Chapter Text
It’s the longest plane ride of Wash’s life.
Well, no it isn’t, not really, but it sure as hell feels like it. Somewhere within the first hour back, after Tucker and Caboose had both drifted off, after Carolina stopped pacing, after Epsilon had stopped glaring at him from across the Pelican, after the Reds’ bantering had dulled to comforting background noise, the adrenaline dump had hit, and hit hard. Wash had settled back against the wall, intending to—well, not sleep, but at least get his frazzled nerves under control, when he’d glanced for the millionth time at where Caboose and Tucker were leaning against each other and noticed that Caboose wasn’t breathing.
Wash had lunged forward to check his pulse so quickly that he’d startled them both awake: Caboose, who frowned at him sleepily, and Tucker, who gasped and put his good arm up in front of his face in a reflexive way that made Wash feel proud and furious and awful all at once.
He can’t relax after that, not even after they both fall asleep again. Instead, he inches closer to Tucker and Caboose and carefully pulls Tucker against his own shoulder to take the weight off Caboose. Caboose is still close enough to touch and that’s vital because it means Wash can make sure he’s still breathing, which he does, often.
“Jesus Christ,” Epsilon finally snaps, after the fifth time Wash reaches across Tucker to press his fingers to Caboose’s wrist. “You’re gonna wake them both up—again—if you keep doing that shit. Will you fucking relax already?”
“Don’t start,” Grif groans when Wash opens his mouth to reply furiously, so he doesn’t start, but only because Tucker has started to twitch and mutter against his shoulder.
Wash hesitates, unsure of if he should wake Tucker up or not, but then Tucker’s mumble turns into a desperate gasp and Wash panics and sort of pats at his leg until Tucker jerks awake and grabs at him, wild-eyed. His gaze locks on Caboose, and Wash catches his arm and squeezes. “Tucker, it’s okay.”
Tucker looks at him then, eyes still fuzzy. Wash isn’t even entirely sure if he’s awake or not, but some of the immediate tension has left his body so Wash will take it. “It’s okay,” he says again. “Just—just rest. Everyone’s safe now.”
It makes something in his chest ache, the way that Tucker just kind of nods and slumps back against his side, because he believes Wash, he trusts him to keep them safe, him and Caboose. It floors Wash, fills him with equal parts reverence and guilt, because—
I should’ve protected them in the first place.
Wash presses his head back into the wall, heart pounding. Tucker’s asleep again immediately, which is good because he needs to rest, but awful because those are nightmares he’s having, and what if that’s a regular thing now? What if they get so bad that he starts pacing the halls at night, trying to avoid sleep? What if Wash runs into him and Tucker makes some sort of joke about how at least Wash has a nightmare buddy now, and tries to laugh them off because he would. What’s he dreaming about, anyway? What did Felix do to him? Half of those little cuts on his body—knife wounds, Wash knows they’re knife wounds—don’t even look as if they had a point beyond causing as much pain as possible, as if Felix was just playing with him—
Anger bubbles in his gut, hot and vicious. He tries to keep it from flooding out to his fingers and toes, from driving him to needless action, but now he can’t stop imagining how Tucker got every single cut and bruise and broken bone, how his hair—Wash can’t stop looking at Tucker’s hair, and the way his normally neat dreads look frizzy and frazzled as if someone had been pulling on them, as if someone had their fucking hands in Tuckers hair, dragged him around, pulled his neck until it hurt—
“Wash.”
Red. His vision is red and he has to blink around it in order to properly see Carolina squatting down beside him. She looks concerned and more than a little suspicious, which throws him for a minute—he isn’t fidgeting or muttering or doing anything to give away the anger thudding in his brain—before he remembers that Carolina’s seen him on the verge of a breakdown on more than one Pelican before.
“Wash, go take a break.” She jerks her head across the Pelican, to the corner farthest from where the Reds are clustered. A quiet, dark, peaceful-looking corner, and one that’s entirely too far away from his team. “I’ll watch them.”
“I don’t need to take a break,” he says sharply. “I’m not even doing anything, Carolina. Just sitting here. Like we all are.”
“Wash.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m—” she exhales, runs a hand through her hair. “You’re exhausted.”
“We’re all exhausted.” Wash slants a gaze pointedly at Tucker and Caboose. “They’re exhausted. They’ve lost a lot of blood. I need to make sure they don’t fall too deeply asleep and don’t…I just need to watch them.”
“You don’t have to do that alone.”
He snorts. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
He almost expects Epsilon to pop back up and tell him off when he says that, but he doesn’t. Good. At any rate, Carolina doesn’t even take the bait, and now he feels like an asshole. “Why do you think I’m here, Wash?”
