Profile

Character Name: Agent Washington
Series: Red vs Blue
Gender: Male
Age: Unknown; presumably in his mid to late 30s
Species: Human

Appearance: The first thing anyone notices about Agent Washington is the armor. Wash wears a full suit of military-issue body armor, lightweight but strong, that covers him from head to toe. At the moment, his armor is colored light blue, with yellow accents on his shoulders and a yellow visor on his helmet. He stands at about average height, a little closer to six feet, with a medium but solid build. He's had to keep fit as part of his military training.

As for what he looks like under the helmet...well, that's a really good question. Canon still hasn't shown us his face. [Headcanon has it that he has short brown hair that's graying at the temples and grey eyes with permanent dark circles under them. Life itself has worn him out, and it shows - there's a reason he keeps that helmet on so often.]

Personality: The easiest way to describe Wash is that he has a gooey, dorky, relatively happy core enclosed by several deep layers of scarring, emotional trauma, and massive trust issues. He started off as a trusting, eager-to-please team rookie; many years, one severe mental breakdown, and multiple betrayals (several of which he committed) later, he's much more of a cynic. Outwardly and upon first meeting, he's very mission-oriented, only interested in getting the job done and lacking much patience for delays or incompetence. He's shown that he does have the capacity to do some pretty terrible things (killing a former teammate comes to mind) when he hits bottom or gets desperate. He also likes to think he's a lone wolf type - he says himself that he doesn't work with partners anymore.

Which...isn't exactly true. A little further down, past that scar tissue and the reflexive mental defenses, Wash can actually be a pretty good guy. If he does accept someone as a partner or teammate, he will work with them and take care of them, going so far as to go against direct orders in order to keep a partner alive. He still has the capacity for compassion and empathy; while he hasn't exercised them much as of late, it's still a possibility for him. It just takes him a good while to warm up to anyone. He can also be a bit of a dork, and he still has a sense of humor, though it has a much more sarcastic bent to it now than it did before.

Basically, life has screwed Wash over pretty hard, and he still goes through life pushing people away and expecting it to happen again - it's only with a little work and a lot of patience that he gets past that mentality enough to work with other people.

After spending a few months with the Reds and Blues, Wash has mellowed a bit - which is to say, he’s just as uptight as ever, but much more patient about it. He has to be - the Blood Gulch crew really didn’t leave him an option, and they sure aren’t changing anytime soon. The biggest change has come in his relationship with Epsilon - namely, Wash now sees Epsilon as a person in his own right instead of just a piece of evidence that he could never manage to wrangle. Of course, he’s still ticked off at Epsilon and Carolina, but that’s more because they left without saying goodbye than anything else. Essentially, Wash has calmed down a good deal about his past and its ramifications, even if he is still dealing with them to some extent. He’s always known how to care about people, but now he’s less reserved about actually showing that he cares about them.

He also learned how to relax - just a bit - but given that everything went straight to hell almost immediately thereafter, that lesson likely didn’t have much time to sink in.

Abilities: Wash is a member of an autonomous military organization called Project Freelancer comprised of well over forty individuals highly skilled in combat and strategy. The organization ranks each Freelancer according to their performance; Wash has the skills to be consistently in the top six on the leaderboard. He has extensive military training, including strategy, hand to hand combat, guns, and bladed weapons, and damned if he doesn't know how to make the most of it.

For what it's worth, he also seems to be incredibly good at surviving things that really should have killed him (being shot in the back more than once and run over by an armored jeep come to mind, and that's at the lower end of the scale).

Items: Wash will be coming in with his battle rifle, Magnum, knife, and armor. (Yes, he sleeps armed and in armor. Old habits die hard.)

History: A bit of world history:

Well, for starters, aliens happened. No, seriously, an alien race called the Covenant attacked an Earth space colony and wiped it out, starting what amounted to an interspecies war, which didn’t go well for the humans. At all. At this point, multiple military organizations were formed in order to try to discover some sort of "magic bullet" to win the war. One of these organizations, Project Freelancer, was given full autonomy; instead of focusing on physical enhancements like the Spartan program (think Master Chief), Freelancers were given high-tech weaponry and armor enhancements. Freelancers, each code named after a state in the USA, were trained extensively and ranked according to their competence. The top-ranked agents went on the most important missions. At the time, Freelancer missions were often against insurgent groups, not on the front lines against the Covenant.

