Chapter Text
Viper was the first one out of the command center and on the tarmac when the stiffs arrived. She was the first one to watch the VLT/R’s bay door creak open and see the shadowy figures within race to unseat themselves. She was the first to see Reyna dash by in a panic, and Killjoy amble past as though in the grip of a hazy dream, tears in her eyes and streaking down her cheeks.
She was the first one there and the last one to leave, watching the VLT/R take off again into the night for asset recovery in the wake of their fresh crisis. It spiraled through the blankets of fog blanketing the base and vanished into the night, melding with the shadows and leaving nothing but swirling curtains of mist and scattered dust at her feet. She turned to go and assess the damage, hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
The initial reports from the scene of the attack were grim. Based on Reyna’s frantic message and the initial communications from the VLT/R pilots, the casualty rate exceeded 50%. Never before had the Valorant Protocol experienced such a substantial loss of personnel at one time – and never had they even expected it to be possible.
Stupid, she chastised herself. Anything is possible. You were stupid to think otherwise.
Security officers rushed past her as she beelined for the clinic, the only place where they had a chance at getting their colleagues back. All available medical staff had been called up – even if they were off-duty or asleep. Even then, there was no guarantee they would be able to recover their slain after such a long time.
We never thought something like this would happen. We should have thought of everything.
Sage couldn’t hope to recover everybody. She knew that much was certain. So who would live, and who would die? Were they flipping coins, or rolling dice, or were they letting the indifferent machinations of medical equipment determine who had the best chance? Standing back in the middle of the command center, looking up at the readouts as they raced across the screens, she knew her grim calculus was correct. They would lose somebody tonight.
We could have avoided this.
But she was not ready to assign blame openly just yet. They still had lives to save, and she had not gathered all of the facts, and there was one particular case she took interest in.
A section of the clinic had been set aside for Brimstone, who was quarantined from the other dead. It was set up that way more out of an abundance of caution than anything else – nobody knew what toxin had been detected in his blood, and they were waiting for her assessment.
Donning her PPE and forging ahead, Sabine did not spare a single effort as she assessed his condition. He was barely alive. A stabilizing intervention had been successfully attempted, but already his vitals were dropping, as though the stabilizer had ceased to function. She had never encountered this phenomenon in all of her time with the Protocol, and realized she was in a race against time as Brimstone’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Unconscious, sheathed in his polyester bodybag, he was pale as a ghost.
She focused on his health first, introducing new IV lines full of liquid lidocaine and facilitating breathing with higher oxygen flow. With his status at least stable after a tense twenty minutes, she turned to trying to figure out just what had been introduced into his body in such high concentrations. She observed physical disfiguration – discoloration in his face and signs of edema in his cheeks – and assumed that his airway had been directly exposed, but there was no way to be sure. Whatever was used left few physical signs, and so she had to dig deeper and isolate and analyze the toxin.
She recognized the basic compounds involved from her own research. But the full picture was different, somehow; there were structures present which she had never seen before, and they changed form and function randomly and unpredictably without changing the toxin’s deleterious impacts on the body. Isolation proved remarkably difficult, too, as though the compound being used sensed her presence and refused to be discovered. Only with intense work and rapid-fire assays was she able to isolate it, and even then she was at a loss for how to explain what she was dealing with.
There was only one sensible explanation that came to mind: Viper.
Rather, her counterpart from the other world: her mirror, the other Sabine, the version of her she loathed most. They had not encountered each other in almost a year, and while she would never forget her worst self, she had not anticipated ꭥ-Viper’s presence anywhere anytime soon. But there was no other plausible explanation for the presence of such a persistent, advanced toxic compound that was attacking Brimstone’s body as well as his mind.
Skye dropped by, offering her skills. Viper suspected it would make little difference, but she was willing to let her give it a try. And Skye did her best, but after fifteen minutes of channeling her radiance there was no change in his vitals or physical state. He remained lifeless, pale, a sculpture laid out on the bare table, his pallid skin lacerated and sticky with dried blood from deep, cruel knife wounds.
“Nothing?” Viper asked.
“Nothing,” Skye confirmed.
“Alright then,” Viper said stiffly.
Skye stared down at Brimstone’s lifeless body blankly, disappointment in her eyes. She was not yet ready to admit defeat, but she clearly perceived she had fallen short.
“I could try to-”
“No. It won’t work. Not yet, at least. Here.”
She quickly put pen to paper and wrote out instructions in her scrappy handwriting.
“Here’s a stability regimen. Repeat it every hour, on the hour. Let me know if his vitals drop or anything changes.”
She handed the hastily-written note to Skye and the nearest medical tech and then left the clinic to be where she really needed to be: her lab, working with her cutting-edge equipment to determine just what she was dealing with.
Like her, ꭥ-Viper was brilliant and crafty, along with being tactically shrewd. Years ago, during their initial skirmishes, they had both deployed the same chemicals against each other. Ever since then they had been locked into an ever-escalating arms race, seeking to outdo the other’s latest innovation and develop something truly radical in order to more effectively debilitate and even kill the other’s allies.