“Look, I….I can’t rest. I have to stay here with them. Okay? I…” Wash stops, mortified at the lump rising in his fault. “I—this is my fault. I told them to come to me on that mission. If I’d just—just told them to hold position, and gone to them, then…”
He can’t finish, and Carolina sighs. “Oh, Wash.”
“I should’ve—I was in charge of that mission, and it was my job to look out for them. Instead, I almost got my…my…I almost got them killed. Both of them. So.” He clears his throat. “So I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to make sure Caboose is still breathing, and make sure Tucker doesn’t move so much he punctures a lung."
Instead of walking away, like she should be, Carolina heaves another sigh and sits cross-legged in front of him. After a moment’s pause, she pulls Caboose’s wrist into her lap, pressing her fingers carefully into his pulse point. “For the record, Wash…that mission you were in charge of? Had a mole right there in the middle of it.”
“So?”
“So,” Carolina says, “don’t be too hard on yourself.”
He raises his eyebrows a little, and she shakes her head stubbornly. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Tucker mumbles a little and Wash tenses, but Tucker merely turns a little more into him, hair falling across his face. Wash lets out a breath, reaching up a hand to tuck his dreads back behind his ear. “Still,” he says softly. He can’t look at Carolina. “Still.”
Epsilon isn’t tired.
He should be. He should be more than ready to log off, after the world’s longest fucking day, full of rescue missions and tense waiting rooms while Dr. Grey operated on Caboose’s stomach (again) and Tucker’s arm and ribs and who the fuck knew what else. Carolina and Washington both debriefed with Kimball and then Carolina went to “personally see to it” that Valasquez was secured to her satisfaction (Epsilon privately thought that this was just so Carolina could stalk impressively outside of the cell for a while, but he sure as shit wasn’t gonna complain). He’s been tense and on edge all goddamn day, because Tucker’s a mess and Caboose hates hospitals and Wash is making such a point out of ignoring him.
So, Epsilon should be relieved when the exhaustion hits Carolina and she finally, finally, strips off her armor and goes the fuck to sleep. She’s actually out, too, not just pretending, flopped down spread eagle on her cot. Epsilon should log off too, decompress a bit so they can be ready for tomorrow’s next adventure, but.
But.
He can’t stop wondering how much of the blood on that fucking torture dungeon’s floor was Tucker’s.
It’s stupid, because Tucker isn’t even in that room anymore. He’s in the infirmary with Caboose, and they’re fine, and there’s no reason to think of the radio tower and the way Tucker had gasped when Felix buried that knife in his gut because it had hurt, holy fucking Christ Church this stings like a bitch, stop fucking screaming and get your ass in that tower, and there’s no reason to think about Wash’s hands slick with Caboose’s blood as he’d pressed them into the wound in his gut and looked up at Carolina and Epsilon and told them with a hysterical cadence to his voice that Tucker was gone and Caboose was in critical condition, and for a moment, Epsilon had thought—he’d thought—
Stop. He has to stop.
Epsilon curls up in the part of Carolina’s brain that’s swirled with shades of red and blue, the part that’s walled off with columns of stone, but soft and velvet with affection on the inside. Curls up and tries to remind himself that he doesn’t need to breathe or still his racing heart, because he has no lungs and he has no heart and besides it’s—it’s fine now. They’re fine. The idiot and the moron are safe and so is he, wrapped up inside the little stone fortress of Carolina’s mind. He doesn’t need to do this part, the part where he wonders what would’ve happened if Wash had been right, if he’d sunk too deep into Caboose’s mind, or if they’d turned right instead of left and found Tucker two minutes later, or if Locus’s camo unit had been too much for Carolina, if, if, if—
“If you’re so worried about them, we can go to the infirmary.”
Epsilon startles, both to hear Carolina’s voice and to realize she was awake. He’d been buried so deep in her brain that he hadn’t even felt her stirring, and now he feels guilty on top of everything else. This was the first time she’d slept in over twenty-four hours.
“It’s fine.” She’s sitting up now, stretching her arms above her head and glancing instinctually towards her shoulder where his avatar normally hovers. “C’mon. Let’s go see them.”
He curls up deeper in the plushy center of her brain, wraps the red and blue colors around himself even tighter. <I know they’re fine, Carolina. We were just there, remember?>
He doesn’t need to see her face to know she’s rolling her eyes. “I’m aware.”
<So, go back to bed. I’ll log off for a while or something, I didn’t mean—oh, for Christ’s sake.>
She’s throwing the blanket aside, reaching for the fatigues neatly folded by her bed. “Stop sulking.”
<I’m not!> He is. He is so sulking. <Fine, if it’ll make you feel better, then we’ll go.>
“Yes, Epsilon.” She finishes laces her boots, tucks the laces in neatly and stands. “It’ll make me feel better.”
