Cinder

18 - Plan of Action

With a clink that only he heard over the sounds of jubilance behind him, Tobias drained the contents of his drink and placed his now-empty glass on the bar.

Surprisingly, the bottom cracked and a fissure appeared which subsequently spread to the other sides of the glass, marring its otherwise perfect and clear surface. Perhaps he'd slammed it a little harder than he'd meant to. With a slightly delayed reaction due to the buzz he was finally starting to feel, he frowned and inspected the glass out of curiosity more than actual concern for the broken item.

It certainly wasn't the only broken thing around here, but it was infinitely more replaceable.

Celebrations over the Seed's demise had been running since a few hours after the announcement came that the Amalgamation had been stopped. In less than two days, the disturbing race of rock-like abominations had made appearances all over the frontier and begun to assimilate each colony's inhabitants. It was astounding how high of a body-count they'd racked up in such a short amount of time; he understood now how even an advanced race such as the Architects almost fell victim to the pestilence as well.

It had been two days since the Tempest event, and word had rapidly spread that the hell was over just about as quickly as it had materialized. People were beginning to show their joy in the best way that humans knew how; by getting shit-faced drunk and trying to forget the whole ordeal.

Originally, he hadn't had any intention of partaking in the galactic-wide party. He'd sat out near the array for a good hour or so, only moving when a retrieval team had come to collect him, Skids, and KT's remains. As per standard protocol, they'd tried to move her parts to the cargo bay for salvage and scrapping. It was common for destroyed Titans to get broken down into individual components to make new ones, so they were reasonably startled when he'd held a gun on them and firmly told them that under no circumstances were they allowed to lay so much as a finger on her.

After alerting Gates, the acting commanding officer of the local Militia forces on Harmony, she was quick to side with Tobias and work out a compromise. They let him keep the data-core, or what was left of it anyway. He knew that this was what KT truly was anyway, not so much the chassis she was put in- but it still pained him to see that blue and white paint of that Vanguard corpse disappear from view as it was hauled off.

Now, the core sat on his bed in the quarters that had been assigned to him temporarily until he was allowed off-world. Briggs and Graves had contacted the higher-ups here to personally let them know, based on his actions over the last few days and weeks, Lieutenant Four was now Rear Admiral Four. As such, he was one of the highest ranking individuals in the Militia now, and the highest ranking officer on Harmony. As such, he'd been given some proper quarters to accommodate himself while he oversaw the reconstruction efforts on Harmony.

He didn't care about the promotion other than the quarters; all he wanted was privacy, and they provided exactly that. But everything else was white noise to him nowadays, unimportant and generally just static to his grieving mind.

He wasn't ashamed to say that he'd spent last night clutching the core as he fell asleep, tears silently streaming down his face as he tried to force himself to enter blissful oblivion. But there was no point; when he was awake, his sorrow kept him up for hours thinking about her, and when he did manage to get some sleep it was always punctuated by nightmares of the Amalgamates.

He wasn't going to go through that again, so he was here at a relatively intact bar where soldiers of IMC and Militia alike had flocked to for celebration. If he was going to get any sleep without the image of Kay or an Amalgamate staring back soullessly at him, he was going to need to be wasted.