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kivaember · 3 days

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SLAPS DOWN SOME FREUD AND RUSTY STUFF. It's just Freud being a freak and Rusty being very alarmed and then very murderous towards him.

Guess you can call this one-sided freud/rusty on freud's side??? i'll leave it for the reader to decide. enjoy!

Arquebus work functions were absolute hell on earth.

It wasn't just the fact that Vespers were paraded around as products rather than employees, it was the fact that Rusty had to stand around and smile vapidly while he had far too many people who he fucking despised talk to him and shake his hand and ask far too many personal questions that weren't relevant to his augmentions or job description at all.

Well, no, technical lie. There were many questions about his augmentations, but they were rarely about their effectiveness in improving his piloting abilities and the like. They were normally things like "is it true that these augmentations extend your life?" or "Arquebus have been advertising the Gen Tens are something that can hit the domestic markets, that they improve the human body in all qualities, is that true?" or "So I hear that one of the biggest risks to augmentation surgery is erectile dysfunction, what do you do about that?" or "Is it true you have to be sterilised?? So you can't get girls pregnant, right?"

There was a reason behind such questions. With the Gen Tens finally out of the experimental stage (as in, they managed to get them to stop killing people) and being extensively field tested in multiple roles, Arquebus had boldly began an advertisement compaign encouraging the domestic sector to invest in augmenting their employees.

Gone were the days where augmentations only benefited soldiers and pilots! With the Gen Tens, the augmentation surgeries were so safe that they could be done far more cheaply than previous generations, and offered a slew of advantageous that would make you a very productive and long-lived worker! The military sector, while booming, was still very restrictive in terms of how many people you can augment until you start scraping the bottom of the poorest barrel, so now Arquebus turned their hungry gaze on the domestic sector.

Arquebus's many subsidaries were going to fall in line, but the executives still had many questions they wanted answers to when spinning up their own advertisement campaigns. What better way to get those answers than from the source? Hence the Vespers, trotted out like good little dogs, barking to the tune that Arquebus wanted, lying through their teeth, telling the corporate vultures what they wanted to hear, all while Rusty hoped they all did get augmented and died horribly from unexpected complications.

Would serve them right.

But it made these work functions an utter horror show for him. Draining. Exhausting. As the initial slew of questioning and socialising began to slow as the alcohol levels rose in everyone's bloodstreams, Rusty was grumpy, tired and had a pounding headache. He kept his smile up only by vividly imagining blowing everyone up with his mind.

"-so the sterility isn't universal?"

"It depends on what you mean by 'sterile'," Maeterlinck answered with a patience Rusty had long ran out of. It was him and her, fielding questions from Executive... Mike Mcfuckhands of Shit Company #69. By this point most people were very drunk, but somehow he and Maeterlinck got ambushed by the one half-way sober executive before they could successfully escape without notice.

(It was one of the few times that Rusty genuinely commiserated with his fellow Vespers. The look of utter despair they had shared had been emphatic.)

"Well, you know..." Mcfuckhands waved his wine glass a little carelessly. Rusty watched with dull eyes as wine spilled over the lip and onto the floor. "You don't need condoms to have some fun, if you know what I mean."

"Well, the augmentations won't protect you from STIs, of course," Maeterlinck said evenly. She was a stronger soldier than Rusty, that was for sure, keeping such a straight face and bland voice. "They'll mitigate the worst of the symptoms, but it won't grant you immunity."

"Oh, er, of course, of course, but, you won't get someone pregnant?"

"No."

save me, Rusty begged whatever deity or demon was listening, save me from this hell.

His prayers were, amazingly, answered almost immediately.

With a chiming tune that was out of place of their swanky surroundings, Rusty's phone began to trill. Leaping upon this opportunity like a starving dog on a bull carcass, he slipped his phone out of his pocket and stepped back.

"Sorry, gotta take this. Important call," he said, ignoring Maeterlinck's dagger stare of 'you cowardly traitor'.

Sorry, Maeterlinck. It was every man for himself out here.

