"This ends here," Renegade said, the words lost immediately to the swelling roar of battle.

Before her, standing strong against the swarm of bodies, Angel Ramirez stood, feet planted hard against the churned red earth. His body was entirely obscured by armor, vaguely reminiscent of SE armor worn by Admiral Vir, but not quite so intimidating. Either way, she didn't need his face to know him. A part of her could have picked him from a crowd simply by his walk: long strides leaned lazily back into his hips, languorous but confident.

She hated it.

She hated how well she knew him.

She hated that she knew him well enough to make it clear she had once cared about him.

"Care." The voice in her head corrected

Renegade snarled, gritting her teeth together hard. She hated THAT even more: she hated the construct part of her: the part of her she could not accept, the part of her that had betrayed herself to make merry with the very people she had loathed so much, the people she bowed to.

"And that right there is your problem. I didn't bow to them. You don't BOW to friends." Renegade bristled, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Her back ached where the spidery limbs of the creature protruded from her body. The void creature, mostly silent these days, clung to her body like a wet shroud, and though it was not visible, she could feel the way it wrapped itself around her.

She hated it.

She hated who she was, who she had been, and what she was now. She hated having three voices in her head, three habitations in her body.

She hated it.

She hated it.

She hated it.

But she took a deep breath. Now was the time to get rid of them, take control, and finally be at peace.

She turned her head back to the marine, standing still as stone upon the battlefield before her. His weapon was raised, but he was weak, and his prior knowledge of her body and the sentience therein was too much.

He couldn't shoot her.

It would make killing him almost laughably easy -- even with his weapon.

"Then why haven't you done it yet?" There was that infernal voice again, nagging at the back of her head, the thing that called itself Maverick, the thing that wanted more than anything to return to a life of pointless servitude to people who didn't even appreciate her, the thing holding her back.

All these thoughts ran through her head in a matter of milliseconds as she made her decision. Maverick was right, she hadn't killed him yet. Angel Ramirez was the last and greatest representation of her weakness, and once he was gone, she would be free.

And in a moment of rage, she acted, racing forward over the cracked and bloodstained earth to where the marine waited silently for his death.

Her feet did not touch the ground dangling some feet above the earth as the spidery protrusions bore her across the open field. It was they who would deal the final blow.

It would be easier that way.

Easier not to do it with her own hands.

Easier to rely on the void creature than to rely on her treacherous self.

She towered over him now, silhouetted against a rust-orange sky as artillery rockets whistled overhead, impacting the ground with great and trembling eruptions that rattled up through her body, and into her bones.

She raised one spiked leg against the sky.

All his other friends were occupied with the fight.

There would be no one to come to save him.

The spike began to fall, aimed at the junction in his armor that separated his neck from his shoulder.

"That's where you're wrong."

Something inside her jerked violently, and for one horrible moment, she felt like she was being torn in half as Maverick forced her way into the shared forefront of their consciousness. Pain, terrible and incredible, blossomed behind her eyes as maverick clawed her way into a space that was only ever meant to hold one. The result was a body split in half; renegade was forced to the right side of the brain, and Maverick was forced to the left side of the brain: the left side of the brain where the language center of their brain resided.

This is what having a stroke must have felt like.

One side of her body collapsed, while the other side attempted to hold itself upright. One side of her face pulled up into a snarl, while the other side of her face tried to speak.

The spiked protrusion on her right side collapsed sending them reeling into the churned and blood-stained dirt. Ramirez flung himself to the side and out of range from her flailing limbs.

Renegade tried to shout but found herself silent, and unable to vocalize.

It was Maverick's turn.

"RAMIREZ RUN!" Her voice was garbled and partially stunted as she tried to make words with a mouth that was only partially cooperating.

Ramirez crawled to his knees face plate of his armored helmet drawn back to reveal his face. His amber eyes were wide with shock and confusion but also.... Hope.

"Maverick!?"

"I said RUN, you dipshit!"

