"You get what you were looking for?" The station commander growled angrily. "Firing your weapon at an innocent woman? After threatening a man?"
"Hardly innocent." One of the nearby officers grumbled.
"What was that, Evans?" The commander snapped.
"Nothing, sir." he sighed sarcastically.
Ana was still shaken by the events of an hour prior and couldn't find her voice to respond, let alone explain herself. So she simply stood at attention and waited until the commander was finished berating her.
"No matter the personal history you have with Kurokawa Fuse, you abused your authority as an officer aboard this station and nearly got someone killed. Tell me, Captain, what am I supposed to do with you? They've locked down Earth for interstellar travel, so I can't ship you back and you're the reason our cells are full, so I can't lock you up."
"I don't know, sir." She said automatically.
"Should've pulled the trigger." Evans said.
Ana winced and the commander's eyes narrowed into slits. This time, however, it was Evans' turn to lose his composure.
"He's a monster, sir. You weren't there, so you don't know. Fuse is responsible for us losing Keystone. And the men he killed at Wardham-"
"You mean the border town where the soldiers fleeing Keystone slaughtered everyone in a futile attempt at a last stand?"
Evans glared defiantly. "He killed them all by himself, sir. A seven year old kid killed trained soldiers and the GA just let him. We were defending our home."
"...Just following orders." Ana murmured. "We all were."
"That's right. And his orders were to kill us all!" Evans snapped. "And he's here, at our station! He's weak enough that we can finally put an end to him and-"
"And what!?" The commander boomed. "Put the horrors of Keystone behind you? You think that's what's going to happen? Kill Fuse and the trauma just goes away? We were all soldiers, Peters. We killed people too. Some of them weren't even involved. The Wardham slaughter is what cinched the war for the GA. You really think they were just going to let the murder of innocent civilians go unanswered?"
"They were our people, sir."
"Enough." Ana murmured.
"You're right, Hart. Suspended from duty until further notice. Evans, you're on thin ice. Until Fuse or the women with him actually do something, you'd do well to steer well clear of him. And remember, if it weren't for the Lin girl, half our station would still be uninhabitable." The commander said. "And Cruz is Vanguard, which means that she's nearly as dangerous as he is."
"Missing arm be damned, huh?" Evans grumbled, walking away before the commander could respond.
"Do we have the footage from their shuttle, sir?" Ana asked. "I'd like to see it."
He glared down at her as she handed over her sidearm. "Why?"
"Red, sir. Pirates attacked his ship as it came from Earth. They marked it with a warning, but never followed up. Fuse's shuttle was similarly attacked. I'm hoping to find something to explain why they haven't attacked us yet."
He considered her for several long seconds before nodding. "I'll have it sent to your tablet. But you're still suspended."
"Yes, sir."
~
Lin tied the cable tightly over the stump where Yolanda's arm had been before helping her to press it against the glowing panel the engine core was housed behind. The woman screamed as smoke tendrils rose from the spot, then collapsed.
Lin checked to make sure she was still breathing before moving over to the cowering teen, who kept his head covered. He flinched as she wrapped her arms around him, then unfolded himself and sobbed into her lap.
"It's okay, Kuro. We're going to be okay." She said weakly as she stroked his hair.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He whimpered over and over.
She shushed him. "It's not your fault. Just rest."
Ana sped through the recording for a few seconds before letting it play again.
"Phantom limb pain is such bullshit!" Yolanda yelled from the door of the shuttle.
Fuse shrunk away from her as Lin worked on the engine. Seeing his reaction, her expression softened.
"I wasn't yelling at you, Fuse." She said, an edge still in her voice. "If it weren't for you, we'd be in a lot worse shape. Just... cursing my bad luck."
"You should be resting." Lin sighed. "Without supplies, if you get an infection-"
"I know, I know. Just getting some fresh air. Can't believe this thing got us all the way into deep space."
"It shouldn't have. But the explosion destroyed the computer responsible for cutting the engines when we're out of range. Also overloaded the generator, which is why we jumped. Putting inert warp cores into a short range shuttle was so stupid." Lin grumbled.
"Probably cheaper than manufacturing cores from scratch. Faster, too."
"And repairing the damage is the equivalent of tightening a screw with a pencil with the tools in the kit."
