Chapter Text
The mistake was a grave one, but not so grave that he couldn't claw back from the brink like he always did.
Eramis was furious, until she too saw through the veil and understood why he said all that he did. She took him aside, led him slow and steady out to the fire pits. Sat with him, side by side, and admitted that she didn't blame him. Not for rejecting their children at the first hurdle. Or refusing to take them into safety before she left for battle. As far as she was concerned, the blame was shared, and mostly hers.
But when he asked why, begged her to understand his perspective, it all became clear. Siriks hadn't even told her the entire story about the kids. He gave her the summary of what happened. Grisly, bitter details omitted. It hit him like a sledgehammer square in the chest to learn of how ignorant he kept her. There they were sitting in collective silent acknowledgement over it being the year that they would have turned forty, and her beloved left it at saying it wasn't a good outcome and nobody knew what happened to anyone else on her ketch. It had been thirty nine years and three hundred and twenty eight days since they hatched, precisely. But who was counting?
Much as he hated Siriks beyond anything else in Sol for doing that, he couldn't let her keep living that way. In a final act of spite, he told her. About the half-mile long debris field. The bodies that got left behind in bits, unrecoverable. Wolves picking her ship clean for weeks, and their not-so-encrypted logs asking questions of how so much blood got inside the ventilation shaft. And then the burial, the scrap of tiny little arm wrapped in white cloth, placed beneath a stack of stones on a Venusian cliffside. The fights that ensued, the evisceration to make sure it would never happen again, and the silent aftermath that lasted for decades.
She cried. A lot. Mostly silently, tears streaming down her cheek and into her mandibles.
In the meantime, he finished his tale, then threw up a seemingly neverending mix of blood and sludge and bile into the firepit.
That earned him another trip back to the accursed med bay, remaining there for the next two days while everyone took a turn poking and prodding to figure out what was going so wrong. Nobody came to any productive conclusions. Nobody even knew what they were looking at. The one mercy granted upon him was that nobody called for Atraks, and she didn't make an appearance of her own volition. In fact, once everyone with the slightest bit of medical knowledge in their minds threw their hands up and realised they were out of ideas, he found himself left alone.
With a little peace and quiet, things started to look up. Instead of fifty errors flitting across his HUD, they halved to a manageable twenty five. One per hour in the day, and an extra for good luck. His head didn't want to pop off his shoulders from an imaginary pressure. His spine didn't ache so much. When he sat up and moved, his surroundings stayed where they were supposed to. Things were far from perfect, but good enough.
Once they saw he was stable, another treatment session came and went. That time, he found a ditch to crawl into and die in afterwards, before anyone else could catch him leaving. Would've been nicer to wake up to a room full of plush and cuddly blankets rather than a Hive Acolyte peering down on his chassis beneath the moonlight, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Its smashed skull held up as a good excuse when anyone asked where he'd gotten to that day. Just pest control. Nothing to do with yet another failed appointment.
While he was out for the count, he figured that Atraks and Praksis had more than enough time to study. Him managing to not visibly succumb to the parasites was a convenient miracle. Leaving him on death's door through dialysis gave them contained, manageable SIVA to poke at. Loads and loads of it, he was sure, by the time Praksis finished up.
The one thing he guaranteed was that they didn't realise that disturbing the nanites caused the majority of problems. Why? He didn't know. Had a few guesses, all contrary to Atraks’s imparted knowledge. Perhaps the cancer was eating away at all his essential functions without his knowledge, and that was why everything seemed to work better. He couldn't wonder about what he didn't have the physical capability to know was wrong. Either that, or it was keeping him going. If he wanted to be optimistic, he could entertain the nanites fixing the damage in equal measure to creating it. An ouroboros of malignancy, all contained inside of his body. What a lucky young Eliksni he was to have to live with that.
Whatever it was, so long as everyone kept their hands and medical instruments to themselves, he lived. And although living with House Devils was a pitiful existence that would never return the minimal effort he was putting in, it was something to keep himself occupied with.
Just a shame that meant others also wanted to occupy themselves with him.