Hope blossomed into relief, but she could only just note the expression before the renegade made a lunge for the controls again. The battle was entirely mental, but Maverick experienced it in an almost physical way, the only way her mind could even remotely interpret the violence that was happening inside her head.

Her body jerked and convulsed on the ground as wild signals tore across the two hemispheres of her brain, sending up uncontrolled and inaccurate electrical signals across both regions of her motor cortex.

The void spines retracted, leaving her flat on her back in the dirt.

Her back arched violently, and one of her legs shot out.

Her nose was filled with the smell of blood and dirt.

"Get out of my way!" Renegade howled.

"Over our dead body! Maverick shouted, the words not just inside her head, but breaking out into the open air even as her cheeks and jaw constricted and relaxed. Her fingers bent into claws, and her spine flexed in the other direction, curling her into the fetal position.

The body was unlikely to last much longer under these conditions.

Either one of them would win.

Or both would die.

Either option was better than the alternative of letting Renegade Kill Ramirez without a fight.

But she had to get away.

If Renegade managed to win this fight, Maverick needed to be as far away from Ramirez as possible to give him a chance to escape.

If this was her last stand, then she was not going to let it be in vain.

She shouted, and tore to her feet, somehow managing to fight past the wild impulses making her body spasm. If these had been real convulsions, none of this would have been possible, but she would take what she could get.

Renegade howled, trying to force half of their body towards Ramirez, who was retreating too slowly over the cracked and barren earth. His eyes were fixed upon her, wide and wild, unsure of what to do. She needed him to run, but she could tell by the posture of his body that he wanted to help her far more than he wanted to run.

She wanted to shout at him, but even as she tried, the words died in her throat morphing into a choked gargle as she lurched forward her momentary distraction giving up some ground to renegade.

"This isn't what you want!" She screamed, inside her head

"You know nothing!" Renegade shouted.

Ramirez's distraction didn't go unnoticed. A void Drev had sensed an opportunity, was sneaking its way over the rusty ground and towards Ramirez's back. Maverick tried to shout again, but still; nothing came out other than a gargled wheeze. "You want respect!" Maverick snarled, allowing Renegade to take control of the body, but only for a moment and in the wrong direction.

They barreled forward, tripping awkwardly over the uneven ground and straight into the path of the lunging Drev.

Sharp pain blossomed through her body as the Drev's spear took her high in the shoulder chewing through the muscle of her shoulder and ripping out a sizable chunk as it was drawn back. The void Drev took a step back, an expression somewhere between alarm and confusion on its face as it turned to look down at her.

Renegade snarled, and so did Maverick, their rage turning abruptly upon the creature that had caused them pain.

Together they lunged forward, tearing into the creature's neck with their bare hands, and the bone shards, which punched their way through the skin of her knuckles.

The Drev fell to the dirt convulsing.

Maverick kept their momentum, lurching into the crowd and away from Ramirez, as fast and hard as she could.

"You always wanted to be needed!" She said sprinting past a wall of churning spear blades.

An artillery round hit the ground not so far to her right, causing her to stagger as dirt, dust, and bodies erupted upwards.

"You want to be needed; you want to be acknowledged."

She understood that.

She understood all of that because Renegade and she were the same person. They weren't simply two separate beings trapped inside one body. They were the same. Maverick didn't want to admit it. It was easier for her to believe that they were simply two different people but at the end of the day that wasn't true and trying to deny it wasn't helping anyone.

"You've always wanted to be needed, to be a part of something, to be relied on and praised for your actions.... So why are you pushing away the one group of people that has always given that to us? You are ruining everything that we could have had." She sensed the pain those words caused, and not just in Maverick, but in Renegade as well, in HER as a whole person.

"They aren't the ones that I wanted...." Renegade said, and this time her voice was small. Maverick vaulted into the air. If she could get them up, and out of the atmosphere maybe....

And that is when the artillery round detonated, the shock wave ripping itself through the air and past her body sending them violently crashing back to earth.

And that is where they stayed.

In a broken heap upon the blood-stained ground.

"We had what we wanted," Maverick said as her mind faded into blackness.