Very little is known about Wash's past before Project Freelancer - all anyone knows is that his name is David, but he sure doesn't go by that now. Little is also known about the beginnings of his time in Project Freelancer; the first time canon focuses on him, he's risen in the ranks high enough to be in the ranks of the top six Freelancers and therefore skilled enough to go on missions with them. These missions included recovering a rather large box, called the sarcophagus, from an insurgent installation and later trying to capture the head of the insurrectionists. This doesn’t quite go as planned, especially since CT, another Freelancer, has been questioning Project Freelancer’s motivations and betrays them, going instead with the insurrectionists. The attempt to take her back, or at least recover her armor (because technology falling into enemy hands is a Bad Thing), fails because of jealousy between Carolina and Texas, the two top-ranked Freelancers, that gets in the way of their mission objectives.

It was around this time that some of the top-rated Freelancers started receiving AI fragments, parts of an artificial intelligence. These had minds and personalities of their own and were implanted in Freelancer armor - and, to an extent, directly installed into their heads - to make split-second accurate calculations in battle and to help run various armor enhancements. They took some time to get used to, but it became obvious very quickly that Freelancers with AI performed at a higher level than those without.

Wash and South Dakota, another agent, were slated to receive AI. Upon discovering that Tex had an AI, Carolina decided she wanted that advantage herself, spoke with the Director, and bumped both South and Wash off the list, taking on two AI fragments at once and immediately challenging Tex to a match...which ended poorly. Evidently having two AI at once was a strain Carolina could not handle.

Canon gets very vague at this point (retrograde storytelling, while suspenseful, is a bitch and a half when it comes to getting the whole story), but there are a few set things we know.

Wash is soon slated for another AI, Epsilon. Not long after Epsilon is implanted, it effectively commits suicide, unraveling itself while in Wash's head and taking him down with it. This leads to a full-on mental breakdown - Wash later says that he couldn't tell whose memories were whose - that takes him years to recover from, leaves him unfit for duty for a very long time, and completely shuts down the AI portion of Project Freelancer. No other Agent gets an AI after Wash loses it.

The next few years of Wash's life are spent in a military institution, where Wash slowly tries to put himself back together. They are long, stressful, and generally horrible years for him.

Canon picks up again after Wash has recovered, with him speaking to the Counselor and insisting that he is no longer able to work with another AI or Freelancer. Because of this, they slate him as a Recovery agent - Recovery One - tasked with following recovery beacons to injured or dead Freelancer armor and recovering the military technology. His first mission has him follow a beacon to York, a fellow freelancer killed in a firefight, where he recovers York's AI, Delta. Another immediate recovery beacon takes him and Delta (whom he carries in a storage unit, refusing to implant Delta in his armor) to North and South Dakota. South is unconscious; North is dead. They were both attacked by someone called the Meta, who has been hunting down Freelancers and killing them for their armor enhancements and AI. Both North and South's enhancement and North's AI Theta have been taken; presumably South survived because she had no AI, being slated to be implanted after Wash. Wash receives orders from Command to wrap up loose ends - that is, kill South - and return to command. He fires a shot into the air, then turns off communications, explaining to South what he was ordered to do and what they're going to do instead - implant Delta in South's armor and set a trap for the Meta, who will come after the AI.

Turns out the Meta is a skilled combatant and things look difficult. Wash trusts South to back him up; instead, South shoots him in the back, leaving him for dead, and gives the Meta a choice: it can either get the armor enhancements off Wash before the explosive charge she rigged on him detonates, or it can chase her and lose Wash's enhancements. The Meta takes Wash's armor enhancements, effectively leaving him for dead and giving South a chance to escape.

After recovering from South’s betrayal (either the explosive was a bluff or Wash is ridiculously lucky), Wash was given another mission - hunt down and kill the Meta - and was sent to Blood Gulch, a box canyon in the middle of nowhere where soldiers who had interacted with Omega had been stationed. Most of the soldiers there had been transferred to other bases, so Wash goes to track them down, first picking up Caboose (who is...simple), then Church, who has been stationed at a completely abandoned base for 14 months. They then head towards Valhalla, a base that was the last known whereabouts of Omega.

It’s then that Wash hits on another recovery beacon - this one from South, who is taking heavy fire from the Meta. They arrive in time to help fend off the Meta, who flees when his armor systems start failing; however, South takes friendly fire and can’t go far. Delta then reveals that she’d been planning on leaving him to the Meta and running for her life, and that she likely set up North to be in the same position so she would survive at the cost of his life. He then points out that, in her current condition, South would hamper their progress and recommends that she not be allowed to do so.

So Wash shoots her.