Being the tallest Eliksni in the Lair who wasn't Wethraks meant being lumped with a lot of minor chores to do and issues to resolve. He became the default answer to all of life's woes. Something on too high a shelf? Get Taniks. Someone sick or injured and couldn't patrol somewhere potentially hazardous? Taniks can join instead. Landscaping needs doing and new defences around the factory need building? Taniks. Dug too deep a hole and now can't get out? Guess who came to the rescue!
In a sense, he didn't entirely hate it. Doing different things did make him feel better in a physical sense, and marginally so in a mental sense. Ignoring how disrespectful to his own reputation it felt, doing a Dreg’s tasks at his stage in life, it did fill that hole of Eramis wanting the Devils to like him. Doing things for them made a lot of acquaintances. The trade-off was that some of the Devils were way too chatty once they got going and crawled out of their shells towards him. The tried and true method of throwing alcohol at a Devil until they were inebriated enough to let down their guard entirely didn't always work out, and none of them could cope with a hangover. They were shadows of their former selves, shrunk beneath a banner they couldn't live up to carry. But those that did indulge, once they got familiar with him by using him as an errands boy, gave Eramis a run for her money in yapping all day long. He was supposed to be telling them good things about what their House was and could become, but getting a word in edgeways? Impossible. His sensors still rang with their inane chatter.
Peace and quiet was a necessity for not just his physical wellbeing, but his mental wellbeing too.
His job for the day consisted of sorting ammo while keeping an eye on the Lair’s entrance for who was coming and going. A Dreg he forgot the name of dropped off a set of ammo boxes and apologised for the mess, but everything got screwed up in transit by an exile who didn't know any better when they delivered them. ‘Everything’ turned out to be a mixed heap of ammunition, split into uneven piles. Someone with a lot of free time on their hands needed to get it back in order. While they were all busy scrambling for a day's rations, or engaging in…whatever it was that Eramis was telling them to do, they didn't have anyone to spare.
So, lounging sideways on the deck chair he'd constructed from off-cuts of steel rods and a few ripped apart cushions, Taniks propped his head up on one upper hand and used the other to pick through the bullets. Having dumped the contents of every box into one, he tossed each type into a separate crate of its own. Some were for plain human guns, at least fifty years old at the earliest - best cracked open and used as fertiliser come the spring. A small handful of charges for wire rifles and shock pistols got tossed into another box, and anything that looked like it could fit into a Lightbearer’s weapon got thrown into a third one.
Regardless of the cold, snow thick on the ground and wind whistling past the antenna on his helmet, he could have sat there right by the bay doors of the Lair's entrance all day until they were sorted by calibre and weapon type, too. There was something to be said about the satisfaction of arbitrary sorting and keeping things organised. Problem was that he had to give it back to the House, and they would fuck it up in no time flat, thus trapping him in a cycle of organisation for the sake of it. At that point, it became infuriating.
If it meant he got left alone to stew, though, then he'd take it. There were more exciting topics to think about and which didn't require anyone's interference or opinions. Under normal circumstances, post-resurrection, he would have set off to take down his killer as soon as possible. The issue was that combat with the Young Wolf had proven fatal twice before. Any thoughts about the means to approach and kill him needed time to marinate. Alongside that perpetual stew boiling in his head, he had to wonder how things could be fixed with Eramis and Siriks, and whether he could be the good Eliksni they insisted he was. Whether he could repair what looked to him like an irreversibly damaged relationship, or improve the state of it in any way at all. That alone took more brain power to stir around the pot than he anticipated.
The kneejerk answer was a resounding no. They saw an Eliksni that wasn't himself. Eramis especially, working from a memory of four decades prior. Yet they insisted they both were happy with him around, and that he had consistently made them happy. For as long as they had all been together, they didn't see a killer when they looked at him. They saw a whole Eliksni, which was great and honourable, but not representative of reality. Unfortunately, with no other way out than to take their word as truth, it left him stuck, fumbling around for a way to co-exist with that ideal.