Preparing for it to be a spam call trying to sell him some kind of gizmo or whatever, Rusty answered the call without checking the ID as he strode with purpose towards the ballroom's doors.

"You just saved me from a really painful conversation from some dumbass executive so I'll listen to whatever you're peddling," Rusty said. "What is it this time? A roomba that'll clean your apartment and then suck you off once it's done?"

"...haven't got one of those in my toolbox, but now you've got me interested, V.IV."

Rusty froze comically.

"C-Commander?" he half-squeaked, mortified when Freud started sniggering in that low, throaty way of his. "What- I thought you were a telemarketer! Why're you-"

Wait.

"...why're you calling me?" Rusty asked dumbly. Hesitantly, he started walking again, his confusion eclipsing his mortification. "Is V.II not picking up?"

"Why would I call Snail?"

Because you're the commander and he's your deputy bitch, Rusty did not say.

"To torment him," he said instead.

"...okay, fair," Freud conceded. "But I called you intentionally. You need to ditch that party and return to HQ."

"Is there an emergency deployment?" Rusty asked, easily slipping into business mode. He exited the ballroom, the music and chatter cutting off when the doors shut behind him. The entrance hallway was far quieter and cooller.

"Emergency deployment... eh, yeah, something like that..." Freud said vaguely. "Just hurry up to the hangar. I'll be waiting, V.IV."

He hung up without much as a goodbye, and Rusty pocketed his phone with a frown. He wondered what kind of mission this was, to have Freud directly calling him and circumventing Snail. It must be pretty bad. Maybe Balam had finally managed to reclaim Pluto from Arquebus? They'd been duking it out over that planetoid's chunked remains ever since it had blown up.

(Why had it blown up? Rusty had no idea. Any details pertaining to "Pluto's Cracking" were very vague and buried under impenetrable black ink. Must've been some UEG experiment that went horribly wrong, was Rusty's theory.)

But if it wasn't Pluto... Rusty couldn't think of anything else urgent enough to warrant Freud's calling him during a work function. Well, even if it was something as mundane as acting as his punching bag in simulated spars, it was leagues better than suffering stupid questions from equally moronic executives...

And Freud was a good excuse to hold up if Snail cottoned onto his early departure. Yes, whatever Freud wanted will be worth it.

Two hours later and standing outside of the London's city limits in STEEL HAZE, Rusty reassessed his earlier sentiments.

Upon arriving at the hangar after switching out his suit and tie for the Vesper flight suit, Freud had all but chivvied him into STEEL HAZE and ordered him to follow him to a set of coordinates outside of London's city limits. All flight clearances had been given for them to travel in flight configuration over the city, Freud assured, and Rusty, unsure but curious, did as he was told.

The coordinates led them both to a large stretch of absolute nowhere deep in the irradiated wastelands of Earth. The ground was rocky and uneven, large fissures gaping where the crust had split open with tremendous force, and so deep that not even STEEL HAZE's sensors could detect the bottom. A flashing alert for unsafe levels of radiation blinked at the bottom of his HUD, the value registering around 7Gy - potent enough to give him acute radiation poisoning if he opened his cockpit hatch. The sky as well was an unsettled shade of rust, the reddish brown dust that coated everything hazing the air due to the constant blistering winds.

It boggled the mind to think some humans did actually live out in these wastelands, somehow, and even more boggling that the Rejuvenated cities were functioning oases where it was easy to forget the state of the world beyond their towering walls.

Honestly, looking at the wasteland around him, Rusty couldn't help but feel relief that Rubicon wasn't this bad. Yeah, the climate was stuck in the middle of an ever deepening ice age in some parts, and majority of life had been rendered extinct... but the atmosphere was irradiated, plants still grew without aid, there was still rain and groundwater and other signs of defiant life. Earth didn't have that. Outside of its fake movie sets that were those cities, the whole planet was straight up dead.

Just completely, totally, utterly dead.

"Right, yeah, this'll do..." Freud hummed. "Some good cover, wide open space, far away enough that those Peacekeepers won't get involved..."