Yolanda looked over at her. "But you can do it, right?"
"Who do you think I am?" Lin replied with a smirk. "The engine's nearly shot, so we won't get far after takeoff, but if I can navigate us to the lanes in the computer's system, we might find someone willing to help us. It's just... slow going right now."
Ana swallowed a chuckle and skimmed further.
Yolanda wasn't waking up no matter what Fuse and Lin did.
"She's burning up." Lin murmured.
Fuse began to panic and slammed his fists into his head. Lin tried to stop him and calm him down, but he was too upset and far too strong for the waifish, childlike teen. She finally slapped him across the face using her whole body to increase the strength of the blow. He blinked at her several times while she glared up at him.
"You have to be strong, Kuro. Strong and brave. Yolanda's going to be fine, okay?" She said, each word measured and firm.
He nodded slowly. "Okay."
"Good. You keep an eye on her, I need to keep working on the engine."
She was getting closer as she sped the footage up until she found what she was looking for. Letting it play, she pulled the tablet closer to her face.
Fuse was cowering in the ship as Lin shrieked at the pirates, pleading with them to stop as they shot at the shuttle. Yolanda moaned and tried to move, but infection had fully taken hold, leaving her on the verge of death.
"Fuse." She breathed, seeing his outline shaking next to her. "Fuse you have to help her."
"I can't." He whimpered.
"You can. You're the only one who-" She moaned, forcing her arm to grab his. "You're the only one who can."
Her eyes rolled in her head and she fell limp, scaring the teen further. He started beating his head and rocking frantically. But a sudden calm came over him as the gunfire stopped. He heard Lin cry out in pain and got to his feet.
The view switched to the external camera and she zoomed it in, trying to see the marking on the pirate's ship, but found herself watching the action happening instead.
Lin's arms were wrapped around his neck while he held her against him, the teen's feet dangled off the ground as she sobbed into his cheek. They stayed like that for several minutes amidst the bodies of the pirates. Nearly all of them with terrified looks frozen on their faces.
"I'm back." He said finally, almost intimately.
She sniffed and nodded, pulling her head away and meeting his gaze. "You're back."
The two kissed for a few seconds before he set her down and looked back at the shuttle. "Hopefully these guys have what you need to get this thing working again."
She nodded and the two walked out of view of the shuttle's cameras.
Ana let the footage play, now more invested in what was happening between the people on the screen than what she initially wanted the footage for.
Fuse had done little more than sleep while Lin continually monitored him and Yolanda. He'd fallen desperately ill shortly after takeoff, and Yolanda, who was already sick from infection, was barely clinging to life. The cause was the damaged shielding around the engine's core. Lin realized she was immune to the radiation, but her two human companions were not.
The medication the pirates had, helped fight the infection and radiation poisoning, but Fuse declined any of it as Yolanda's need was much greater. As a result, they were both near death when they arrived at Albion.
Lin was beside herself with desperation and fear as it seemed like it took forever for them to do anything about it. Finally, Winston had donned a radiation suit and ventured into the shuttle to pull the three out.
~
Ana poured over the footage for nearly three days without rest. She'd heard their conversations, seen their individual struggles, and watched as a nineteen year old girl did more in a few weeks than Ana would've considered possible for someone her age.
She watched Fuse come back to himself once more and shuddered again. Before, he'd been acting like any other teen would have given their situation. He didn't resemble the Fuse she knew in the slightest. The transformation changed everything about him, from the look in his eyes to how he carried himself.
But the most surprising of all was the tenderness he'd shown Lin, who the twenty-four year old had come to admire through the footage. The teen had clearly been on the verge of losing it for some time and the only thing keeping her together was the desperate work she was doing on the ship. But when Fuse emerged from the shuttle, it was like seeing a rebirth in her soul.
He was her hero and the love she had for him was unmistakable. So seeing her despair as he was slowly, painfully dying in front of her and she was faced with her powerlessness to stop it had made Ana cry more than once.
Setting the tablet down, she sighed and downed the rest of her cold coffee before looking at the teen seated across from her. "How long have you been there?"
Red shrugged. "A few minutes, I guess? You've been glued to that tablet for days, I was starting to get worried."
