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kivaember · 1 month

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when you get the urge to just crank out 2k+ oneshot about rusty getting briefly jealous over ayre when 621 tells him about her............ well anyways. here, enjoy! (it's not 2am i should sleep)

jealousy

Rusty wasn't quite sure when it started exactly, these talks with the new merc in town.

The days were long on Rubicon, and the nights even longer, and as the stalemate stretched between Arquebus and Balam, so too did the monotony of the various sorties Rusty was sent out on. Usually he was alone, performing well at 'surgical strikes' or 'sabotage runs', but sometimes he was deployed alongside the MT squad he was the commander of. There wasn't much chatter there, though, except for 'yes sir!' or 'understood, commander!' from the grunts, or Snail's dulcet tones drawling through the comms.

With the new merc, it was a little different.

He didn't talk for one. Raven only ever communicated through text, and even these were very short phrases like ack, or negative, or clarify. It should've been off-putting, but Rusty found a strange sort of openness to the blank canvas Raven offered during sorties. No matter what Rusty said, Raven always replied with an ack at the very least.

Acknowledgement. I acknowledge your words.

It was little things at first, inconsequential. After their first team up at The Wall, where Raven survived where he shouldn't've, Rusty had been curious yet wary. He knew that the merc was running a stolen license - he'd met the original Raven and had narrowly escaped with his life in the encounter - and he'd heard of Handler Walter's reputation. His Hounds tended to be high-quality pilots, no matter their outdated augmentations and their equally outdated ACs - and they bore no loyalty to no one but Walter, who was a dangerous wildcard in his own right.

So Rusty had tried to scope out this 'hound'. Got absolutely fuck-all in return.

"So, where're you from?" Ack. Negative. "Nowhere?" Ack. "How old are you?" Ack. Negative. "You don't know?" Ack. "What's your favourite food?" Ack. Negative. "You don't have one?" Ack. "What're your plans after Rubicon?" Ack. Negative. "None?" Ack.

Was it cageyness? Maybe he was so brainfried he didn't remember? Rusty didn't know, but it prompted him to give him examples in return, even if they were all blatant lies:

"I'm from the Jupiter colonies, though I grew up in Tau Ceti." Ack. "I'm almost forty years old." Ack. "My favourite food is seafood paella." Ack. "I plan to take a two week vacation to the beach after Rubicon and blow all my bonus money on a new car." Ack.

And from there...

Rusty didn't know when it started. When his probing questions getting stonewalled turned into him just... talking to Raven, if only to hear the ack in return. How his blatant lies shifted into something just half a step away from vaguely truthful, on those long days and even longer nights, during sorties where they trashed Balam outposts and sent their MTs running, or harassed Liberation Front supply lines (yet, somehow, those Rubiconists always somehow managed to slip away before they could be captured for re-education, strange that....)

It'd become a sort of catharsis for him, a comfort. Maybe this was what it was supposed to be like when you went to therapy, having someone you could just talk at to sort out your own thoughts, not having to juggle with actually carrying a conversation, just needing someone to say yup, i hear you, i'm listening, without giving needless platitudes or advice - or worse, asking questions.

Hah.

It was kind of pathetic, really.

But for someone like Rusty, this was the best he was going to get. Once he'd finished his mission, no one would ever want to speak to him again - provided he wasn't buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, with his name synonymous to traitor.

So, despite the slippery slope this was, with Raven squatting in the nebulous region of threat i am keeping close to observe and one of the few decent people in my fucked up social circle i'd be sad to kill one day, Rusty kept talking.

And eventually... Raven spoke back.

"-nyway, it's getting a bit awkward right now. Freud's more than a little antsy at how Snail keeps giving me all the assault missions while he's staying benched just in case, and I have no idea how to tell him that Snail's probably just trying to kill me by overworking me. Well, tell him in a way to say 'this isn't a good thing!' Pretty sure Freud would find that a fun afternoon, dodging assassination attempts..."

'Ack.'

"Honestly, I'm a little jealous of you sometimes, buddy," Rusty sighed half-jokingly. He toed a chunk of scrap with STEEL HAZE's clawed foot, checking it for mines. Balam had gone a little nuts with this current outpost of theirs, and the place was lousy with them. "You get to pick and choose your missions, and don't have to deal with office politics. Now there's a battlefield that takes no survivors, let me tell you."