Impossible as it seemed, there did appear to be some light and the end of the tunnel. Perhaps they could work together and solve their issues, do all that good bonding stuff. What better way to do it than through violence? If he couldn't kill the Young Wolf alone, then the two of them fighting alongside would do nicely. Between Eramis’s inability to lose, and Siriks’s Splicing manipulating the Light, they would be an unstoppable force of nature. Wiping that shithead Guardian off the face of the system might spark up that giddy joy at a hard-fought victory that they all so badly needed. Less time focusing on rights and wrongs and bygone moral imperatives, more on blood and battle, and how good it felt to see the light leave someone's eyes. Particularly when it was the City’s best kept pet.
Some of the bullets he chucked around looked like they might do the job in going right between the Young Wolf’s eyes quite nicely. Taniks paused and held up a few of the more likely candidates to examine them. Two bullets would end it. One for him, one for his Ghost. Didn't have to be anything big or fancy, but the fleeting image of the Exo exploding into a thousand pieces in a mighty explosion did please him. So maybe the bigger, the better.
Rolling them into his palm and passing them into a lower hand to hold on to for safekeeping, he carried on, until his audio sensor picked up the faint noise of something trudging through the snow from behind his back. Peripheral sensors picked up on them without having to look up from his task, but his backmost optics still swivelled to examine them.
Approaching was a Vandal, wrapped up in light plum colour robes and a fur trimmed hood over her head. She wore a rubber apron, new enough that the crease lines of where it had been folded showed, but with a few spots of a dark, hardened substance stuck to it. Unlike some of the smaller Devils he'd interacted with, her face was set neutral, no signs of any apprehension showing towards him as she came around to his front.
“Taniks?” she started, having to raise her voice before it could get whipped away by the wind. “Could you help us with some furs that we're processing?”
“Why’d’you want me?” he asked.
“We’ve got a couple of bear pelts and cow hides to deal with today, and you're kind of the strongest Eliksni here right now. You can probably do it quicker and move around the heavy pelts for us more easily.”
There went his quiet day of contemplation. And more than half the bullets would get left unsorted. Though, eke-ing it out meant more time he could tell others not to bother him. In theory, he could sit and sort and re-sort them for days on end, doing whatever he liked in the background while still seeming productive. Who would ask? He was still in charge of himself and didn't answer to anyone he didn't want to. If he was busy, so be it. They couldn't force him to do anything.
Flicking one final bullet into the rightmost box, he shut the lid and swung himself upright in the same movement. “Yeah, sure.”
“Thank you,” She dipped her head to him and chittered, then did a double take when she looked up and realised how far back she had to crane her neck to see his face again once stood up. “I'm Plumiraks, by the way.”
Taniks chuffed in return by way of a greeting, letting her take the lead and hanging back a few seconds. Her little legs meant he could overtake her in a single stride. Had to make it a little fairer. Once there was enough distance between them, he followed, but it turned out she hadn't come from far anyway. Around the corner and a little ways away, she took him to a wooden outbuilding. He never gave it a second glance each time he went past, but it actually stood out amongst the other slapdash construction efforts now that he got the chance to look at it. Unlike the converted sheds and shacks peppered around, the hut seemed purpose built. Someone had put time and thought into making exactly what they wanted, using the edge of a concrete base to line the building up against and make a patio to work on when it wasn't so cold out. Timber slats cladded the exterior, and two sets of metal-hinged doors made up one wall.
For Devils, it was an impressive little barn.
“I won't make this hard for you and force you through the entrance we normally use,” Plumiraks said, unlatching the doors and pulling one open with a creak.
As soon as she got it open a crack, the distinct scent of iron and wet animal, mixed with sharp chemicals, hit him in the face. Inside was warm to his readings, exacerbating the unpleasant smell, but the Eliksni sat in a semi circle in the middle of the shop didn't seem to mind. Each of their heads twisted or perked up to see who entered, though didn't appear to flinch or shrink away from his presence. A quick chorus of greetings followed while they carried on with their activities. One of them held a fox pelt draped across their lap, hand-sewing something into or around the fur. Another faced away from the group, squatted over a flat palette and a bear pelt twice their size covered in salt, with two plastic containers beside them.