This potent toxin was just the next step in said arms race, but she had not been expecting it to be such a massive leap forward. Placing samples in spectrometers and preparing additional assays for what she assumed would be a long night, she allowed herself to hope for the best – but she still expected the worse.
So far, none of her colleagues were dead beyond retrieval. Sage was doing her work right now, but there was no guarantee she could revive them all. As Viper let her equipment proceed and stepped out of her lab briefly, she returned to the clinic to find Sage and Vyse deliberating in hushed tones inside of Sage’s office. The moment she made eye contact with Sage, the latter urged her to come in.
“We need an immediate response,” Sage asserted.
“We should consider the possibility of another attack at any time,” Vyse added.
“Agreed,” Viper said, “but Sage, we need you here. Vyse and I will handle all external affairs.”
“That is fine.”
Sage’s cold tone suggested she did not entirely agree, but she may also have been simply exhausted from so much use of her healing abilities. Her skin was paler than usual and her hands were shaking as she gripped her desk.
“I’ll coordinate our security team here and put the base in lockdown, at least for the night,” Viper said.
“I’ll task Cypher and Fade with intelligence and surveillance. We need information,” Vyse said.
“Just don’t put them in harm’s way. We don’t need any additional losses.”
“I will let them make the decisions that they think are right.”
She frowned, but did not fight back on that. She had enough to worry about and none of them had the authority to overrule each other without Brimstone present; and since that was a foregone conclusion, she had no way to give either of them orders. She would have to trust them both.
“I’ll be in my lab,” Viper said, pulling away from them. “I’m already working to figure out just what Brimstone has been attacked with.”
“We’ll get our operations squared away quickly.”
“Send any updates to my inbox. I cannot be disturbed tonight.”
It was of utmost importance that she be allowed to focus – and no contaminants could be allowed into her lab space, lest they potentially set her back. Everything needed to be perfectly arranged and planned, and yet none of them were prepared enough to be able to do that. They could only trust to their respective skills and hope for the best.
She spent far too long in her lab that night, heedless of the hour and desperate for a solution. She threw everything at the wall, and nothing stuck – the compound evaded her efforts at identification, and proved to be resilient to typical determination methods. Forced to think outside the box, she came up with a number of approaches – but they utilized dangerous materials, took time, and were not guaranteed to be successful.
Time was of the essence. She did not know how long she could keep Brimstone stable without a real antitoxin at hand. She had large quantities of medicine and Sage’s well-trained staff to attend to him, but how many more hours would that give him? For all she knew, he was crashing out and on the brink of death right now and a frantic message was in her inbox begging her to come and help save him.
Instinctively, she checked her inbox. Nothing. Okay. But a cursory look did remind her of something unpleasant that she had not yet tackled since everything turned upside-down.
She had an unread message from Reyna, four days old, that she was pretty sure contained nothing of value. But it prompted her to remember that Reyna had been one of the few to return alive – Reyna had raced past her, wheeling a gurney with Sova’s lifeless form on it. They had locked eyes briefly, but said nothing.
Where was she now?
It was one in the morning, and there was plenty of work left to do. Viper’s cursor hovered over the unread email, but she could not properly prepare herself to send a response. Was Reyna even awake? And if she was, would she even be able to talk about it? The wounds remained fresh, and there was no salve that could possibly ease her mind at this time.
Viper hesitated, but then remembered her earlier realization: time is of the essence. She needed to know as much as possible, no matter how much it hurt. She could spare tonight, but the morning would present a different set of problems. Reluctantly, her heart heavy and her chest tight, she opened the email and skipped past it, then sent the briefest follow-up:
Meet me in my office at 8 AM, please. We need to talk.
She knew she was not going to get any sleep tonight. It wouldn’t be the first time. Closing out of the message as if to banish it to some interim space where she could pretend it didn’t exist for the moment, she pulled her protective gear back on and returned to the lab, where her equipment churned away and monitors beeped all night.
Seven hours passed in the blink of a bleary eye. She could operate without sleep, but for how long?
She was at twenty-four hours now, and another cup of coffee awaited her as she prepared for Reyna’s arrival.
Why are you so afraid?
She knew exactly why. She was unwilling to put it into words. Somehow, that made the threat feel all the more real.
Threat of what, exactly?
She didn’t know what she feared. Reyna had raced past her yesterday, consumed by her duty and without a moment to spare for her lover – and almost certainly she would be working through her feelings today. But Viper did not expect the woman to arrive at her office looking half-dead and with grief written plain on her face. It was clear she had not slept at all, much like Viper.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Mmmhm.”
“Have a seat, please. Coffee?”
Reyna accepted wordlessly. She took it as a conditional invitation to this discussion, but Viper could feel that she would rather be anywhere else.
Don’t think I like doing this too. She needed answers, and wished there was an easier way to get them. She also needed to help Reyna any way she could.
“I understand how difficult this must have been for you.”
Reyna said nothing.
“I can’t imagine how you feel right now. I’m not going to try, either. I just want to know what happened out there.”