'Ack.'

"In fact, it's just you and Walter, isn't it?" Rusty mused. He knew Arquebus had already exhausted its information network to dig up as many skeletons as it could on Walter, and amazingly enough they'd only come up with a few bones. Walter's past was shadier than midnight fog, and Raven basically manifested out of thin air with how non-existent his papertrail was.

Or, rather, how fraudulent it was. The original C4-621 had died over two years ago. Whoever this 621 was... no one had a clue, no one but Raven himself and Walter, that is.

'Ack. Negative.'

Rusty paused, putting his very cautious examination of his immediate surroundings on hold as he fixed STEEL HAZE's ocular feeds onto STALKER.

"It isn't?"

Raven didn't respond, which was odd. He always gave at least an ack. Had he said something he wasn't supposed to? Rusty was intrigued... but he knew he'd get nothing else out of him. Still, it was a scrap of info-

'i have a friend.'

Rusty blinked at the words that flashed across his HUD, in the little chatbox that was designated for STALKER's text comms. It was not ack, negative or clarify. It was actually a full on sentence, the very first that Rusty had ever read from the mercenary.

He was actually speechless for several moments, the words actually taking some time to fully process their meaning.

"A... friend?" Rusty repeated.

'Ack.'

Rusty waited, because in any normal social setting this would be when elaboration occurred, but after three whole minutes where they just stood there staring at each other, Rusty realised nope, that was it. Raven just upended the norm to drop an enigmatic sentence and decided to explain nothing. Typical.

"...who's this friend?" Rusty tried. "You got a name for them? Any details? C'mon, throw me a bone here."

There was no immediate response. Rusty waited impatiently.

'Ayre. She's a Rubiconian. I have no bones. Sorry.'

Ayre? A Rubiconian? She?

"Huh..." Rusty's stomach felt weird, a sort of knotted tension he couldn't quite explain. A Rubiconian... he didn't know anyone by the name of 'Ayre', but then again, he's been away for ten years and didn't know everyone... as an independent mercenary, too, Raven probably took jobs for the RLF - Rusty already knew of two he'd taken - so... probably someone from one of the other cells...

A friend though... he probably interacted with her outside of missions to have that close of a relationship. Two months, though? This was the first time Rusty had prised anything other than ack, negative or clarify from the guy in those months, and it turned out he had a full on friend in his back pocket this whole time? Talk about a shock...

"How'd... you meet?" Rusty asked, aiming for casual but his words coming out all stiff instead.

'Mission.'

Right, of course.

Rusty abruptly returned to the task at hand: checking their ground route for mines as they inched through the outer perimetre of the Balam outpost. Usually they'd just fly over the damn things, but Balam had installed some heavy-hitting anti-air cannons, the outpost practically a bristling porcupine with how many of them were primed and ready to shoot a fly out of the sky so... here they were, tiptoeing through a minefield instead.

It was tedious but doable. STEEL HAZE's LIDAR system was finetuned enough to detect the mines before he entered their detonation range, and STALKER was a repurposed surveyor AC. It was slow but safe. Mostly slow.

'You too.'

"Huh?" Rusty blinked at the sudden text, confused from the lack of context. "Me what?"

'Friend.'

"...oh." It clicked. "I'm your friend too?"

'Ack.'

"Thanks, buddy," Rusty said, injecting some friendly cheer into his tone, even as he felt... conflicted over the whole thing. His stomach hurt like he'd just eaten a bowl of stinging nettles, his mouth twisted into a grimace as his emotions bounced between tiredly resigned and intensely guilty.

He didn't return the sentiment, and Raven said nothing else. In fact, the rest of the mission was completely silent, broken only by Rusty giving the occasional order or situation update as they penetrated the minefield and destroyed the anti-air guns in the outpost, the Balam MTs routed and in full retreat.

Rusty knew it was out of character. He was chatty, especially with Raven, but his mind kept churning over this mystery friend. Ayre. She. Apparently been buddies with Raven for a while.

