Chapter Text
>dave: drive it like you stole it.
( mass effect | civil twilight - anybody out there )
Cerberus is full of shit.
It's not exactly hard to figure out, and he's had a lot of time to look at it from uglier angles than he'd ever want to know about--if he'd had a choice. That's probably the issue, when he gets down to it: they forced him into this corner, and what else is there to do? Books and vids, yeah, sometimes, but he chews through them faster than they dish out new ones. From there, he's down to counting numbers, ceiling tiles and seconds, but it makes him feel sick to try to numb himself like that. His mind is all he really owns.
So he thinks, because he's clever like that. Cleverer than they give him credit for, that's for damn sure; he doubts they ever figured they'd have a kid like him on their hands, one who likes to run marathons in his head to match his wall-to-wall pacing. The tiles mark years of it, worn down to a smoothness by his feet as he goes from desk to bookshelf over and over and over. Blisters his heels something stupid, but it's something to do with his body that isn't lying down and dying, and that's all he needs.
Cerberus is full of shit. Not for what they're doing to him--because hey, dangerous, crazy alien world out there, right? It all makes sense in that militantly progressive kind of way; lots of humans in the 'verse who need a future, and if it costs a dozen to buy it for millions, that's a pretty good deal. Play the numbers smart enough and you get to walk home a winner, and that's what matters in the end. No, they're full of shit for a point so simple that he figured it out when he was a kid and he's only had years to refine it:
Cerberus, the vanguard of humanity, a collection of the smartest goddamn people the species has to offer, actually believes that they can keep him here forever.
He's no scientist, but that's a flawed premise if he's ever heard one.
(He is five years old and remembering the day he went to the zoo last year, and the tiger exhibit, watching caution-orange jungle cats stalk the length of the bars, end to end, smooth shoulderblades jutting and receding in furred waves. He'd asked his brother why they keep doing that and his brother had fixed him with a wry grin, ruffled his mop of dishwater blond hair, and said, “Shit, kid, they want out. Only reason they can't is 'cause they'd snap into your scrawny ass like a slim jim.”
And he understands it now, the pacing, working off frenetic energy with nowhere else to go, because he's doing it too, end to end, just watching the other children outside his window that he can never, ever get to look his way no matter how loud he yells and how hard he pounds on the glass. His arms are bruised vulgar yellow and green all from elbow to wrist and it hurts too much to fight anymore.
So he paces. And he wants out.)
Today is the day he chooses to be sixteen--because those are the other things he owns, the tiny decisions he can make, the ones that don't mean much and never have to be completely true--and habit finds him pacing in the false dawn light again, ghosting from wall to institutionally white wall. If he holds his breath, he can hear Pragia outside under the hum of air conditioning, the rustle of leaves and the creaking of trees growing too fast.
(At least, that's what he imagines it is. Not like he's ever seen it.)
The scenery never changes, but what's in his head is fluid. He admits to liking the lessons they give him; brief coughs of time where he doesn't have to worry about what comes next. Nice to know there's a world out there, too, even if he's not a part of it. Makes it a little easier to handle in the end. Alien biology, history, culture, turians and the Contact War, asari and the Citadel, quarians and the geth--Cerberus approaches it like a military briefing, like they're about to boot him out into the galaxy on a mission and they're giving him an intel breakdown. They never give him too much at once, but he wonders if they even know how much that leaves him wanting more.
Maybe he's an experiment in seeing what happens when you put a little bit of knowledge in a person and let it brew for awhile. They've always liked to split him up into segments, reduce him to numbers; it'd make sense that they'd make him an experiment in an experiment. Scientific fucking matryoshka. Human mise an abyme.
Because why not? Hell, he can do it too.
He marches in his pendulum-swinging, military-rhythm from wall to wall to wall to wall in the half-light, taking inventory.
