble. This nakedness, though, is nothing compared to the unbidden thoughts laid bare, the rawness of shared synapses, the shame of having no secrets. It is devastatingly quiet in Epsilon’s mind when Wash’s body settles back on top of his, reaching out for one of his hands and threading their fingers together. And even when Wash presses into him, they’re not close enough, skin separating them from ever being truly one.
“This is what I wanted,” Wash is saying as he settles himself, and Epsilon can feel the shudder of pleasure rippling up Wash’s spine like it’s his own. “I wanted to crawl inside your skin and see you from the outside, I just wanted you to let me in…”
“You’ve – ah!” The words are knocked out of him when Wash begins to move, and he gives himself over to the feeling, luxuriating in his own body, in these new feelings inside and out. “You’ve never been out,” he tells him, “I couldn’t forget you, I tried, but I couldn’t…”
“Why, why would you – mmm – why would you want to forget,” Wash grunts out, organic skin slapping hard against synthetic as he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts.
He has an answer: it’s all too much. He remembers everything, remembers back to the round chassis and the storage unit and the suicide, the time with Wash when all his memories were falling apart, the lives before that when he was Alpha and when he was Leonard and when he was someone else entirely, and all of it is racing before him so fast, his strange synthetic body reacting so powerfully to everything that he can’t help sighing out “faster, Wash, you wanna be here all night?”
“Oh, fuck you,” is the murmur he gets in return, breath hot against his neck as teeth try to rip into his not-skin.
“That’s what you’re trying to do?” Epsilon teases, clawing at Wash’s side with his nails, so sharp and quick that he knows he’s drawn blood. “I can – aah – I can hardly tell, fuck me harder, Wash, come on…”
Wash obliges, his rhythm changing from merely possessive to positively savage, a growl building deep in his throat. His calloused palm runs along the underside of Epsilon’s cock, fingers gripping hard, and when a rough-padded thumb brushes over his slit Epsilon screams from sensory overload. It’s not long before Wash pushes him to the edge, and just when a cloud sweeps over the moon, that’s when he’s pushed over, all the heat that had pooled at the base of his spine spilling out over Wash’s hand, his body nothing but a mess of tangled, overloaded circuits crawling with electricity.
He hardly cares when Wash groans into his shoulder and stills inside him, and he’s still too absorbed in his own feelings to notice when he pulls away, his lean body limp from exertion. He’s teasing out the boundary between human and machine, trying to tell what’s below that synthetic skin, and his imitation synapses are just barely starting to fizzle back to normal when Wash tosses him his bodysuit. It lands on his stomach with a wet smack, but Epsilon can’t tell what kind of liquid it’s landed in, and he doesn’t particularly want to find out.
It’s darker now, not even the stars to light the night, and so there shouldn’t be any shame in being naked, but Wash already has his bodysuit on to the waist, sitting pensively and looking at the horizon. Epsilon joins him after a moment of pulling himself together. He’s just about to ask what Wash is thinking when Wash volunteers it. “We could both be going to prison.”
“Like hell,” he says. “You hand me over, he lets me live, we ride off into the sunset riding tandem on a Mongoose, and we live happily ever after.”
He can’t see Wash’s smile through the dark, but he knows it’s there; he always did appreciate sarcasm. “More like I hand you over, he puts you behind a protocol, and I rot in jail.”
“Oh, fuck that,” Epsilon spits. “We’ll put up a fight.”
Wash is morose again, posture making him look smaller than he really is, just one man against the darkness of the sky. “Even counting the Reds and the Blues – which you shouldn’t – we’d be outnumbered thirty to one. Unless – ”
He knows what Wash is about to ask him to do. “No. She’d get us all killed.” Once he would have jumped at the chance, but no matter what happens, he’s longing to leave her behind. It’s much quieter without her on his back, silent as the grave when he’s with Wash, and he doesn’t want to wake her wrath.
Wash sighs, and Epsilon is so close that the gust ruffles his hair. “You really do have a death wish, don’t you?”
He shrugs. “I already committed suicide once.”