At the edge of the circle, one Devil held a hatchling wrapped up in a dish towel. A furry hat had been secured to their head, with the ears of the leopard cub the fur once belonged to left intact and poking up. Instead of any other blanket or stuffed animals to hold, however, their hatchling had a lint roller. Tiny teething marks covered the handle, and the paper was littered with fluff, but they held it close like it was their most precious toy. Eyes half-lidded, they dozed while their caretaker sewed a sheathe for a dagger together with their lower hands. Even while barely awake, the roller was going nowhere.
Kids were weird with what they liked. He knew that firsthand. It was based on very limited knowledge before the chance to learn more got ripped away, but he knew.
Scanning across the workshop and over the tools lining the walls and worktops with all kinds of works in progress, Taniks remarked, “You got your own production line out here?”
“We do everything! Furs, cloaks, clothes, sometimes armor and weapon repairs if we can,” Plumiraks replied. Pointing in a circle around the barn, she introduced them, “This is Raspiks, Vitis, Citriks, Limoks, and their hatchling, Retikis. Pyruks is out washing some pelts by the river, but you'll meet him later.”
“Bunch of fucking fruits,” he hissed under his breath, nowhere near as quiet as he could have been.
“Yep, that's us!” She beamed, any implications sailing clear over her head. “Funny coincidence, isn't it? Nobody really picks up on it, usually.”
“You family?”
“No, but Citriks and Limoks are mates. It's just fate that brought us all together.”
He rolled his eyes as soon as her back was turned. Far more likely that they were a case of Devils adopting European languages and amalgamating them into Eliksni sounding names, but whatever kept them happy. The chances that they even knew what fruits they were each named after, let alone tasted them, seemed slim. There were fruits and berries in the Cosmodrome if someone knew where to look, but nothing so exotic as a citrus or stone fruit. They were more likely to find an ancient can of peaches hidden in a cache somewhere. It was only a matter of time until some poor hatchling got stuck with a bastardised name along the lines of ‘servavit persici’ . Assuming it hadn't already happened.
“This way,” She moved on, bringing him to a piece of wood sticking out of the wall at an angle with an inside out grizzly bear pelt stretched taut over it. Bright red and pink viscera covered the skin, apart from one pale patch where she presumably had started cleaning it up. A bucket beside it collected the unwanted goop, and a knife with a thick handle had been deposited into it. “Have you done this before?”
He shook his head, and Plumiraks chirped, her eyes lighting up as she took up the knife. Part of him almost envied her enthusiasm, and another part groaned, but better to be taught about something from someone passionate about their craft. So long as she didn't go on and on like Eramis or Siriks could do about their interests - but what else did he have to do, anyway?
“I won't bore you with all the details, but this is the earliest part of the process in tanning hides. Bears are tough, so they need a lot of work. To start that off, you just need to flesh it - scrape off the membrane and fat that's stuck to the skin. Don't worry if it doesn't all come off, it'll get buffed out later when it's dried,” She slid the dull side of the blade against the skin on a diagonal to flense away a patch of viscera as demonstration while she spoke. “Do a little bit at a time. It's not meant to be done quickly.”
Handing the knife up, she stood aside for him to take up position in front of the pelt. Mirroring her movements, Taniks sawed off a piece, meeting a touch more resistance than expected as the blade slid under and up through. Small wonder why they wanted someone else to do it. Someone who's arms didn't get tired, in particular.
“Good, great. Now move the pelt around and do another little bit. Always keep stretching it, the more tense it is, the cleaner it all comes off,” she instructed, nodding when he did as he was told. “Just get rid of as much fat as you can so it doesn't spoil when we treat it ”
Content that he was doing a good job after another minute of watching and minor corrections, Plumiraks backed off and swept away into a utility room. “Did you want an apron? It's going to be a little small on you if you do,” she called over the rumble of a tired and blood-spattered washing machine.
“I'm good,” he replied. Handsome as he knew he was and not wanting to spoil that, blood and guts all wiped off in the end. A little bit of crap from a bear skin wasn't going to cause a huge problem. Might even fly off and get stuck in a mechanism for him to find and make a snack out of later. Delicious.