<Shut up.>
The base is quiet as they walk, only a few errant soldiers wandering the halls. Epsilon recognizes the vacant, wide-eyed looks on their faces—he’s seen it too many times on Carolina, on all of them, hell, felt the same blank sort of terror deep in his own wires. The number of soldiers thins out even further as they reach the infirmary, but Carolina still creeps down the hallway like she’s on some sort of secret fucking mission. As if anyone is going to stop her from checking on them. Well, except maybe Dr. Grey, but Dr. Grey is nowhere to be seen.
Carolina eases the door open so quietly that none of them stir, not even Washington, who is still slouched in a visitor’s chair in between Caboose and Tucker’s bed. It makes Epsilon feel—well, he doesn’t know what it makes him feel to see Wash there, head lolling on his shoulder, hand inches away from his pistol. Relief, that someone else is just as much of a paranoid lunatic as he is, jealousy that this is Wash’s team more than it ever was Epsilon's, irritation, that he’s fucking sleeping here, still half in his armor.
Epsilon opts for irritation. <Jesus Christ, he’s still here?>
Carolina’s thoughts brush against his own, amused. <Guess he wasn’t the only one who was worried.>
<Hey, fuck you, I wasn’t worried!>
But it uncoils something inside of him nonetheless to see them like this, Caboose and Tucker and even Wash, sleeping and thankfully, blessedly, alive.
Carolina shuts the door carefully behind her and steps further into the room, gliding across the floor until she’s standing between both of their beds. <They’re alright.>
<Yeah, I can see that, thanks C.>
Now that they’re here, he feels kind of silly, and more than a little creepy, watching them sleep. Okay. It’s fine, he got it out of his system, and they can go now—
“Church?”
They both wince at Caboose’s whisper, loud enough to wake the fucking dead, as usual. Carolina shoots a glance at Tucker and Wash before moving swiftly to the foot of Caboose’s bed. “It’s me, Caboose. Carolina. And Church,” she adds as an afterthought, and Epsilon mimes rolling his eyes so she can feel it.
“Please tell Church we are all okay and not dying.” Caboose pauses. “Yet.”
Carolina pauses, startled, before bringing a hand up to cover her smile. “You hear that, Church?”
<Oh, well, isn’t he clever,> Epsilon says sarcastically. <Tell him to go back to sleep, Jesus.>
Caboose pats the edge of his bed, and Epsilon tries to hide his surprise when Carolina sits on the edge of it. “Agent Carolina, it is just—just so nice of you and Church to come here, but you don’t have to be worried.”
<We weren’t worried,> Epsilon grumps. <C, you gotta tell him we weren’t worried, I’ll never hear the end of it—>
“Because I am keeping watch.”
<Oh, well thank God for that.>
“Caboose,” Carolina says, after a pause. “You don’t have to keep watch. You should be sleeping.”
“Oh yeah probably,” Caboose agrees easily. “Yeah, I think we should all be sleeping, but I’m not, and you’re not, and Church is not, and you’re here instead so. I think that you’re worried, but you don’t need to be.”
That’s when Epsilon knows it’s time for him to power down, because—it actually makes him feel better, hearing Caboose talk like that. Like it’s just another day where he’s nothing more than just another irritating idiot. Jesus Christ, he’s getting delirious. <Alright, let’s go,> he grumps at Carolina. <Caboose is on guard duty, so I guess we can consider shit handled.>
He tries not to be too obvious about his relief when Carolina hesitates, then folds her legs up underneath her at the foot of Caboose’s bet. “Thanks, Caboose. Maybe we’ll stay and help you keep watch for just a little while.”
Epsilon sighs, looking around at them all: from Tucker, his broken arm folded in its cast across his chest, to Wash, slumped and exhausted in his chair, to Carolina’s hands, unlacing her boots. To Caboose, smiling at Carolina in a way that lets Epsilon know he’s looking right at him. At his team: his annoying, loud, infuriating team.
<Alright, alright, fine. But only for a little while.>
Sarge, despite all appearances, knows the people around him pretty well. It’s the mark of a good leader, which Sarge undoubtedly is without question. Thus he knows that Washington is far more likely to actually listen to what he has to say if he starts out genuine. “Wash, c’mere son.”
The look Wash gives him is hollow and tired and full to the brim with dread. Hrm. He may have misjudged. Instead he returns his attention to Caboose and Tucker just past the door, where Caboose is making his fourth attempt at writing his name on Tucker’s cast. “…gonna make full recoveries?”
Wash still looks suspicious when Sarge glances at him out of the corner of his eye, but at least he relaxes a little when he faces his team again. “That’s what Dr. Grey said.”
“And she’d know,” Sarge muses. “Don’t tell him I said nothin’ about it, but Aquaman ain’t too bad a partner in crime. Woulda been a shame if he got benched.”