1.) He's special. He's different. They call him gifted, but he knows that's just a word loaded with ten tons of steaming cow shit because what they really mean is useful accident. Kids like him don't occur in nature; it's all freighter crashes and industrial runoff, exposure to element zero, life imitating art--or just half-assed comic book plots and Hollywood rehashes that they give to him in snippets. No gifts here, just luck, and they've pounded the statistics into his head over and over and over again to make him realize how lucky he is:
Exposure rate in humans doesn't even brush up against .5%. Maybe that's changed since the last time they told him anything--he figures if it'd make more people like him, they'd be dusting human cities with eezo like powder snow--but it's not like he's got access to the information. No, it only started happening since faster-than-light space travel and element zero-powered drive cores, and pretty specifically only since the first time they ever tanked a trillion-dollar craft right into Singapore and got to see what happened to those kids for the twenty years after. It was an accident. Accidents happen.
And then they keep happening.
Out of that .5%, most aren't even affected. 70%? No issues. That other 30%, though, there's the distinction--20% of it ends up in cancer, the regular kind, because eezo in that dust form just loves to get itself into live tissue. He could've come out of it with brain tumors or marrow-sucking leukemia, but hey, he didn't. Isn't that lucky? That last 10% got the little bear's porridge of mutagens, that perfect temperature, that perfect chemistry, that perfect, lucky distribution of nodules all along the nervous system. They're the special ones. They're the ones everyone wants.
And the distinction keeps going: only 10% of that 10% ever see real results, the kind that don't trickle down to nothing before they even hit their teens, and only 10% of that 10% are strong enough to find themselves fit for training. He's part of an even smaller number (zero is what they keep calling him, zero for potential and he fucking hates it) because he's just better than the others. You'll be giving Asari matriarchs a run for their money someday, they tell him. The strongest human. The best.
And yeah, it took awhile to get used to it, to train neurons to fire in sequence and activate the eezo, make it flutter awake with electricity, make it spit out the dark energy he needs to turn physics into his bitch. It's more than sci-fi telekinesis bullshit: he's a self-contained mass effect generator. A biotic to end all biotics. It's a thing that goes around on the staff to laugh a little in disbelief when they see his readings, those obnoxious scholar chuckles while they pat each other on the backs like prideful parents. You'll be a one-man army. And they laugh.
He finds it way funnier than they do.
(He's seven years old and doesn't know the difference between training and torture, or if there's any difference at all, on his hands and knees and dry heaving. They hold him down and inject him with stuff that fills all his muscles with a sort of heaviness and make him run until he collapses, shock him when he tries to stop before then; and then they do it over and over again, repeated trials, until one day he finally glows a bright biotic blue and sends the doctor checking his pulse flying into a tray of metal instruments, arcs of stainless steel and a noise harsh on his sensitive ears.
That's the first time he hears the laugh, and the clapping, looking up at staff bleary-eyed while they tell him that he's gifted, lucky: that he shouldn't even be able to do the things he does, but he can.
And they'll make him so much better.)
2.) Something is changing. And it's not just him and the miracle of puberty.
Yeah, he's put on inches and pounds. That's a given. At sixteen, he's stretched out and gangly, skin over ribs and the notches of his spine in a way that makes him look half-starved. Muscles lay flat over a slight skeleton. He can handle more than he used to, though--there's power behind the kicks and punches they make him deliver to the chrome carapaces of combat mechs, even if it's like his bones are breaking--and there are days where he feels like he's made of static, that blossoming of biotic power itching just under the surface. It hasn't even been a week since they fit him with a new implant and a new array of amps and the difference is damn near staggering; when he isn't hunched over on the foot of his bed with his head in his hands, eyes clenched against a migraine, he feels like he can almost--maybe--not quite grasp the sizzling something flashing through his nerves.
But it's more than that. The facility buzzes. He sees new kids brought in who sit in the courtyard and look generally confused and sedated as hell, and there are old faces he hasn't seen in a long, long time. Staff is rotating around these days, too, doctors and scientists he's known since he was a kid just gone one day with younger, more distant replacements. He can't say he gives much of a shit--he goes out of his way to forget names because that's just too intimate for him, knowing that the person about to beat him bloody with a cattle prod just to see how long it takes for biotics to flare under stress has a name--but the change sets him on edge. He knew which ones liked to really lay into him and which ones held back. He knew what to expect This new set is an unknown quantity.