"I needed answers."
"About the pirates?"
She nodded absently, then started. "The what?"
"That's what you've been watching the footage for, right? To find out more about the pirates?"
"Oh, yeah. The pirates. It seems like the same ones did attack them, but Fuse took care of it." She said quickly.
Red's expression darkened. "But there'll be more. There's always more."
She stared at her charge before sighing. "I know how you're feeling. All of us do. But... Red, I'm starting to think that... that maybe..."
"Don't say it, Ana." He said, cutting her off. "You got to confront your past. I've seen you watching those recordings. You're less concerned with the pirates and more concerned with him."
"Red-"
He waved her off and smiled sadly. "I think this is the last bit of childhood I have left, being angry about what happened. And I'm not quite ready to be an adult yet, so... Just let me be angry for a little while longer, okay? Besides, you've got some childhood of your own to leave behind still, right?"
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He was only a few years younger than Fuse, so he still had the face of a child, but his eyes spoke of a maturity she'd never seen or bothered to notice in him until now. With a quiet laugh, she got up from the table and sighed. "You're right. Thanks, kid."
"Try not to shoot him this time." He smirked.
"I'm suspended and also shut up." She said, smiling as she walked away from the cafeteria and made her way to the lift.
~
Brown eyes glared at her from the door. "What do you want?"
"Just to talk." She said crisply, trying not to match Yolanda's tone.
"You armed?"
She shook her head and spread her arms. Her only clothes were the security uniforms, but she'd left the jacket behind and only wore the pants and shirt. She could feel Yolanda's sharp eyes scrutinizing every fold of fabric, but after several seconds she nodded, satisfied. "Come in."
The door opened all the way and the woman stepped away. Even on the mend, she moved like a soldier and Ana couldn't shake the feeling that she wouldn't stand a chance against her if it came to it. This woman was like Fuse; the real deal.
Fuse sat on the couch facing the door with Lin seated right next to him, almost protectively. She held a black shirt in her hands and gave Ana a glance before helping him shrug the shirt on, covering the litany of scars. He was thinner than she expected, as well, almost gaunt. Something she hadn't noticed when he was fully dressed.
"You said you wanted to talk, not gawk." Yolanda said dully, walking past her and dropping onto the couch on the other side of Fuse, then gestured to a chair.
"Be nice." Fuse muttered.
Despite it being a few days, he looked weaker than he had. Ana swallowed and sat down in the chair.
"He's still suffering from radiation poisoning." Lin said, answering the unasked question as she gathered up the bottles and syringes. "He had virtually no immune system and was still recovering on Earth before we escaped."
"You'd think that super-healing of yours would've kicked in by now." Yolanda grumbled.
"Pretty sure it was already taxed before the shuttle, Cruz." He replied, then looked over at Ana. "I'm glad you came to talk and not fight. It's pretty hard to move right now, as you can see."
He gave her a lopsided grin as Lin carried the medications into a different room.
"I saw the footage from the shuttle." She said without preamble.
"And you had questions." He confirmed. "I'll answer what I can. Lin and Cruz might be able to answer what I can't."
She nodded. "What... Er... When the pirates attacked, you were..."
"I had suffered some pretty severe injuries on Earth that left me... broken." He said thoughtfully.
Yolanda scoffed. "Understatement of the century. He had his skull crushed fighting some berserk military defector working for the same mad scientist that made him. Then the doctor who was supposed to be piecing him back together was actually taking the slow route to kill him. When we finally got out of there and to a doctor that actually helped him, he woke up with complete amnesia. But he snapped out of it when the pirates that attacked us started hurting Lin."
"Way to sum it up." Fuse muttered.
"That explains the kissing." Ana murmured, biting her thumbnail.
"Kissing? What kissing? You two never told me about kissing!" She said, looking between Fuse and Lin, who'd just walked back into the room.
Lin's entire body turned red while Fuse's ears darkened. "It wasn't planned! It just happened!" The girl practically shrieked.
"While I was laying in the ship dying, ya'll made time to make out and it 'just happened'!?"
It was clear Yolanda wasn't angry, despite her tone. But Fuse turned pale for a different reason while the teen argued back. After a few minutes, the soldier had a satisfied grin on her face while Lin sat down stiffly next to Fuse at a respectable distance.