Retikis roused up at her raised voice, blinking out of sync from the unplanned awakening. Out of the corner of his eye, Taniks watched her yawn, mouth agape for a few seconds and letting out a cute little chirp when she finished. Within a few seconds of being alert, she began to wriggle and whine, shrugging off the dish cloth being used as a blanket and waving three and a half arms around in protest of being held on her mother's lap.
The sight of it made him pause, lingering on the stump where her lower arm was meant to be. That wasn't right. Nobody docked hatchlings that small. Missing a limb at that age meant something weird, and Taniks didn't want to step into the territory of wondering what it was. An all too familiar image conjured in his mind in answer, and he glanced away to focus back on the pelt and shrug it off. Didn't matter right then. The universe wouldn't let him forget his sins in a hurry, but he didn't have to pay attention to it trying to get into his head without his permission.
“That arm isn't looking much better,” Vitis, the one with the fox pelt, remarked.
“I know, the medics want to give it until her second or third moult to see if it's going to grow back properly,” Citriks leaned down to place Retikis on the floor, letting her scurry off as fast as her five limbs could carry her - four, discounting the lint roller clutched in one hand. “She doesn't seem to be in any pain, but…”
Vitis chirred with sympathy. “What happens if it doesn't?”
“We'll look into putting a prosthetic in place. It's just such an invasive procedure, you know? They have to really dig inside of you, the growth plates get damaged, it might try to grow back still and be even more uncomfortable,” she explained, trailing off and clicking her mandibles with unease. “I don't want her to be forever-docked, but I don't want her to hurt for the rest of her life, either.”
To his observation, Retikis couldn't have cared less about her parents wanting to do anything. Hadn't gotten to the age where she understood what anyone was talking about yet. Scuttling around like some kind of weird isopod, she remained ignorant to the continued conversation and far more interested in putting a hand straight into the pile of salt on the palette. Intrigued by the feeling, she tapped it a few times - yes, still powdery and slightly sticky with grease - and then leaned over to sniff it.
A little squeak and frantic chirruping said everything for how it tasted when snorted.
Citriks came to her rescue, scooping her up again and brushing the caked on salt from her snout. Taking the hatchling’s hand, she moved it up and down so that she lint-rolled herself and picked up the last few grains, just grazing the sticky tape over her face. Then, as soon as she was clean, she set her down again and gave her a push into a better direction.
Efficient. Startlingly so. That was not the first time that had happened.
Watching the whole performance gnawed at his insides like a rat chewing through wires. Bitterness came upon him. At least she got the privilege of getting to do that with her kid, rather than sitting there wishing time could be turned back. No counting days and looking at photos with a foreboding sense of what would eventually be recognised as heartbreak, heavy as the weight of the world, crushing her flat.
Or maybe she did? How did it happen?
More to the point, why the hell did he suddenly care, anyway? He didn't know anyone in the workshop from a hole in the wall. They didn't know him, either, outside of what he was currently offering the House and the horror stories that trailed behind him. There was a good reason for why a number of Devils still refused to see him as anything other than a monster to defer to. Breaking that illusion and getting all gooey and touchy-feely about some random hatchling was a non-starter. He did not need to give a single shit about one of many thousands of doomed Devil hatchlings just because one happened to be minus an arm and sat in front of him while wallowing in his memories.
But then came the damnable catch. They invited him in for a reason. Eramis told him to make friends. Friends were made by asking questions of each other and taking an interest (although it took him too long to figure that out). Feigning a smidgen of sympathy for Retikis might endear them all, and it kept him in the loop for what other things he might need to solve in the future. To them, it would prove that Taniks wasn't a monster that ate children of all species for breakfast and used their tiny, flexible bones to pick their flesh out of his jaws. He cared about the hatchlings. What a sweet guy under the cold exterior.
Once he shuddered away the visceral discomfort brought on by that thought process, and replaced it with curiosity getting the better of him, he asked, “What happened to her?”
“My eggs didn't develop correctly; times were hard and I wasn't able to get enough Ether earlier this year. One failed to thrive, the other didn't hatch, and Retikis came out fine until her first moult when her arm popped off with her shell,” she answered, as if it were a common problem to have hatchlings popping entire limbs off.