“He’s benched regardless, for now.” The grim determination on Wash’s face is so pointlessly dramatic that even Sarge has to roll his eyes.
“Down, boy.”
“Ex-” Flabbergasting Wash used to be a sport until he got accustomed to their strangeness, but it’s nice to know they can still manage it from time to time. “Excuse me? What did you just say?”
“You almost lost ‘em.” Sarge lets his voice go low and grumbly as he watches Tucker snatch the marker from Caboose and sign it for him instead. “Both of ‘em. I get it. You and me Wash, we’ve had wayyy too many close calls here.”
The air almost audibly leaves Washington’s sails. “…yeah.” He turns back to watch with Sarge as Caboose and Tucker squabble over the correct spelling of ‘Caboose.’ “Yeah. Way too many.”
“It’s hard, knowin’ you can’t be everywhere and do everything for ‘em. Almost like bein’ a parent.”
“Sort of. I guess, yeah.”
“Not that I’d ever wish custody of Grif onto even my worst enemies.”
Wash’s laugh is faint and humorless, and Sarge knows he’s been read. “Of course.”
“But it’s just that.” Sarge doesn’t continue until Wash glances back over at him. “You gotta know that they know what they’re doin’, even if they’re doin’ it badly. Or not doin’ it at all. That’s what a leader does; make ‘em decent enough to handle themselves.”
Wash bristles again. “If this is about what I said on the Pelican-”
“You said a lot of things Wash, and not all of ‘em were wrong.” Sarge makes a sound, his own soft exhale that’s not quite a sigh. “I ain’t gonna tell you how to feel about the little glowworm, that’s your business. I know you got some history.”
“To put it lightly,” Wash mutters.
“But don’t you think big blue over there’s got history of his own?”
Tucker has since given up trying to police Caboose and is now glaring up at the ceiling as Caboose scribbles all over his cast. Wash stares and Sarge knows he’s trying to marry the image of Caboose scrawling flowers and hearts with the sight of him hurling an HMG, of him snarling that fucker Felix. “Epsilon used him, Sarge.”
“I figure he let himself get used.” Sarge nudges him when he notices Washington making a fist and sure enough, he relaxes that too. “Sure, he might make things more worse than better and sure, he might end up hospitalizin’ anybody he rescues-”
“Not helping, Sarge.”
“All I’m sayin’ is, don’t confuse him jumping into the fire for anything other than what it actually was. And as I recall you were damn ready to do the same thing yourself.”
Wash opens his mouth, then closes it. “It’s not the same.”
“I reckon it is.”
“I didn’t let someone take over my brain because I felt cornered.”
“He’d have joined that fight no matter what.” Sarge gestures to Caboose and Tucker, bickering again over the marker. “The way I see it, Sunspot did what he did just to make sure the odds were stacked up in favor of surviving.”
“You don’t understand,” Wash mutters, though he doesn’t sound as sure of it as he once was. “Epsilon has a history of overstepping his bounds.”
The laugh startles Wash but Sarge just can’t help himself. “You been listening, Washington? All of us got nothin’ but history with each other! We’ve shot at each other, tried to kill one another, pulled each other outta the fire again and again. Maybe we ain’t got your fancy Freelancer training or gadgets or your drama-”
“Hey-”
“But one thing we all got is our teams.” Sarge pauses. “And Grif. Still, somehow, against all odds and wishes.”
“Okay, Sarge. You can admit you were worried when he fell, if you want.”
“Worried he’d make it, maybe,” Sarge sniffs, offended. Washington shakes his head and looks back to his team, but at least the lines in his face are a little softer than before. Sarge risks giving him another nudge, and this time Washington lets himself be jostled with it. “Look over there. You got ‘em both, hale an’ whole. Whatever your history with the sparkplug is, getting everybody back safe is something you both wanted. Ain’t that right?”
Washington scowls, but Sarge knows he’s got him so he allows him his silence. He claps Washington on the shoulder and turns away to go find his own team, hound Donut for scratching up his visor and all that.
“Hey, Sarge?” Washington looks small in his power armor in front of the hospital door, eyes tired and expression fragile. “I…I’ll never be able to thank you and the other Reds enough, I-”
“Oh, give it a rest, Wash,” Sarge groans, turning back away with a dismissive wave. “It ain’t a hot day in hell if we’re not saving Blue Team’s hides. Again.” Because for all his complaining and threats and personal vendettas, Sarge can admit –at least to himself- that they’re not all bad. He sneaks a glance over his shoulder to see Wash smiling tiredly into the hospital room, chuckling and shaking his head about something Caboose probably said or did.
Yeah. There are worse enemies to have.
As it turns out, recovering from getting tortured really, really sucks.