While Wash is disposing of the body, Delta reveals to the blues what happened with Wash and Epsilon and starts to talk about the Alpha; before he can say much, Wash returns, shuts him down, and says that the AI have been obsessed with finding the Alpha. At that point he receives another recovery beacon, this one from the Meta, whose armor is fluctuating because it has too much equipment to run on one suit of armor. Wash figures it’s a good time to take him out while his power is low, so they pursue him to a huge set of wind turbines, where the Meta is trying to siphon power to recharge his armor.

They might have actually succeeded if it weren’t for one thing; while Wash was inadvertently gathering what was left of the Blood Gulch Blue team, the Meta deceived the Red team’s sergeant into reassembling his team and going after them. They’re far from the most competent soldiers on the planet, but they’re more than enough to cause a distraction, allowing the Meta to charge his armor, knock out Caboose, steal Delta, and get away.

So now Wash is confused by the arrival of the Red team and frustrated that the Meta’s escaped. On top of this, he finds out that Church is a ghost (long story) and that Delta has left them one last message: memory is the key. Wash, knowing what that means, hauls everyone off to Command; they’re going after the Alpha.

He manages to get Church alone in the room where the unstable AI fragments are stored, and Wash explains quite a few things to him. It’s cheaper and easier to store an AI than to delete it; for that reason, when Epsilon unraveled, it was stored; Project Freelancer was only assigned one AI, and AI cannot be copied; however, an AI, like a human mind, can be fragmented via horrific torture; Epsilon was the fragment that contained Alpha’s memories, so Wash has known all of Project Freelancer’s dirty secrets ever since he was implanted with Epsilon; he plans on obtaining Epsilon and bringing it to the authorities in order to bring Project Freelancer to justice; and by the way, given Church’s ability to live without a body and armor-hop, Church is actually the Alpha.

He plans on sending Epsilon away with the Reds and Blues and setting off an EMP to destroy the rest of the AI and everything electronic in the facility. Per usual, this doesn’t quite go as planned, namely because the Meta snuck in with them and wants the Alpha as well and because the Director has somehow cottoned on to the plan and appears on a communication screen, trying to convince Wash that this is a bad idea. Wash is done taking orders from the Director, and the Director orders the Meta to kill Wash; Church goes into the Meta’s storage unit to distract all his AI fragments and generally cause internal havoc, Caboose gets away with Epsilon in the storage unit, and Wash sets off the EMP. Unfortunately, with no backup and no vehicle to escape in, Wash is soon arrested.

He’s in prison on a number of counts (dereliction of duty, conspiracy to commit treason, destruction of classified military property) for probably well on a year when Caboose somehow manages to place a call to the prison. Because the Reds had deleted the Blues from the database while they were in command, Caboose was able to escape with Epsilon untraced and unpursued. Wash finds out he has Epsilon and makes a deal with the head of the Oversight Subcommittee, the group investigating Project Freelancer: Wash gets them Epsilon, and they give him a get out of jail free card and a clean slate.

So he partners with the Meta and heads off to track down Epsilon. This...rarely goes as planned, actually. He has a few near misses, with the Reds, Caboose, and Epsilon barely managing to escape him, and admittedly he gets brutal, managing to kill one of the Reds before the rest can escape. He basically chases them all over creation before receiving a recovery beacon - oddly enough, from the armor that Epsilon (whom Caboose has taught to be Church) inhabited. Upon arriving at the source of the beacon, Wash and the Meta wind up embroiled in a fight against Tex, an AI herself, who was revived from Epsilon’s memories. Things get bad, and then worse, and finally the Meta overpowers Tex and stabs her with a capture unit, trapping her inside. Instead of handing it over to Wash, he plugs it into his armor and turns on Wash, intending to kill him, bringing the betrayal count up to three.

Wash would have died right then and there if the Reds and Blues, who had been separated from Church and Tex, hadn’t arrived on the scene. With their combined combat skills, a bit of trickery, and a shitton of luck, they manage to recover the capture unit and cliff the Meta. Unfortunately, the capture unit is unstable and on the verge of shutting down. Church bids them goodbye and goes in the capture unit to try to find Tex, only to have it shut down and trap them both inside.

The Reds and Blues forgive Wash’s betrayal, saying that he helped them in the final battle (and that Caboose wanted to keep him), give him Church’s blue armor, and fake his death. Wash heads with them back to their current bases in Valhalla. It’s not exactly what he wanted, but in some ways it’s still a clean slate.