“It came off? ” After so long getting used to the idea that hatchlings typically lost limbs in way more traumatic a manner, her description sounded tame to the point of disbelief. Especially by Devil standards.
“It was like shucking a crab. Just her shell and her arm sticking off the side, with her next to it looking at us like she had no idea what happened.” She managed to smile at the recollection. “Now we just give her as much Ether as we can between us and hope it heals itself to grow normally. We'll worry about docking when she comes of age.”
Sounded like she did all she could for her own, and still got handed the short end of the stick. In that way, he could kid himself they were similar. Funny how he should be dragged back to the world of the living around the same date he laid, and stand there four decades later listening to someone else who found their kid without a limb. That time, the whole child was intact, rather than them coming across a tiny scrap of flesh crushed in the remains of a ship with no hatchling to match.
Was it a coincidence that they had the same concerns about her future? Questioning how they would treat and guide a child through the terrors of their accepted culture? He lost track of the conversations Eramis and Siriks had roped him into on how his own children were to be raised. Those two hated docking others. It was one of those holdovers that they wished, behind closed doors, that they didn't have to deal with or dish out at a moment's notice. Forty years straight of doing just that and worse in the Prison of Elders on a daily basis hadn't numbed Eramis to the practice or changed her mind, last he heard. Siriks…maybe he changed. Hard to tell. Every time they met while she was imprisoned, he looked at him like he wanted to shake him so vigorously that it rattled all his nuts and bolts loose.
He nodded along with them to seem reasonable and not rock the boat. Something about snatching someone by the arm and twisting hard, then ripping the limb free in a shower of blood and an ear-piercing scream tended to scratch an itch. Maybe it was the immediacy with which it could be done. That was what his Kell delighted in - or, no, he did it slow. That was it. Tendons snapped one by one, dragging it out like ripping a hangnail off and letting it go all the way up a finger. It was a pain incomparable, and one he remembered so, so intimately.
Taniks gripped the knife that bit tighter, and the blade sank into the bear’s flesh. He cursed, scowling at the pinprick sized hole knicked into the skin. Shouldn't have happened. A mechanism was missing there to stop accidents, mental or physical. An automatic push away from the deep end and into shallower, safer waters. He could think in those without getting lost to the depths. Maybe the SIVA had written that quirk out and repaired it? Memory wipes in any other circumstance looked like bugs or glitches, and it didn't like imperfections. Fixing that would need to be saved for another time, but he filed it top of the list. Distractions led to vulnerability.
Treading carefully back from the mental brink, he recalled the agreement was that Eramis’s children were going to get the best they possibly could. If it meant shielding them from a few socially acceptable matters they couldn't get on board with, so be it. Nobody was going to question the Shipstealer, hero of Twilight Gap and firebrand of House Devils. Her word was law in those tumultuous months following, no matter what banner one carried. If she didn't want her babies docked, it wasn't happening, and anyone who criticised would be in for a terrible time between the three of them.
…Two. Two of them. Had to remember his rejection. His failure. Even if he bore the eggs, he wasn't meant to be involved.
Wasn't he?
“So long as Eramis has her way, you won't have to worry about it.” Taniks said, hoping it hadn't been too long a gap since she spoke and he replied. Hard to tell when indulging in a tangent against his will.
“Is that what she's been saying? No more docking?” Citriks trilled. Her eyes narrowed with confusion. “Then what happens if someone does wrong?”
Taniks shrugged an upper arm, keeping the other busy with flicking flesh and fur off the hide. “Nothing. You fuck up, you move on and don't do it again.” How many times had she applied the same thinking to himself, when he was busy pushing her away no matter what the cost all those years ago? Didn't matter that he'd holed up in the ventilation system of her ketch and wouldn't come out despite her son’s desperate attempts, Eramis let him keep figuring himself out. He'd fall on his face, bite her waiting hand, then pick himself up to do it again and again and again.