Ominous words.

"Hey, Commander?" Rusty said.

"Yeah?"

"Are you planning on murdering me out here or something?"

Freud didn't immediately answer. Slowly, LOCKSMITH swivelled around to face STEEL HAZE, but its weapons remained inactive and the Scudder rifle was pointing downwards towards the ground. Rusty still kept his finger close to his trigger, though, his implants ready to engage his FCS the second LOCKSMITH so much as twitched wrong.

"......is that what you're into?" Freud finally asked.

What. "What?"

"Hey, no judgement on my part. I get that there's a bit of excitement at consensual attempted murder-"

What???

"Uh- no? No??" Rusty stuttered, unsure on how Freud even made that bizarre leap of logic. "I'm not- that's not why I asked! You just-"

Freud cut him off with a horribly obnoxious laugh. "You're so easily flustered, V.IV! I'm just yanking your chain. I know you're a good little tamed wolf."

Rusty huffed, his face feeling uncomfortably hot. "With someone like you, it's hard to tell, commander. You've always had unique tastes."

"Ooooh, looks like this wolf's muzzle can slip loose," Freud purred. "Perfect. That'll make this more... fun."

STEEL HAZE's sensors picked up LOCKSMITH's weapon systems coming online. Functioning purely off instinct, Rusty activated his own and snapped STEEL HAZE's arm right up, its SAMPU machine gun aimed squarely at LOCKSMITH's Core - just as LOCKSMITH's Scudder rifle pointed at him.

"You didn't even blink," Freud murmured. "Good."

"I've always been quick on the draw, commander," Rusty said lightly, maintaining V.IV Rusty's confident, airy mein all while his mind raced frantically, trying to figure out if he had slipped up somewhere, if Freud had cottoned onto his true nature. Had he really called him out here to get rid of him? Well, least Freud offered him a fighting chance - better than being vanished by the Peacekeepers in the middle of the night.

"Yeah. Your reaction times in the sims were always somewhat impressive..."

LOCKSMITH started to sidestep. STEEL HAZE matched it. They began to circle each other.

"But sims are rarely indicative of a pilot's true skill," Freud said conversationally, like they weren't holding guns in each other's faces. "It's only when they're really under pressure that they show their true abilities."

"Is that what this is?" Rusty asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. "You want to see me perform under pressure?"

"You half-ass your spars in the sims." Freud's voice went flat - almost cold. "You can clearly do better, but you don't. You pretend to be less skilled than you really are, and it really, really, really pisses me off. So this is what we're going to do."

With its free hand, LOCKSMITH gestured to their surroundings. "We're going to fight here and now. If you don't give me your all, I'm going to crack your cockpit open like an egg. What's the ambient radiation level right now? 7Gy?"

"Yeah," Rusty said flatly.

"Hm, that means you'd have about ten minutes before you start vomiting your guts out and your intestines try to escape your body through your asshole," Freud said, so matter-of-fact. "I think it'd take, what, a few hours before you start bleeding from every orifice?"

It'd be a horrible way to go. Rusty felt his pulse pick up a little. "Did Arquebus HQ authorise this 'test', commander?"

"I always ask for forgiveness than permission from HQ, and they always forgive me," Freud laughed, but there was something strangely bitter about it. "You can be replaced, anyways. Now."

LOCKSMITH's head tilted fractionally.

"Fight like the cornered wolf that you are, V.IV," Freud murmured. "Let me see those fangs of yours."

And before Rusty could respond, LOCKSMITH fired.

In the end, the decision was easy to make.

Though Rusty had told himself he'd try to conceal his true skill as much as possible, even at risk to himself, when his back was really pushed to the wall and he had to choose between dying and keeping his cover, or fighting back like a cornered animal desperate to live and blowing everything, Rusty didn't really have to think about it.

He fought back with everything he had. He bared those fangs. He pushed himself to his very limits, Freud matching him every step of the way, pushing him and pushing him, until their ammunition was spent and the generators were close to overheating, their battle tearing up new scars along the cracked earth and leaving chunks of of themselves behind.