It’s not even the mess that Felix turned his arm into that sucks, or his broken ribs—although both of those things do suck, a lot. It’s the goddamn cuts inside his mouth, and the way Donut has to come fix his dreads, and the bruise on his jaw. It’s the little things, that make it difficult to eat and sleep and even move, some days, the things that he can’t ignore no matter how much pain medicine they put him on.
“You never prepared me for this part,” Tucker grumps at Wash. He waits until they’ve been back for a week to say it and some of the guilt has left Wash’s expression, until he thinks Wash might be ready to take a joke.
Wash glances up from where he’s on his datapad on between his bed and Caboose’s. “Hmm? What part?”
“The recovering from torture part,” Tucker says. “You know, you went on and on about what would happen during, but not like. You know. After.”
Apparently, he was wrong about Wash being able to realize that Tucker was joking, because guilt immediately clouds his expression. Caboose frowns at him from behind Wash’s back and Tucker sticks his tongue out at him when Wash isn’t looking before changing tracts. “It worked though. All that creepy shit you told Caboose and me.
“It did?”
Tucker nods. “Yeah dude. It, uh...it helped.”
It’s not a total lie—Wash’s RTI lecture had worked, although Tucker thinks it would’ve been more useful if he’d actually paid attention to what Wash was saying. Some of the guilt leaves Wash’s face, so he’ll count that as a victory.
But he knows that Wash still feels guilty, and so does Caboose, and so does Tucker and it’s fucked and every time the three of them get anywhere near talking about it—which Tucker is content to do exactly never, thanks—it all falls apart. The I’m sorrys turn into no, I’m the one who should be sorry and then the thank yous turn into I’m the one who should be thanking you and Tucker can’t stand it because they’re not getting it.
They’re not getting that it was pure luck that saved Caboose, that Tucker still fucked up, that he came within a hair of getting his teammate killed because he was stupid, that every time he looks at Caboose or Wash or any of them he can barely breathe because what if it had gone the other way? What if they hadn’t found him, and it had all gone to shit, and Felix really had made Tucker watch while he killed them? Tucker can’t stop seeing it, can’t stop seeing Carolina falling with a thud, body hitting the ground next to Grif’s, her arm falling to the side to lay across his chest. It looks like they’re sleeping, tangled together, but their blood is pooling beneath their bodies and they’re not sleeping, no matter how intensely Tucker pretends they are. He watches as Carolina’s blood mixes with Grif’s, whose blood mixes with Simmons’, whose blood runs down the groove in the floors to mix with Donut’s and on and on and on until they’re everywhere he looks, the bodies of his stupid friends, his moronic friends who are all dead because of him—
Felix isn’t even pretending to care about turning the temple on anymore as he turns his gun on Wash and Tucker doesn’t care anymore either. Caboose is dead and his friends are dead and Wash is all that’s left of his team, and he tells Felix to bring him the fucking sword and he’ll turn it on, he’ll activate every fucking tower on this planet if he just wouldn’t, please, stop, I’ll do anything just don’t--
But Felix shoots Wash right through the center of his forehead and Tucker screams and screams and screams. His throat is raw and hoarse and he’s breaking, something in his head cracking right down the middle, and he barely notices Felix lunging for him until it’s too late, until the knife is already inside of his mouth, and Felix doesn’t have some sort of clamp to hold his tongue out which is stupid because who hasn’t seen The Mummy Returns? Everyone’s seen that, even if it is a million years old, so Felix should know that if you try to cut someone’s tongue out without proper torture tools than it’s gonna be messy and bloody and his mouth is full of blood now; Felix has sunk the blade into his cheek and the blood is pouring into his mouth and he’s choking on it, he’s dying and all he can think is that at least he’ll see his friends again, if you believed in that sort of thing—
“Tucker, Tucker, Tucker!”
That’s Wash calling his name, which makes no sense because he can see Wash, dead on the floor in front of him, brains splattered out behind the wall, right next to Caboose, eyes open and lifeless, hands still pressed into the bloody wound in his torso—
Valasquez killed Caboose at the capital, something whispers, and he latches onto it. He wraps his hands around it, uses it to pull himself out of this hell—Caboose can’t be here, and Wash can’t be dead if he’s calling for him, which means—
Tucker opens his eyes with a gasp. Wash and Caboose are there, bending over his hospital bed, because they’re okay, they’re fine, because Caboose has been healing right there beside him and Wash insists on sleeping in their hospital room every goddamn night. They’d both been sleeping, too, from the drowsy slant to their eyes, and Tucker feels even worse because he knows for a fact neither of them have been sleeping well and now he’s gone and woken them up. “Fuck,” Tucker gasps. He sits up in bed and rubs his hands over his face, then quickly clenches them into fists when he realizes they’re shaking. “Fuck, I’m—I’m sorry.”