Sure, it got him wrapped in a rug and thrown off her ketch after three weeks of that, but they still found each other in the end once he'd figured out a few outlets for that aggression. And she never laid a hand on him (unless requested) in all the time thereafter.
“That would be something,” She let out a wistful sigh, finishing the stitch on the sheathe and cutting the remaining thread off. “Limoks got docked two or three, maybe four times?”
“And some Eliksni in this room never had the scythe on them apart from their coming of age,” Limoks gave a sideways glance to Plumiraks from his place beside his mate.
“I was good and did what I was told! Unlike some Devils,” Plumiraks chattered, bobbling her head at him from behind a heap of sopping wet hides. Getting up to stand on a stool and reach a clothesline hanging across the wall, she added, “If Frusiks kept your docking caps on and put prosthetics on top, it would've been easier to pop them off and take them away whenever you misbehaved!”
“Yeah, right!” He laughed. “And then he would have smacked me over the head with it each time!”
“Like he didn't anyway?” Plumiraks tittered.
The group exploded into enthusiastic chatter, reminiscing about the old days. With nothing to add, Taniks opted to listen while he continued sliding the flesh from the pelt. Must have been nice to grow up into a crew where they were all friendly. He couldn't relate. There were a few individuals he tolerated, solely because they could keep up with how he worked, but fitting into a large group was wistful thinking. When he had a ketch and a crew, they were all just means to an end. A little extra firepower where he needed more bodies thrown at a target, or a set of heads to share brain cells on solving problems. They all governed themselves, but deferred to him for final decisions. Friends, they were not. Colleagues…hardly that, either.
Limoks, as it happened, had always been too friendly with his Captain. He never reciprocated, because he simply did not like him. They assumed that contributed to the number dockings, but it didn't help that he was a troublemaker, too. Clowning around to lighten the mood apparently wasn't appropriate in the middle of an active battlefield. Who'd have guessed! Not him, since it happened at least twice, and almost got everyone killed on both occasions.
Once they settled down from recounting that tale, Taniks sensed the Vandal's gaze falling on to his own prosthetic limbs. “What about your arms?” Limoks asked. “Did you make them yourself?”
And there they went stepping straight into another minefield. Cool. Great. Fun. Just what he needed. Noble as it was for his partners to be so reluctant about chopping limbs off, House Scar did not care. It made his abdomen ache just to think about it, but he couldn't move further into those memories. Just had to stand on the boundary of accessing them, like opening a door to a dark corridor where a phantom lurked. The fruit basket weren't ready to hear about all that. Nobody needed to listen to the fragments of memories he could share on how he even came upon his prosthetics, or why he built into himself instead of letting the arms grow back themselves.
“Yeah. Out of whatever I could find. Made ‘em better and started experimenting with other splices when I got myself a place in London. Haven't changed them much since.” he replied, as vague as possible.
“Doesn't it hurt, doing all that by yourself?”
“Only if you let it or want it to.” That approach worked for most things, he'd learned. Easier to just forget and find a way to make the feelings stop. Self inflicted pain through augmentation, unnecessary side tracked thoughts, visions of the kids whose blood remained on his hands…
Something touching his leg turned his attention straight away.
He chittered, looking down and around the pelt. Retikis pushed the lint roller back and forth along his shinguard, completely ignoring the fluff scattered across the floor in favour of pulling off individual strands stuck to his leg. Sensing she was being watched, though, she paused and blinked up at him, trilling.
“Get out of here,” He nudged her away, with a twitch of his knee. “Gonna stab you in the eye sitting there like that.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Limoks said, not looking up from his work to see where his hatchling had gotten to. “I don't know whether trouble finds her, or she finds trouble.”
“Wonder where she gets that from,” he muttered. Putting her on a leash would solve a lot of their problems. Strange to think that once upon a time, eons ago, hatchlings were playing with cloaking tools and giving their caretakers the run-around by turning invisible. Now they got lint rollers. Or they got plopped into nests to chase fleas and ticks for snacks. No better than some kind of glorified vacuum on legs. Maybe that's what her job would be the day Siriks finally acted on that urge to rattle him to bits; collecting him back up across the Lair.
