Chapter Text
The drifter was
Slow.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk. To move.
He just…
It felt like everything was moving so quickly, everywhere that wasn’t in his head. Amir was practically a blur ninety percent of the time, fuzzing in and out of his attention.
His head was
Was…
He struggled to remember. He’d been struggling. Words echoed.
‘Dangerous. Dangerous. Dangerous.’
He and The Blur played two-player pinball. They’d tried other games, but they hadn’t made any sense to him.
Amir should have left him alone. Should have. Should have. He couldn’t remember why, but
‘Staying just long enough to make it hurt’
'Or did you never intend to let them go.'
He’d told him. Finally, He’d been trying to find the words for so long. Years. Centuries. It had been so… hard to…
Stuffing. That was the word he wanted. His head was filled with stuffing.
And he was on fire.
It was a subtle sensation. A thousand years away, as distant as… Not stars, he eventually recognized. Fake stars. Lights? Were they… Not playing pinball anymore?
His heartbeat was like Amir. Too fast. He felt… viscous. Thick. Milk on the counter for a week. Equally as rotten.
He could
So far away
Taste it.
It tasted sharp, and it squirmed inside him. Tried to push its way out. Wanted OUT. Starved him of… Stuffed his brain with…
Gods, what was happening to him?
The thought made him stumble, a year after it had gone through his head. Amir was there. Hands on h
Is
Bare skin. Arm, ripped off. Arm. Broken. Shot through. Stabbed. Chained. Stabbed. Sliced. Shredded. Pulled from its socket. Ripping muscle and skin and tendon and vein. Dead. Over. And over. And OVER. AND OVER. AND
GET. AWAY.
Amir was apologizing, letting him stand, huddling his arms close. Amir looked… frantic. Why? Wasn’t his fault though. Soft textures. Equal pressure. Not hands. Not chains. Not ropes. Not something that would hurt. That was better. He’d wrapped his arm in the blanket. Leading him back.
Time moved around him. Left him be. As it should. Better that way. Better that they forget. They’d hurt less.
His heart ached. Different pains. Not a blade’s stabbing.
They didnt deserve this.
Should
Reset.
Let them forget he existed. Let them…
Death. He watched it replay on a screen far away. Each of them dying. That was order.
No. No. Please. Stop.
It didn’t listen to him.
--
A year drifted by. He couldn’t sleep. They wanted him to, he knew. They cared so much. Shouldn’t have. He was a pox. A plague. Rotting everything he touched. He was the air that rotted the milk.
Rot. That was what was trying to happen to him. He could feel it. He could see it when he closed his eyes. It boiled. Incompatible. Wanting out. Desperate. Terrified. It knew. It knew. He was a plague. A plague. A plague.
Leticia spoke in that beautiful language he didn’t understand. Softly. Asking something. Baring his skin.
Tied down. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Move. MOVE. Taking away his thoughts, draining them away like something crimson that shimmered. Putting fire into his body. Injecting boiling acid. Incompatible. It burned.
He couldn’t lay down. He couldn’t. Didn’t she see? It was all he could do to protect himself. All he could do to separate the moments. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t leave himself to be taken from and put into. He couldn’t.
Air touched his bare chest. Softly warm air. Bombastine. Emerald colors. Gods she was going to kill him. She moved his hands. He was too terrified to resist. Too slow. Too full of stuffing.
Pressure, sliding down his body. Remaining equal. Pressure that quieted the wind. Let him be free of at least that much.
A… Huh? He looked down. What was a shirt? His skin was blackened, but the only fire he felt was the one that hadn’t been able to escape him. Ah. A shirt. Right. She took his arm again, but it was protected. Hands weren’t. It was… Alright. He’d lost his hands. They’d been cut off. Crushed. Stabbed with holes. But he’d grown used to the pressure being inconsistent there.
Pressure. Upper arm. Made his heart beat wrong. Too fast already. Could feel his pulse. Pressure kept moving. Kept changing. Struggling against the pressure. Made his veins spasm. That wonderful, kind woman in red who swore at him too fast to understand more often than she spoke softly. She was looking… Like Amir had. Horrified. She’d noticed. He didn’t know, yet. She told him. He looked like he might faint.
It took him a week to move his arm, but he managed it. Amir held still. He patted his shoulder. He didn’t need to worry. The drifter knew somehow that he was worried that he’d become like the rest of them. Or worse, the metal rot they knew. He didn’t need to worry. The drifter didn’t exist right.
Took him days to speak. His voice was so… Soft. They had to know, for sure. So they didn’t worry.
“It”
“Is”
“Incompatible.”
He finally, finally said. Amir put his head in his hands. Lettie looked like she might do the same, but chose to put something dark and metal to his chest.