For waking you up, he wants to clarify, but it’s the first time he’s managed to get the words out, so he lets them sit. Neither of them say anything, which isn’t that unusual for Wash but shocking for Caboose. Tucker works up the nerve to look at him and finds that Caboose is looking at him too, his eyes huge in the moonlight streaming in through their door. “Ah, well,” he says finally, “I guess that’s okay, Tucker. I wasn’t having a very good dream either.”
Which, Tucker isn’t really sure if that makes me feel better or worse, but then Wash sits down heavily on the edge of his bed. “Me neither.”
Tucker rolls his eyes, kicking out at him with his foot. “Dude, that’s nothing new.”
Caboose brightens. “Well, if we are all having bad dreams, then we should just all keep sharing a room! And then we can have a sleepover every night! And we can stay up and watch movies and—”
Tucker groans. “Caboose, that sounds like a goddamn nightmare if I ever heard one.”
“Well, excuse me, Tucker,” Caboose huffs, “but I don’t hear you coming up with any good ideas, so—”
“I have an idea.”
They both turn to look at Wash, who is looking at them all fondly and shit. “I think,” Wash says, “that we’ve all earned a vacation.”
The last time Caboose went on a vacation, it was with three of his sisters just before his deployment.
They’d driven up to the lake, just the four of them, and spend an entire week basking on its shores. It had been bright and sunny, and they’d played games and gone swimming and ate ice cream and those things were nice, but the nicest thing was being with his family.
Caboose is with his family now, too, and that’s nice, even if he’s not quite sure that this counts as a vacation. For one thing, they’re still inside Armonia’s base, huddled around what’s less of a majestic lake and more of a large pond in the farthest corner of the courtyard.
For another, Agent Washington won’t take off his armor.
Caboose can’t be certain, but he thinks that it’s been even longer since Wash had a vacation. Maybe he’s forgotten how they work. “Um, Agent Washington?”
Wash looks at him. He’s at least put his gun down, although it’s within arm’s reach. Caboose sighs. “I think you are vacationing wrong.”
Wash shifts around in that way he does when he’s feeling guilty about something. “I know, Caboose—I’m sorry, I wanted to get you guys a real vacation, but it’s just not safe outside the base—”
“Oh no!” Caboose interrupts enthusiastically. “Oh, no, this is wonderful. It’s very quiet and the water is nice and cool and I am with one of my best friends. And Tucker,” Caboose adds as an afterthought.
Tucker snorts. He, in contrast to Wash, is hardly wearing anything, floating on his back in the pond. “Thanks, Caboose.”
Caboose makes a face at him, then turns back to Wash. “The vacation is very nice, but you are not vacationing right. I am going to help you.”
“Help me with….oh, Caboose, no,” Wash protests, as Caboose reaches for his helmet. “I…one of us should keep our armor on.”
“Oh my god,” Tucker groans from the water. “Wash, we’re literally still inside the base. There are soldiers in armor all over. That’s why we’re here. Get in the fucking water and relax. Unless you can’t swim?”
Wash winces as Tucker splashes over to him. “Tucker, be careful. You only just got your cast off- I’m not sure you should even be in the water at all—”
“This is part of my physical therapy regimen,” Tucker insists. “Water’s good for…healing the bones. Or something.”
He’s reached the shore where Wash is sitting, grabs one of his ankles, and starts popping the seals on his boot. Wash sputters indignantly as Tucker yanks it off his foot and chucks it across the clearing. “Tucker!”
Caboose nods approvingly, reaching for Wash’s helmet again, and Wash sighs, batting them both away. “Alright, alright! I’ll take the armor off. Happy?”
“Yes,” Caboose and Tucker say in unison.
It takes approximately ten million years for Wash to take off all his armor, and Tucker sighs impatiently the whole time, until Caboose tells him to shut up and Tucker says make me so Caboose jumps into water to tackle him and it starts a water wrestling match that Caboose is winning, obviously, until Wash shrieks at them to be careful and finally speeds up the process of removing his armor to jump in after them.
“Honestly,” he says, dragging Tucker away. “You two are going to be the death of me. You both just had surgery—”
Tucker rolls his eyes. “Wash, we’re fine—”
“Supposed to be taking it easy—”
“I always take it easy on Tucker, because I am so much stronger than him,” Caboose says, because it’s true, thank you, and also because he knows it’ll make Tucker sputter and lunge at him again, which it does. They all end up under the water and emerge to see the entirety of Red Team watching them.
“Oh, for god’s—what do you want?” Wash asks, exasperated. “Look, we are on vacation—”
“So are we,” Grif says, already half out of his armor. “Move over.”
“But—”
Grif cannonballs into the pond and Wash gives up, throwing his arms in the air. Caboose distinctly hears him mutter something about peace and quiet, but Agent Washington has a lot of mutters and this one is his secretly happy one.