The fight didn't end in a draw so much as they wordlessly came to a mutual halt several tens of metres apart. LOCKSMITH was missing an arm - a casualty to Rusty's laser slicer shearing the limb off at the shoulder - and parts of its armour was warped and dented from STEEL HAZE's plasma missiles eating through the military grade steel. The Scudder rifle had been tossed aside a while back, and LOCKSMITH's fingers on that hand were partially crushed from where it had slugged STEEL HAZE in the gut at full force. Rusty was still feeling the ache from that even now.

He wished he could say STEEL HAZE was in a better state, but the fact was the AC was barely functioning. Its right arm was useless - Freud's revenge for LOCKSMITH's dismembered arm - and STEEL HAZE's ablative armour was stripped down to nothing, revealing the dull, gunmetal grey base armour underneath, scorched and scratched from deflected rounds or glancing blows from the MORLEY grenade launcher. Rusty had sacrificed many of STEEL HAZE's functionality to defend the Core at all costs, knowing it would take only one minor breach of the Core block to have him dying from acute radiation poisoning.

If they continued to fight, Rusty would lose. That was cold, hard fact, and he was braced for it, braced for overloading his own generator and latching onto LOCKSMITH if need be, if only to drag Freud into his grave with him, but instead after a long, charged pause, LOCKSMITH's weapon systems deactivated.

Rusty kept STEEL HAZE's active.

"...that's more like it," Freud murmured. His voice had a distinct breathlessness to it that Rusty tried to ignore. "You were glorious, V.IV. Vicious, fast, and decisive. You almost killed me a few times, might've if luck had been on your side."

"You sound disappointed," Rusty gritted out, not bothering to pretend to be V.IV Rusty. "Don't tell me this was some fucking convoluted suicide attempt."

Freud laughed - no, cackled. "Suicide attempt? You still think you can beat me right now?"

Rusty swallowed down his pride, sensing a trap in Freud's breathless, wild voice. He clenched his jaw, bared his fangs in a snarl that Freud couldn't see but definitely hear as he growled: "Not right now. But one day."

"One day. One day, you might be able to." Freud inhaled deeply, and let it out slow. "Yeah, one day."

Rusty waited, his pulse still thumping like a drum in his ears, STEEL HAZE poised to lunge, teetering on a tripwire. After a long, long pause, where Freud audibly pulled himself back under control, folding back his wild, deranged true self into the far more socially acceptable lines of V.I Freud, Vesper, LOCKSMITH turned away.

"Well, I think we've been gone long enough. Come on, V.IV. Let's go back."

Freud didn't wait. He launched LOCKSMITH upwards and boosted back towards the city, the AC travelling at a much slower speed than its flight-configuration allowed. Its armour integrity was likely hanging on by a thread, much like STEEL HAZE's.

Rusty reluctantly followed him but kept his distance, still trying to figure out what the fuck that had been about. Freud had always been a bit of a mystery, but it turned out he was fucking insane and couldn't be trusted to be normal at all. Who the hell invited someone out into the middle of nowhere to goad them into a fight to the death?! What was wrong with this guy?!

i better be careful around him, Rusty thought agitatedly. Freud now knew his true skill - had known he'd been holding back for a long while, it seemed. Had he shared this information with anyone else? Was he onto Rusty, or was he so fucking nuts that he only cared about being cheated out of a good spar in the sims? Was Rusty going to be called out into the irradiated wastelands to fight him again? Should he complain to Snail about this?! Would Snail side with him out of his hatred for Freud, or with Freud out of his hatred for Rusty???

And more importantly...

...

Who was going to authorise STEEL HAZE's repairs... since this wasn't an official sortie, then... then this might come out of... Rusty's wages...

...

i'm definitely going to kill him, he decided, cold with an intense, deep fury, maybe not today or tomorrow, but one day, i'm going to fucking kill him.

#armored core #armored core 6 #fanfic #v.iv rusty #v.i freud #freud is such a freak i love him

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