A few months after returning to a sim base with the Reds and Blues, he received another blast from his past - Carolina showed up, essentially out of nowhere, and enlisted them in a mission to break into the UNSC storage facility that housed the Epsilon AI unit and break Epsilon out. Despite the upheaval it would cause, Wash went with it - Caboose wanted his best friend back, and for Wash, Carolina had essentially come back from the dead. He still considered her his CO.

Unfortunately, much like Wash, Carolina had changed over the years, and not for the better. She had zero respect for any of the Blood Gulch crew and didn’t treat Wash much better on most days. He still went with it, acting as a bridge between his old CO and his new teammates, trying to keep the peace until they accomplished Carolina’s objective: finding the Director of Project Freelancer.

Things came to a head when they did just that: Epsilon managed to recover his memories, along with a good amount of data, and they were able to locate the Director. Carolina called them together to outline her battle plan, which essentially treated the Reds and Blues as cannon fodder. They protested, the situation escalated, and when Carolina pulled a gun on Tucker, Wash pulled a gun on her, saying he was protecting his friends. Epsilon had a pretty spectacular meltdown that essentially alienated everyone, and Carolina and Epsilon left on their own, leaving Wash and the Reds and Blues in Valhalla.

It didn’t take them very long to realize that, despite having acted terribly, Epsilon and Carolina were still their friends and still deserved a second chance. They set off after them and arrived just in time to see Carolina facing down an entire horde of Tex clones. The Director kept trying to get her right, kept splitting the AI, until he had a group of fragmented AIs that didn’t know how to do anything but fight okay (think Inverse Ninja Law). Still, Carolina was struggling, and they arrived in time to help her out. It was Epsilon who finally managed to reach the Texes and shut them down, and only after Wash came to terms with Epsilon as a person - as Church - not just a piece of evidence, reminding him that he knew Tex the best of all of them and that he was best suited to lay her to rest.

Wash let Carolina deal with the Director on her own. This wasn’t his revenge anymore, after all.

Some amount of time after that (because what are timelines in this series, honestly), they were granted official pardons by the UNSC (though whether Wash’s pardon was given to him specifically or to “Leonard Church” is still unknown) and shipped off to what would likely have been another post...if multiple unrelated but simultaneous factors hadn’t caused the ship to crash on a planet way out on the corner of UNSC space and all but abandoned by the UNSC: Chorus. Believing themselves the only survivors of the crash and unable to find Carolina or Epsilon, they set up camp and Wash tried his hardest to convince the Reds and Blues that this wasn’t a goddamn game and that they’d need to work and ration if they wanted to survive. He also had Tucker (and to some extent Caboose) running training exercises, under the belief that if something happened, they’d be better prepared to handle it. (Because around Wash, something *always* happened. That paranoia wasn’t going anywhere.)

They managed to get their long-range radio fixed and send out a distress call, though it doesn’t amount to much (because who drops off one guy in a canyon, leaves, and calls that a rescue?), and Tucker finally calls out Wash on how he’d been acting, telling him that he could relax. Wash had been trying to be the leader he knew by example - the Carolina - instead of the leader the Blue team actually needed. He apologized for not being there for them - Caboose, especially - in the wake of losing their friend, and resolved to be a better leader.

Which was about when they were attacked by an outside force.

As it turned out, Chorus was in the middle of a civil war, with the powers that be - the Federal Army of Chorus - versus the rebel alliance - the New Republic. (Yes, it’s all very Star Wars. Fed vs New, if you will.) Both sides had hired mercenaries; both sides had heard the distress call broadcast from the canyon; as their reputation as Big Damn Heroes had preceded them, both sides wanted the Blood Gulch Crew to fight for them. Locus, the mercenary working for the Feds, brought a squad of men to try to subdue them by force and bring them in; the Blues were able to fight them off with the help of Felix, the mercenary working for the New Republic. Felix explained the situation and told them they were involved in the war whether they liked it or not, as Locus would come back with more men and weapons to try it again.

So they prepared the canyon as best they could for battle. For a while, it looked like they might actually come out on top; however, Felix’s reinforcements arrived way too late, and Locus put his cloaking armor modification to good use. Sarge and Donut were both knocked unconscious, and Wash took a pretty bad hit. His last act was to seal off the tunnel the reinforcements had used to enter the canyon, trapping him and Sarge and Donut inside the canyon with the Feds and the rest of the BGC, along with Felix and his reinforcements, on the other side, out of the Feds' reach. He then took another hard hit, blacked out, and woke up in Traverse Town, with absolutely no idea whether he’d survived the battle on Chorus or not.

[This is a RP journal for revenance_rpg played by kiaxet. All events in this journal are fictitious. Agent Washington belongs to RoosterTeeth.]