Caboose rolls over onto his back in the water, arms out to the side so that he can float on his back. For a while, he just listens to the sounds of everyone talking and yelling and splashing around him. It’s nice and peaceful and makes something inside his head go still, which is one of the many things he has in common with Washington. He’s able to think best like this, surrounded by noise and activity and that warm glow that comes from being surrounded by friends.
His head bumps into something, and Caboose rolls over in the water to see that he’s collided with Tucker’s knee. Tucker is sitting on the banks of the pond, rubbing absently at his arm, and makes a face when he notices Caboose frowning at him. “Oh, it’s fine. Just a little sore. C’mon, get that look off your face before Wash sees and like, forbids us from doing anything fun ever again.”
Caboose wants to argue, if only on principle, but looking at Tucker’s arm reminds him of that way it had looked when they found him: hanging loosely out of his shoulder, swollen to nearly twice it’s normal size. He’d been very careful when he brought him onto the ship, but Tucker had still made those awful little noises and it makes Caboose’s stomach feel queasy to remember that, so he tears his eyes away and looks at Tucker’s face instead.
“Um, Tucker, I have been thinking—”
“Oh, boy—”
“And I have decided that you can work with me on future missions after all.”
Tucker gapes at him. “Huh?”
“I have a condition, though.”
“You. Have a condition. For me.”
“Yes,” Caboose says serenely, “and that condition is that I make the plans from now on.”
“Bullshit you make the plans! Okay, how’s this for a condition—we can still do missions together if you tell me when you’re fucking bleeding out in your goddamn armor.”
When Caboose doesn’t respond right away, Tucker’s face grows smug and that’s just annoying, so he huffs and Tucker huffs back. “Okay, Tucker. I will tell you I am bleeding if you do not try to trade places with people who bad guys are trying to take to bad places—”
Tucker snorts. “Yeah, right. Like I was gonna let that—”
He stops and it kind of makes Caboose stop too, and look at Tucker, really look at him. Tucker sighs, uncomfortable, but he reaches out and ruffles Caboose’s hair hard. “Just shut up, alright?”
There’s a new scar on his face now, temple to chin. Tucker has lots of new scars now, and Caboose wonders if he yelled when he got them. Caboose isn’t sure if he would’ve yelled himself, but he knows, he knows, if it had been him in Tucker’s place, that he wouldn’t have come back.
He grabs the hand that Tucker has in his hair and yanks Tucker in the water. Tucker yelps, but quiets when Caboose pulls him into a hug. “No more stupid plans,” he says, but he really means thank you and when Tucker hugs him back briefly, he thinks that Tucker is saying it back.
Caboose lets go of Tucker to see Wash looking over at them, but then Grif tackles him and declares a game of chicken. Tucker climbs up onto Caboose’s shoulders and Donut climbs onto Grif’s, and Wash looks worried as he watches them, but he lets out a whoop when Tucker knocks Donut back into the pond and Caboose listens to Tucker’s laughter join in and thinks that although this isn’t quite a real vacation, it's enough.
It’s enough.
Two years later…
The thing with being a bunch of war heroes is that trying to find some peace and quiet in the after is damn near impossible.
Particularly on this tiny ass planet. Particularly when the press won’t leave them alone. Particularly when everyone wants them to help with something, or answer this, or give advice on that, and—
And quite honestly, Tucker is sick of the whole goddamn thing.
Which is how he finds himself clustered around the table, deep in the base of Armonia with the rest of his annoying friends, peering over a holographic map and trying to find…well. Something. Something, or somewhere they could go and relax where no one would bother them for like, five minutes. It’s a task that’s proving to be easier said than done, and Tucker’s spirits are sinking further by the minute as they stare at the map.
“What if,” Caboose says slowly, and Tucker groans, “we live in a space ship! We will float around in the sky and then no one will find us unless they have a space ship too, and when they float up to us and knock on our door we can say—and say—”
“I think big blue might be onto something,” Sarge interrupts, sitting up a little straighter. “We could configure the ship so that—”
“No!”
Tucker isn’t the only one who says it, and Sarge huffs, sinking back into his seat. “Well, suit your damn selves, then!”
“Okay,” Wash says, snapping his fingers. “Okay, I’ve got it—what if we went to stay in one of those alien temples for a while? No one would bother us there, right?”
“Genius,” Tucker breathes. He whacks Wash on the shoulder, beaming. “Fucking genius! Oh man, that’s a great idea, those things are like, empty! And I can totally open them with my sword! Maybe I can like, configure them so that no one else but us can get in.”
Simmons rolls his eyes. “Pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.”
“Pretty sure this is a stupid idea,” Grif says. He’d laid facedown on the floor when this discussion first began forty-five minutes ago, and hasn’t lifted his forehead off the ground since. “I mean, they’re just big, creepy marble rooms! No food, no beds—do they even have bathrooms in them?”