Reyna nursed her coffee, apprehensive. Her eyes flickered up and down, from the dark caffeinated void in her cup to Viper’s weary, bloodshot eyes. She was searching for comfort, and found little in either. Again, she said nothing.
“Any information you can provide me will be helpful. We need to organize our response immediately.”
Reyna understood the need. It was the mechanism of action that appeared to elude her. She said nothing still, as though withholding secrets, and Viper grew irritated as she continued to talk to a brick wall.
“Reyna, please. I’m working as quickly as I can right now. I worked all night. I’m trying to figure out at least what happened to Brimstone.”
“I can tell you a thing or two about that.”
Reyna’s tone made her blood run cold. She paused, her hands halfway to the edge of the desk, staring Reyna right in the eyes.
Reyna’s eyes were typically lively, occupied by a dancing flame that took on varying hues of purple according to her mood. There was nothing there now but a cool, distant anger, the burning embers of rage smothered by grief.
“I saw him fight back. He tried to fight back. We were completely caught off guard.”
“What happened?”
“We were gassed,” Reyna said succinctly. “She poisoned us.”
Viper’s heart could have stopped. She knew this was coming, but she wasn’t prepared for the words. A thousand hours of preparation would not have been ample for the revelation – she had met herself before, but something about this time was different. This was a whole new level of violence and malice that she did not think her alter self would stoop to. She had thought wrong.
“She poisoned us all without warning. No consideration for the sanctuary or the children. We were lucky that most of them were in their beds at that point.”
“And Brimstone?”
“He did what he could,” Reyna said, with derision. “But he’s one man.”
“He was the last one, wasn’t he?”
Reyna nodded. Somehow, she understood how that came to be. Brimstone was always a fighter, even in his older age. He would not have gone down without a struggle. But if they were caught by surprise, and her own mirror was leading the charge…it was not a surprise to know that this was the outcome.
“I was barely conscious when I watched him die. It was prolonged. Dreadful. He suffered…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, you’re sorry?”
Reyna’s voice quivered for the first time since she had sat down. Her coffee was forgotten.
“Do you realize how it feels to look at you right now?”
Viper felt as though she had been punched in the gut. An uncomfortable feeling persisted even after she regained composure.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s you. It was you.”
“Reyna…”
“She removed her mask before she killed him. She wanted him to see her face,” Reyna said, biting her bottom lip. “Your face, Viper. She wanted him to know who it was.”
Now it was Viper’s turn to be silent. She wasn’t stunned – she just didn’t know what she could say to make anything better. If anything, her words would probably make the situation worse. Reyna wasn’t accusing her of something she didn’t do, but it was clear that looking into Viper’s eyes brought her back to that moment last night.
“I’m sorry,” Reyna apologized, through unsteady breaths. “But do you realize how I feel right now?”
Then before Viper could even offer an answer, she snorted derisively. “No, I don’t think you do. How could you?”
“Reyna, I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to help.”
“You can’t upset me more than I’m already upset,” Reyna said. “They attacked us. They attacked me. They went right for my people, my wards, my children. They would have gone for my sister too, if she-”
Reyna trailed off, choking back her words, her temper rising and her eyes welling up with fresh tears. By the glistening streaks on her cheeks, she had already given up plenty tonight.
“She was out for treatment,” Reyna said, the bitterness in her voice making Viper’s skin crawl. “She was supposed to come back tomorrow. One more day. If they had waited one more fucking day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You.” Reyna wheeled on her so suddenly she reached for a weapon she did not have on her. “You’re sorry? You don’t even know the half of it.”
“Reyna, this isn’t like you.”
“I watched her press her palm to his face and suffocate him to death. He died slowly, agonizingly, choking down her toxin.”
“He’s not dead, Reyna.”
“He might as well be,” Reyna said, fresh tears brimming in her eyes. “It would probably be more merciful for him.”
“Don’t say that.”
“And you know what the worst part is? She was satisfied with her work. I watched her go…Raze with her…and she was satisfied.”
Viper said nothing. She understood herself better than anyone else. She wondered if satisfaction was the word she would choose to describe such a feeling.
She did what she came to do. But is she satisfied at all? Or is this just grim work for her?
But she had nothing more to say to Reyna. She was hurt, almost betrayed, by how Reyna looked at her as though she were the enemy. She wanted to plead her case, offer a reminder that though they might share the same face, they did not share hearts and minds.
But what good would it do right now? Reyna had nothing more to say, and got up to leave without being dismissed. Normally such insubordination would be disciplined. Viper did not have it in her heart to call after her partner as she stalked out of her office and disappeared down the hall.
It was you.
She would try not to think about those words as she had a long, busy day ahead. She could only imagine what Reyna saw in her eyes at that moment. She could only imagine what Reyna felt. But she did not dare to ask more.
Resigning herself to frustration, and forcing herself to focus, she set about brewing another cup of coffee and prepared to return to her lab for the next step in her effort to save Brimstone’s life – if indeed such a thing was even possible now.