Mara sighed, turning away from the vehicle.
She activated her communicator, and her voice reverted, by pure reflex, to its professional tone.
"This is Vice-Captain O'Connell, Jaeger Company, containment mission complete. Class B rift neutralized. Boss eliminated. No residual breach. Requesting validation."
Mara's communicator crackled. It was the Division Commander.
[Vice-Captain O'Connell. You and Captain Mercer missed a major briefing and triggered a Class B incident without prior evacuation authorization. You're both summoned for a disciplinary review tomorrow at 0800. And, O'Connell... you were assigned to monitor him. Not to imitate him. Bring him back. And make sure he's sober and dressed properly.]
The communication cut off.
"Shit..."
She headed back to the vehicle.
Elias was already asleep.
Really asleep.
Head leaned against the window, breathing slow, steady.
"...Captain," she murmured, without really knowing why she was speaking out loud.
Saito, sitting on the bumper, lit a cigarette.
"Don't bother. He never wakes up until we're moving."
"It's not normal," she replied sharply.
"Nothing about him is."
Finn returned, water bottle in hand, his color a bit more human.
"Seriously..." he said in a low voice. "He... he stabbed a pen into the head of an eight-meter Nemesis."
Briggs nodded.
Finn stared at him.
"...Why does he have that?"
Briggs shrugged. "Why not."
Mara massaged the bridge of her nose.
"Agent Briggs."
"Yeah?"
"His official rank is B."
Briggs smiled, amused. "Official, yeah."
She locked eyes with him. "Have you ever seen a B do that?"
"I've seen A's die trying."
She sighed.
"Of course."
The ride back to HQ was a silent one, except for the light snoring coming from the passenger seat. Mara drove, hands clenched on the wheel, Commander Hargrave's words looping in her mind.
(Monitor him. Not imitate him.)
In the rearview mirror, she could see Saito meticulously cleaning his rifle, Briggs grinning stupidly at the scenery, and Finn, still pale, staring at his hands.
And then there was 'him.'
Elias Mercer, sleeping. Head tilted back against the headrest, mouth slightly open, breathing with the regularity of a metronome.
Mara parked in the underground garage, cutting the engine with a bit too much force. The sharp noise startled Finn awake, but not Elias.
"We're here, Captain," she said, her voice cutting.
No reaction.
"Captain Mercer."
Nothing.
She turned to him. "Commander Hargrave said if you weren't sober and dressed properly tomorrow, he'd demote you to handling latrine paperwork for the Class F hunters."
One gray-green eye cracked open. "Class F latrines are outsourced, O'Connell. Hargrave's too cheap to pay a hunter, even a demoted one, for that. Your bluff is transparent."
He stretched, cracking his vertebrae, and got out of the vehicle without a glance at the others. "Good job, guys. Fill out your reports. Well, Briggs, fill out ours. I've got a date with my pillow."
He headed toward the elevator.
Mara caught up in three strides. "The reports? You're not even going to debrief? We just had a Class C+ engagement! There are procedures! Analyses to do! Incident forms to fill out in triplicate!"
The elevator arrived. Ding. The doors opened. Elias stepped in. Mara followed, blocking the doors from closing with her arm.
"The procedures," she continued, her voice rising a notch, "exist for a reason. To learn, to improve our responses, to—"
"To keep people who like writing busy," he finished, pressing the button for his floor. "Briggs will do a summary. He's good at that. Short, simple, and he always forgets to mention the protocol deviations. Perfect."
The doors closed. They were alone in the narrow cabin.
"You don't take anything seriously, do you? Your rank, your responsibilities, your men's safety?"
He finally looked at her. His gaze was no longer sleepy. "I take keeping my men alive very seriously. The rest is noise."
"The 'noise' is what keeps the organization running! Without paperwork, no supplies! Without debriefs, no improvements! Without discipline—"
"—we have a company with the highest survival and success rate in all of Division 7," he cut in calmly. "Your numbers, not mine. You must have read them before taking the post. So either you believe in the numbers, or you believe in the procedures. Both at once is tricky."
The elevator stopped. The seventh. Their floor.
The 7th Company's HQ had nothing glorious about it. An open space with mismatched desks, screens showing sector maps, a coffee maker gurgling ominously, and a vibe more like a wacky fan club than an elite military unit.
It was 6:30 PM. The time when most companies finished their reports. Here, several hunters were gathered around a card game. Another, a guy with thick glasses, was perfecting a plastic model of a Ravager Nemesis. A young woman was levitating three coffee cups in balance above the machine.
All looked up when Elias entered. And all, without exception, had the same wide smile, the same bright look.
"Cap'n! You take care of 'em?" called the card player.
"As usual, Jax," Elias replied with a vague wave. He headed to his desk—a organized disaster of stacked papers, empty mugs, and indefinable objects.
"We heard it was a C+ that blew up prematurely," said the telekinetic, landing a steaming coffee cup right on Elias's desk without spilling a drop.
"Prematurely, yeah. Like my retirement," Elias grumbled, grabbing the cup. He took a sip and grimaced. "Rachel, your coffee still tastes like internal dissent and shattered dreams."
"That's the special 'budget cut' flavor, Captain. I brewed it in the rejected overrun reports."
Laughter erupted in the room.
Mara stayed by the door, watching the scene. She'd served in three different companies. She'd known the iron discipline of Vanguard, the cold ambition of DOOM. But this...
She saw Briggs and Saito enter in turn. Briggs was immediately bombarded with questions.
"So? What'd the new nervous guy do? He puke?"
"Did the Cap' use the pen trick? I bet a coffee he would!"
"The Vice-Captain? She hold up?"
Briggs, grinning like a kid at Christmas, launched into the tale. "...and then, the Cap', he looks at the monster, yawns, and BAM! The brick right in the face! You should've seen the beast's mug!"
The laughter doubled. Saito nodded with a small smirk.
Mara felt a dull frustration rising in her.
'Am I hallucinating, or are they straight-up celebrating the disregard for procedures?!'