He was surprised Walter would've tolerated it. He always weighed in whenever he was on comms on their sorties, snapping at Raven to focus on the mission, or curtly telling Rusty to stop distracting his hound. Needless to say, he and Walter did not see eye-to-eye often, and Rusty couldn't help but feel that Walter held a hint of disdain for him specifically. He had no idea what he'd done to earn that mysterious handler's ire, though. Getting too friendly with his dog, maybe?

In which case...

"Hey, Raven," Rusty said, too curious for his own good. "Does Walter know about this Ayre of yours?"

'Ack.'

"He does? And he's... fine with her?" Rusty asked in mild surprise. Huh, maybe Walter was fine with his hound knowing nice girls? Well, as nice as freedom fighter girls could be... or Walter disliked corporate mercenaries? But he was oddly friendly with Michigan, so that couldn't be it...

Maybe he was just plain homophobic? Thought Rusty was some evil gay trying to seduce his hound to bat for the Arquebus team only? Rusty couldn't help but snort at that theory.

'He doesn't think she exists.'

Uh...

"He... what?"

'He doesn't think she exists.'

Rusty had no idea how to unpack that.

"...like, does he think she's a catfish or...?"

'? Catfish can't talk?'

"What?"

'She's not a fish?'

"No, I- not that kind of fish. A catfish."

'Catfish are a diverse group of ray-finned fish. They can't communicate with humans.'

"No, no, not- it's- it's describing a technique people use, to decieve someone with a fake identity. Usually in romance scams... it's called catfishing. So, a catfish. A person faking their identity to scam you out of something."

'Ack. Negative. Ayre is not 'fake' or scamming me.'

"But Walter thinks she is?"

'He thinks she doesn't exist.'

Why did Rusty feel like they were going in circles...? He let out a laugh, amused despite the frustratingly confusing nature of this entire discussion, and shook his head.

"Buddy... why doesn't he think she exists?"

The response was a long time coming. Long enough that Rusty thought Raven had dropped the topic entirely - even if it would've left Rusty thoroughly scratching his head on the apparent Schrodinger nature of one Ayre Rubicon, when:

'Because she doesn't have a body and only I can hear her voice. He thinks she's a hallucination.'

...

Okay.

Rusty had no idea how to unpack that.

"Huh," he said, with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. "I see."

He said nothing else. What else do you say to that. Really.

'You don't think she exists either.'

"I..." Rusty could practically sense some sort of wall being pulled up between him and Raven, leaving him with only a split second to make a snap decision. Tell the truth and say yes, I actually agree with your handler for once and think she's a hallucination, and alienate Raven, or lie and say no, I believe you, tell me more, and end up spending the rest of his time humouring Raven and his hallucination in full earnest.

And... really, what was wrong in that?

This hallucination clearly didn't interfere in Raven's mission performance, and he seemed to be otherwise connected to reality. Maybe Ayre was just a manifestation of Raven's loneliness, an imaginary friend he'd conjured up for himself and just couldn't let go of. Rusty knew Gen Fours had it hard. Legally, they weren't even considered humans, just intellectual property or military assets. Maybe this 'Ayre' was the only "human contact" he'd had until Rusty had come along.

With that in mind... Rusty's decision was easy.

"I believe you," Rusty said gently. "Just trying to wrap my head around not having a body... must be hard."

There was a pause, a long one, and Rusty waited to see if Raven would see through him and scorn him for trying to humour him, or if he was just-

'She says she's used to it, but there're some things she wants to do but can't, without a body.'

"Oh? Like what?"

And just like that, their roles were reversed. Raven's responses were slow, typed out as they were, but Rusty was getting more than ack, negative or clarify, and he felt a little rueful that it was because of an imaginary friend when he'd been standing right here for months...

But it was fine. Rusty'll show him that he didn't have to pretend to get his human interaction. Just like how Raven quietly listened and acknowledged his words, Rusty'll will do the same. And even if Raven kept hallucinating this Ayre, what did it matter, so long as it didn't interfere in his connection to reality?

Out of all vices Rusty had seen in his fellow pilots... this was the most harmless one

...if a little sad.

#armored core #armored core 6 #v.iv rusty #c4 621 #viv621 #fanfic #when ur slapped with a fic idea instead of sleeping...#anyway here's rusty getting jealous over ayre for a hot second

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