A blade. Puncturing his lungs. Bisecting his heart. She was going to kill him, his heartbeat stuttered, she wa
Constant pressure. No further addition to pain. Her jaw set. She looked at him. Was he sure, babas?
Another week of effort.
“Yes.”
“I”
“Can”
“Feel”
“It”
“Boiling.”
Amir looked like he might throw up.
Lettie
Pain. It was a subtle, small pain, but it was real. Small only at first. It grew. His hand. She’d cut. It. Open. He could see the silver and red bursting out of him. Trying so hard to escape, coming down his arm in streams. The pressure finally had a way out. Taking his blood with it. Amir ran out of the room. He…
He passed out.
--
And in all respects, the drifter felt much better when he woke back up. Still woozy from severe blood loss, yes, but at very least his brain wasn’t being starved of oxygen by the techrot. It was probably too large to permeate the membranes.
Having a walking Trinity was a blessing. (Hah-hah) Having a living, breathing, speaking one who called him babas and other strange things, could think, and subsisted off of basically just coffee? Far better. Likely he might have died without her help, the stress on his body far too much to bear. And that would have set him back… Set all of them back…
How long had it been?
Amir was playing his game, sound way up, in his usual spot in the corner. How long had it been since he’d gotten back? A week? A month? Time dilated and fuzzed in his memories, he could barely remember anything.
No. That
Wasn’t true.
His brain itched in the wrong way when it offered up those thoughts, though, so he just… Put them right back down and kicked the box shut. Later, maybe. It didn’t stop the anxiety, or the lingering sorrow, but nothing did. And hey, both of those were better than nothing. He could live with sorrow and fear.
The drifter heaved himself up with a groan, and immediately regretted it, because his body woke up. Its first gift, a pounding headache, and second, the distinctly unpleasant sensation of needs that had gone unfulfilled for a while. Gods, those were also new, since he'd escaped, and they did not stop getting on his metaphorical nerves or his physical ones. Hunger, real hunger. Thirst. Everything else on the pile was also a problem but those two were the most upsetting.
Amir was by his side when those thoughts hit him, the box opening right back up because he hadn't fucking locked it, and...
He had the briefest of mental echoes telling him to just eat the man.
Zephyr was… Going to be a problem for a little while. He’d…
Sol and Lua. The sensation of biting a human head in half was… He could still feel the way bone cracked, crunched, shattered, and just gave way to jelly.
It was…
Exquisite. Powerful. Primal. He'd been so free to feel and do, no fear, no phantom pains, no regrets. A child with a gun. Protecting. It was protecting, wasn't it? Even if he was killing for himself. Even if he was hunting down tired old beasts with eyes that had gone dull from starvation. They cowered before his grin. Tombstone teeth in a smile too wide to be human. The void was a mirror, after all, and they? They wouldn't hurt him any more. Ever.
He felt sick.
Monster. Hurting because he could. Playing dangerous games, just for the thrill. Just to feel something. It had never been Zephyr. That was just a puppet. He'd chosen. He'd decided. The decrees had all been his own. Dangerous. Dangerous. Dangerous.
A child. Throwing a gun away in horror, hearing it clank and clatter down a deep, deep shaft where it could never ever hurt anyone ever again. Sobbing. She'd killed someone she hadn't meant to. She couldn't be a soldier. Couldn't be their guardian. Growing up had always meant he'd had to face what he'd done, and-
Gods he had never wanted to.
But the sensations never left him. Sometimes, it'd just be so easy to...
No.
NO.
The monster was not who he wanted to be. Not who he'd let himself be. He couldn't. He would be better, for them. He was here because he cared. Because he could help. It wasn't just a game to him. It wasn't. There were so many emotions to feel. Why did he always loop back to the same few? He could kill to protect. HAD to. They needed him to.
And...
And it was just one more reason for his stomach to rebel. He held back a dry heave, thick, minerally saliva flooding his mouth. Grab the blanket, focus on that. Focus on that. Count the fibers beneath his thumb. Focus on the thought of the Hex. What he could do for them. Smiles on their faces, for once. Hope in their eyes.
Hope in the eyes of children in a classroom who knew he was lying. The wall was coming down. The door being forced open by hands. Limbs. Inhuman. Hateful. Murmuring voices. Screaming voices. Echoing voices. He couldn't protect them.
Oh damnation. What was he doing.
“You’re awake!” Amir laughed, grinning.
Took him a moment to swallow down the bile.
“Unfortunately.” The drifter grumbled.
Amir laughed again anyway, wrapping him in a hug that threatened to knock him over. Sodding man. Beautiful, wonderful, friend that he was. Already he was yapping, catching him up on everything that’d been going down. The drifter stuffed the cracks in his head and let himself think about nothing but his friends.