Wash tenses up next to him. Then, just as abruptly, he begins to laugh. In the darkness, it’s as broken and hysterical as a sob.
--
The Chairman looks bored, and that isn’t a good sign.
“Agent Washington,” he’s saying in that pompous tone, “did you think that I would simply let you go in exchange for this – this…” He gestures to Epsilon’s body.
Wash is getting irritated. Every word of his is coming from behind gritted teeth. “I told you that he was with the Blues, and he was. Look, scan him if you want, I can promise you that he’s the genuine article.”
“Genuine article he may be,” the Chairman drawls, “but I only agreed that I would clear your slate. Unfortunately, I do not have the ability to mitigate your sentence.” He uses a finger to beckon. “Come here, Epsilon, I would see you closer.”
“You said you would get me out of here.” He can feel the rage boiling under Wash’s surface, brewing inside his helmet.
“And I did,” the Chairman points out, his voice innocuous. “You were given leave to pursue Epsilon and bring him back to me. I see that you have succeeded. And now you must serve the rest of your sentence. Epsilon, come here.”
Epsilon doesn’t move. He can tell Wash is trembling with rage. All that comes out from that helmet, though, is a quiet, pained “No.” His gun comes up, and he aims for the Chairman’s head.
“Agent Washington!” At last, some sign of emotion from the Chairman. “Stand down.”
“I brought down the Director, delivered him to your doorstep, and you’re sending me back to prison?” Wash grits out. “I’m not going.”
“I repeat, stand down!” There’s the sound of at least twenty cartridges being slammed into guns, and then a gentle click as they’re all leveled at the two of them.
“I will not stand for this!” It’s the first time Epsilon’s ever heard him raise his voice, and the rage it contains is frightening.
“For the last time, Agent Washington, stand down!”
The room is filled with an edgy silence, the feeling of bated breath. Wash turns his head to stare at Epsilon, and Epsilon answers him with a shrug. “You just had to do it, didn’t you?”
“Epsilon, to me!” the Chairman booms.
He doesn’t move forward – or at least, his body doesn’t. It takes nothing to leave that shell, let it crumple onto the floor, and entering Wash’s head again feels like he’s come home.
--
Neither of them can remember how they got here.
Wash is slumped against a wall, his breathing wet and labored. Epsilon is projecting himself from his shoulder, casting a bright blue light over his armor, his form bent in two. He can barely stand upright. He can’t pull himself together – not when Wash is in this much pain.
Somewhere in the fray, Wash took two bullets to the chest. Another is lodged in his thigh. He’s bleeding, the smell of it thick in the air, clogging the intake vents of his helmet. There’s dead bodies all around them, and the fighting has moved on to other rooms, but the two of them are still here, breathing, denying the inevitable.
Epsilon can sense it, now that he’s in Wash’s head. Wash knew it was suicide, and he did it anyhow. And it was all for him – for both of them, together, like they ought to have been all along. “They can’t take you,” Wash burbles out. Epsilon can feel the bubble of blood that bursts at the corner of his mouth.
“I won’t let them,” Epsilon reassures him.
Wash laughs; the sound is thick, and it dissolves into coughs. “You can’t stay here,” he tells him.
“Yeah, and where else would I go? He already has Tex,” Epsilon points out. The unsaid thought – that he doesn’t want anyone else to carry him like Wash has – resonates inside their shared mind.
“If you’re still in here,” and he coughs again, blood spraying on the inside of his visor, “you know what the armor protocol will do to you.”
“I know,” he confirmed. He didn’t move.
“You can’t stay in here!” Wash is furious. He wants at least one of them to survive this.
“I’ve already died once.”
“And that was – ” he can’t catch his breath, his speech is getting weaker, “- that was my fault too, you don’t – ” a sick wheeze, full of fluid, “- don’t have to die again…”
“The last time, I died to leave you.” He turns up the brightness as far as he can, but he’s fading. “This time, I’m dying to stay.”
“What about her?” Wash’s last word comes out as a wheeze. It won’t be long now.
“I don’t need her.” I need you.
The clouds crawl over them, and the moon never comes out again.