“Grif,” Tucker says through gritted teeth, “we can’t use any of that stuff here either because no one will leave us alone! I mean, do you want to actually eat food in the mess hall, or do you want to give your fifty billionth interview?”
Grif lifts his head slightly, cracks an eye at Tucker, and drops his head back down. “So what are our options?”
Tucker grins, turning his attention to the map. “Well, okay, we’ve got….”
He trails off, leaning closer to read the tiny, holographic names. The Temple of Procreation. The Temple of Endless Summer. The Temple of Interior Decorating. The Temple of High Celebration—
Wait.
“Whoa whoa whoa, hold on.” Simmons lets out a squawk of protest as Tucker elbows him aside, leaning in closer to the map. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got to be absolutely fucking shitting—”
“Tucker,” Carolina says, impatient. “What is it?”
“That.” He jabs his finger at the map. “The Temple of High Celebration. Isn’t that where—”
“We had to come rescue your ass? Yup.”
“You’re not even looking at the map, Grif!”
“I don’t need to. Why would it literally be anything else?”
“Yeah, but you don’t know—”
“Santa,” Wash says loudly, “What exactly is the Temple of High Celebration?”
Santa materializes in the middle of their map, turning to face the temple in question. “The Temple of High Celebration. It was commonly used to ensure ideal weather conditions on days where important ceremonies were set to take place. When activated, it shoots a beam of light into the sky to scatter the clouds for miles, and bring blue skies to—”
“Wait,” Tucker says loudly, “wait, hold the fuck up. You’re telling me that we all almost died for a glorified fucking weather machine?! I thought I got Caboose killed for a machine that makes the fucking sun shine on people’s stupid wedding days?!”
“Well,” says Caboose, his voice thoughtful, “you can’t put a price on a sunny day.”
There are several long beats of silence, and then—
“The Temple of High Celebration,” Santa says serenely, “is an icon to the people of Chorus. It activates one of Chorus’s most time-honored traditions—”
Tucker isn’t the only one he groans, nor is he the first person to head to the door. Wash beats him there, and is shaking his head in a mixture of dismay and exasperation and, of course, guilt. “I’m sorry, Tucker. That...can't have been easy to hear.”
“Dude, it’s fine.” When Wash continues to watch him apprehensively, Tucker rolls his eyes, giving Wash’s shoulder a shove. “Stop. Look, at least I didn’t fuck and activate something that would’ve liked, blinded the entire planet.”
Wash gives him a look, but nods slowly. “If you’re sure—”
“I’m sure,” Tucker says firmly. “It’s cool, we’ll find somewhere else to live. Like, uh…”
“Like the moon,” Caboose says, his voice coming so close to Tucker’s ear that Tucker jumps.
“Jesus, Caboose! What the fuck have I told you about doing that?”
“To not do it.”
Honestly. Tucker could fucking strangle him sometimes. “And also, we can’t live on the moon.”
“Don’t be stupid, Tucker,” Caboose says. “Of course we can.”
“Caboose, what moon?”
Caboose rolls his eyes. “The moon in the sky, Tucker.”
“I know, I meant--are Chorus’s moons even inhabitable?”
“I grew up on a moon.”
“I know, but not all moons are the same!”
“Yes they are.”
“No they aren’t! Look, don’t you think we would’ve heard about if there were just people living on the moon?”
“Maybe they never tired.”
“But then they’d have to like, make it all…..livable and shit!”
“Terraforming,” Simmons says, poking his head out into the hallway from where the Reds are still arguing with Santa. “It’s called terraforming. It’s a process of grooming a new planet or moon for—”
“See?” Tucker says triumphantly. “They have to….do that nerd stuff before we can just live on the moon.”
“But Tucker, it will be so much fun to terracotta the moon!”
“It’s terraforming, Caboose,” Simmons says impatiently, “and it takes hundreds of years—”
“What if…we work really, really quickly—”
“I think,” Wash says loudly. “That living on the moon sounds like a wonderful idea.”
Tucker shoots him a murderous glare. “Oh, come on!”
Wash folds his arms across his chest. “You got a better idea?”
Tucker throws up his hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—you know what? Fine. Let’s go. Let’s go talk to Kimball and see what she says.”
“She will say that I am right,” Caboose says.
“Then I guess it looks like I’m stuck on a fucking moon with you assholes. Great.”
But as the rest of their team piles into the hallway, and the Reds spend five minutes arguing about the fastest way to Kimball’s office, and Carolina insists she can get them there without being spotted by a single soul, and Sarge gets them seen within three minutes, and Wash yells to run for it, and they sprint through the hallways of Armonia’s base—
Tucker thinks there are worse places to be stuck, than on a moon with his team.