"You said super-healing. What did you mean?" Ana asked once they'd settled back down.
Yolanda shrugged. "I can't really explain that one. That's more Lin's area of expertise."
"You know more about it than I do. I didn't know he even had augmentations until he was awake. I heard Sebastian and Rebecca talking about it."
"What?" Ana asked. Things had derailed so far from what she'd come to discuss.
Fuse sighed. "There was a scientist contracted out to create super soldiers for the upcoming war. He tried his experiments on adults, but when that didn't work out, he continued his work on children. Myself and eleven others were the result. The kids you saw and fought at Keystone were the pinnacle of his work. Enhanced strength, vision, reaction time, healing, intelligence, and conditioned to kill whoever we were pointed at. That's the short version."
Ana stared at him, her expression slowly growing dark. "So once the war was over and you were the only one left, you just decided to stick around and keep killing whoever you were pointed at?"
"That's not fair, he-!" Lin snapped, but Yolanda held her hand out to stop her.
"They experimented on him." She said. "Then they used him to form the foundation of the Vanguard unit. You're aware of that, aren't you?"
Ana nodded. "Special armored division that operated much like the kids at Keystone did. Only deployed in groups of two or three to deal with problems the regular troops can't handle. Walking atomic bombs."
"We had no real leadership among ourselves, but we all respected Fuse to some degree. He bucked authority to the point where Command almost never gave him downtime to recover unless it was in the brig, but he never once complained. Because so long as he was on the field, there was rarely any lives lost no matter who we were fighting. That's on both sides." Yolanda said.
"I wonder if the other side feels the same." Ana said, letting her bias boil back up to the surface. "It doesn't change what he did at Keystone or Wardham."
"I won't justify or decry the actions at Keystone. I wasn't there. But you can't seriously believe what happened at Wardham wasn't justified." Yolanda said coldly. "The cowards who didn't surrender murdered those people. They weren't part of the war by any metric. Just farmers and families. Innocents."
Ana bit the inside of her lip. She wanted to argue like Evans had, but when she'd heard about Wardham, even she was disgusted. Wardham is what the rebels used to fuel their anger toward the GA and Fuse, but they conveniently leave out that it was their own actions that directly led to the legend of the Wolf.
"Fuse wasn't alone in those woods. How many of your men did you throw at the other kids until you finally took them down?" Yolanda asked, then scoffed. "Hell, one of those kids killed herself before the fighting even started and Fuse killed another right in front of you. You only had to kill nine. I could tell you the figures, but you'd probably twist that to fit your narrative of hate too."
"You created your own boogeyman because you're sore losers." Lin said flatly. "You blame him for everything when it's the people in charge of everything that made him. He didn't ask to be made into a soldier. He had a family and they took them from him. Then he had another family, and they took him from them. You look at Kuro and see a seven year old monster, but I look at him and see him. He saved me over and over again when he could've just left me to die."
"Lin-" He murmured, but she wasn't done yet.
"Nearly our entire planet wants me dead, and he's stood against them all to protect me. You lost friends and family in the war, and I'm sad for you. But I had nobody until Kuro. For all we know, the friends we left on Earth are all dead, so literally everyone I have left that I love and care about are right here. So you'll have to excuse me if I value my losses more than yours."
Ana glared at Lin before looking at the ceiling and groaning in frustration. "This is not how I saw this conversation going."
"Then keep it going. What else did you come here to ask?" Fuse said simply.
She looked at him. "I came here to find out if you were the same person that saved me in those woods, but I think I have my answer. And it's not one I'm happy with because it means that my fear and anger for you is unjustified."
Rising from the chair, she walked over to the door and started to open it, but rested her head against it. "You really fought the world to keep one girl safe?"
"I don't know if I've fought the world yet, but I haven't run into too many people who don't want her dead."
"Even I did at one point." Yolanda added.
Lin groaned. "You just had bring that up."
Ana turned and looked at Fuse. "You're stronger than we were, Fuse. Facing all that you have for the sake of one person. We couldn't have survived that even if we were super soldiers."
"You'd be surprised what you're capable of when you find the things that mean the most to you." Yolanda replied.