“That's a point, Atraks needs her eyes looking at, doesn't she?” Plumiraks piped up, pulling the washing line across to throw on another dripping pelt.
“Yeah, where is she anyway?” Citriks asked.
“She said she wasn't feeling well earlier, so she stayed in her den. Something about a stomach ache?” Plumiraks cocked her head, chittering to invite anyone else's knowledge.
“She said she might go to the medical room about it, but I don't know. She has that nerve damage, she doesn't feel things like we do,” Limoks added. “So either it's really bad, or her body remembered what feelings are.”
Midway through picking the pelt up to move it, Taniks paused. “Atraks?”
“Yeah, you must have met her? Siriks's Captain? She oversees most of this, it’s just a hobby and something to give back to the House; she's been a furrier forever . We all clubbed together to make sure everyone had something to wear when all our supply chains started to collapse,” She turned to face him as she explained, and must have interpreted his lack of reaction as puzzlement, scrunching her snout like he was missing the quiet part out loud. “Because. You know. The Young Wolf killed everyone else locally.”
What she didn't see under his helmet, was the twist of his jaw as he forced down a rising well of anger. How was it that every single thing he got involved in, she was also there in some manner? Fifteen hundred Devils, dozens of tasks to participate in, and they crossed paths at every opportunity. Coincidence, his ass. Sure made sense as to why Plumiraks was so keen to get his help and invite him in. Why none of them were surprised by his arrival. It wasn't just a nice offer to help out and get to know some other Eliksni. It was all to get round him where she was failing otherwise!
Oh, the gossip that must have bounced off the walls of the shop. What exactly had Atraks been saying? Had they heard about the reactions he'd been having? Their forced discussions? She must've spilled everything . Every question they asked, it all revealed things he would've never said had he any idea she was tangentially involved with them.
It still didn't add up on how she had time to juggle all those jobs she talked about. Jack of all trades, master of none came to mind. That was a secondary problem to roll over later, when he could hop over the hurdle of understanding that every single thing he'd ever done in the Lair had been playing right into her hands. To what end? Something about it spoke of far more than justifying her own selfish goals. She got the SIVA out of him. She knew they were cut from the same kind of cloth in their modifications. Only thing she hadn't gotten was for him to work on her and fix her problems, but all that she was doing made no sense when compared towards that end.
There was only one way to find out. In sickness or in health, she'd win the stupid prize for the stupid game she'd been playing. Never had he found more success than forcing an answer out of someone when they were at their lowest. Didn't matter the truth behind it or whether they made it up so he'd have mercy on them. It all came out in the end.
“Yeah. I've heard of her,” Taniks kept his voice steady, putting the pelt back down and clamping it into place. He swapped the knife back into his upper hand, scraping the fat off where it remained. Like nothing ever happened. No cause for concern. “When did that start?”
“Her feeling sick? I don't know, a couple of days ago. She kept working until today, she always does that thing where she says she's fine but she's not,” Plumiraks stepped down from the stool, pulling one of the furs hanging from the line straight. Quieter, she added, “I worry about her, sometimes.”
“Want me to check on her?” he asked, a little rush of excitement running through his systems to have a plan to get at her formulate and unfold into his waiting claws.
“Could you?” she chirped. “Just to see how she is, if she needs anything. We'll get it.”
“Yeah, this is good as done, anyway,” He dropped the knife into the bucket and let her examine the fur. “I'll do the rest when I come back.”
Quick as that, he departed against a backdrop of another chorus of goodbyes. Heading out into the snow, his vision flickered as his helm and optics adjusted to the whiteness - or most of it did, anyway. An error message cropped up on his right side, letting him know the obvious. He squinted into the overexposed side of his HUD, trudging down the worn and icy path through the drifts accumulating against the Lair’s exterior.
It was not a right or honourable thing to do in kicking Atraks while she was down, but she'd done the same to him. And yeah, she had left him be and not made any further attempts to speak with him personally since the day she chose to harass him, but that clearly didn't stop her from doing it indirectly. Her schemes couldn't be stopped by a tummy ache, so he wouldn't be deterred by one, either.
She had no idea what was coming.