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After that, it all goes faster than he can keep track of. Job after job, showing upstarts who’s boss and learning what it means to run a city. It’s not all gunfights and explosions; there are negotiations and sales and all the small details that come with running a large crime ring.
Jack approaches him one day with a long box under her arm, setting it down on the coffee table while he kicks the shit out of a Beedrill.
“You’re a pretty good shot,” she says. He shrugs. He’s good enough, he supposes. More hits than misses, that’s good, right? “Geoff’s been talking about another eye in the sky.”
With that, she opens up the box to reveal a shiny black rifle. After a moment of hesitation, he picks it up. He’s pretty sure he’s never held a weapon this expensive. The Crew’s logo is painted in thin green lines on the butt stock, and when he lifts it as if to shoot it fits comfortably against his shoulder.
At Jack’s urging when she sees the delighted smile on his face, he follows her down to one of the lower floors. It’s been converted into a shooting range, all non-supporting walls torn out. There are no guns down here, but there’s a whole shelving unit of sorted and labelled ammo. He and Jack each put on a pair of earphones, the foam pressing his glasses into the side of his head awkwardly, and she walks him through how to load, aim, and fire. It’s all fairly intuitive, and he gets the hang of it quickly. The recoil is smooth but powerful, and he resolves to start wearing some sort of padding on that arm.
When he makes ten headshots in a row, followed by another ten in other vital areas, he’s reached a decision.
He turns to Jack, “Does it come in pink?”
Geoff happily starts assigning Ray to sniper positions, and just like that everything starts falling into place.
With Ray as their watchful eye above, with occasional assistance from Jack and Gavin in a chopper, the other guys start going bigger and bigger, knowing there’s someone watching their back. Even Vagabond, who Ray knows doesn’t quite trust him yet, starts calling for a few quick shots when he’s caught in a sticky situation.
It’s fucking awesome. He gets to watch all the action from above, see all the fighting and explosions without being in the thick of things. It suits his dark-alley, fast-escape nature. He still fights on the ground sometimes though , when they need an extra man or a sniper wouldn’t help much anyway (or if Jack sees how restless he’s getting, how he says he likes the distance but has started to love the adrenalin of having bullets fire just past your skull, and assures him that she and Gavin will get it covered from the air).
He cares for his rifle the way some might care for a child. He cleans it daily, practices whenever he can to feel the recoil go through him like a shockwave, makes sure the pink paint never scratches or wears away. Michael laughs and mocks him for doting over the gun, but he owns a chrome car, he doesn’t get to judge.
So he shoots, and he games with Michael and Gavin and kicks Geoff’s ass at CoD on an almost nightly basis, and he gets used to Vagabond’s icy stare drilling into the back of his head, and tries to figure out to repay Jack for the gun and the opportunities and the way she so effortlessly gave him a space in her little group. And it’s incredible.
Geoff hands him a small metal disk, half an inch thick and heavier than it looks. It’s strangely warm to the touch in the center, but the rest is cool and pristine.
“This is your respawner,” Geoff says, and Ray’s eyes go wide. He’s only ever heard of these things, and now he’s holding one right in his hand. Whoa.
Then it stabs him in the palm.
“Son of a bitch!” He barely avoids dropping it. Geoff laughs, the asshole.
“Yeah, it’ll do that. Probably should have given you one sooner, but they’re expensive as dicks and we tend to need a lot per person.”
Ray’s learned that a good way to gauge Geoff’s mood is by keeping track of how many times dicks come up in a conversation. Zero, and he’s pissed; from there it’s just a constant scale upwards.
“They’re all gonna take a blood sample,” Geoff continues. “Every time you respawn you have to prep a new one. Keep it with you, especially in a fight. As soon as it gets too far from you it won’t work. Any critical hit will activate it, and it’ll give you an extra boost until you either get the hell outta there or die.”
“And then I come back?” Ray asks.
“Eh, kind of. It’s some science-y dimensional bullshit that Ryan’ll probably explain to you eventually. Point is, you get hit, you basically die but not completely, and you wake up somewhere completely fine with a dead respawner. Don’t just die for the hell of it though; I spent a cock-ton of money on those.”
The thought of dying makes him queasy.
“I’ll do my best,” he says, and slips it into a handy inside pocket in his nice new jacket.
When the mask finally comes off, it’s under fire in an air hanger, with Jack and Gavin fending off police choppers and Michael and Geoff trying to get close through a mass of cop cars. With Gav manning the gun in the chopper and Michael tossing sticky bombs and grenades at their pursuers, it looked like everything was going swell.
Then Vagabond took a .50 caliber bullet to the thigh, and his leg… Ray’s doing his best not to retch, dragging Vagabond into cover despite the man’s pained groans and shallow breathing as the ruins of his limb scrapes across the ground.
“Hey, stay awake bud, stay with me.” He snaps in Vagabond’s masked face, waiting till he sees glassy blue eyes blink up at him before speaking again. “Talk to me. Stay awake. What happened out there?”
All he gets in response is an agonized moan as muscles spasm and pull at torn nerves and muscles that aren’t there anymore. Shit. “Just hold on, let me –“he tries pressing his jacket against the bleeding stump but all he gets for his efforts are a ruined hoodie and an animalistic scream of pain.
The others are yelling through the comms, demanding status updates and current locations and asking questions he can’t answer because one of his crewmates is dying.
Vagabond hisses two words.
“What? No! Are you crazy?”
“Kill me and I’ll respawn” is the only reply he gets.
“I – I can’t… Fuck, I can’t –“Panic is rising in his throat, choking him, making it hard to breathe and guns are still firing and he can’t answer his comms he can’t shoot he can’t shoot him he can’t
With seemingly all the strength he has left, Vagabond pulls the mask off his head and looks Ray dead in the eye.
“I’m no use like this,” Ryan says. “It’ll barely hurt compared to my leg, and I’ll be right back. Kill me.”
He wears some sort of war paint, blood red covering the top half of his face, black around his eyes and over his mouth like stitches. It makes him look fearsome even as he seems more human than Ray has ever seen him. With the mask gone, it’s like he stops being the Vagabond, the Mad King, and is just another mortal man.
But they’re not quite mortal yet.
Ray draws a pistol and shoots him square between the eyes.
The aftermath of the airfield isn’t pretty. Ryan takes an hour to check in when it’s all over, and Ray spends it convinced that he messed up, that he actually killed him. It’s his first field experience with a respawner, and he had no idea what it really meant to die only to come back. He still has no idea.
When Ryan finally does call, Geoff puts him on speakerphone so everyone can yell at him. He seems shamed enough when he quietly apologizes and promises to be back quickly.
The call ends, and Ray staggers back to the couch and collapses, a hysterical little laugh clawing its way out of his throat. Gavin sits on one side of him, Michael on the other. They don’t get close, but he can feel them all the same.
“The first is always the hardest,” Gavin says quietly. “Takes a while to get used to it all.”
Michael makes a wordless noise of agreement, and the three just sit there for the twenty minutes until Ryan walks through the door, unmasked and whole, and everything starts to be okay again.