There's a new nurse, too. The old one wasn't bad, just stern in a ruler-wielding Catholic nun sort of way, but she was always flawlessly on schedule with all his meals and never fumbled a single damn injection of the shit they use to keep him in this pacing, passive fugue state. This new one, though. She's young, and there's a kind of songbird delicacy to her, a high, tittering voice and thin bones. And she's nice enough--nicer than he's used to, for however much that means here--but she gives him his food when he's either not hungry or half past starving, and he wonders how much training she had before she came here because it takes her ten goddamn stabs before she finally hits the vein with those needles. She just shakes and shivers all over, a full-body quiver that goes from her eyes to her feet. He figures he just scares her, but shit, lady. Don't take the job if you're not ready to climb into the lion pit.
And as he runs a finger over the stitches at his hairline, still a little raw from his surgery--because what he really needed was more wetware to make him feel just a little less human, just a little more like a machine--he realizes one very important change:
They haven't let him out of this room in a long, long time. And he's starting to get impatient.
(He's nine years old and the butt of an automatic rifle is jamming painfully into his spine. The last thing he wants to do is get into that ring of kids all looking at him with that sunken, hungry sort of stare, but they shove him so hard he almost loses his footing. He stumbles, locked in by concrete dividers and tides of children and armed guards that stand like black granite statues. There's another boy in there with him--older, taller by six easy inches, built in freight train angles--crouched low on his heels.
“We told them they'd get to go home if they kill you.” The doctor's voice is quiet at his ear, and coldly clinical. “Let's see what you can do.”
He goes back to his room that night with raw, bloody fists and a swollen face and messily dislocated joints that make his arm flop in a sick, marionette kind of way. Every piece of him hurts in heartbeat throbs; and for the first time since they brought him here-- because the brother whose face they've taken from him always told him to suck it up, that tears are weak, that they mean he's lost--he huddles in the shower and cries.)
3.) He's not actually sure how old he is. He's not actually sure about a lot of things when it comes to personal details. That's the funny part about what they're doing to him.
He used to remember, and he remembers remembering, and that's what gets him. At one point, it was there. It was real. But they're determined as fuck to ride him for every last mile like some scrawny, sorry pack mule, to bleed out every part of him that was ever human, and it makes him dig fingers into his scalp and laugh because they're winning. He knows he's no lab-grown designer kid--he's pretty sure none of the ones they drag in are, some of them still with fresh Batarian slaver brands--so he knows he has a birthday. What day, though? What month? What year? And how would he even know how to track it when he doesn't have a starting point? His internal clock is completely off-reference, ticking along a timeline that doesn't mean a goddamn thing. The shift between fifteen and sixteen happened sometime in the months between surgeries. All he knows is what the doctors tell him.
They try to convince him that he doesn't have a family. (He's glad they don't try to pull that 'we're your family now'' cult-brand brainwashing on him anymore because it just makes him taste bile and blood-boiling, unadulterated fury; the last person that stupid, some barely graduated intern who thought she could bring some shred of humanity to this shit show and make him pliable, like they could just Stockholm him and make their jobs easier, got a face full of industrial safety glass and a breathing tube for her trouble. He never saw her again. There's something warm and ugly in him that bubbles up when he wonders if she ended up dying.) They're wrong, though; he remembers remembering a family, blank faces that used to have names and colors and shapes attached to them. And maybe it's just a delusional, rigor mortis deathgrip to try to hang onto something, just another one of his choices that don't matter to anyone but himself, but he knows his parents, whoever and wherever the fuck they are, didn't just drop him off at the space asshole clinic one day and never pick him up.
(But maybe they're dead. Maybe Cerberus even killed them. How would he know now? How much will it matter in another ten years when he only remembers how he'd remember remembering?)
He's mid-pace with wiry hands locked behind his head when the door slides open, greeting the nurse with a tilted chin and flat indifference. She's prim in her Cerberus-issue uniform, crisp white lab coat to match the room, all delicate and arsenic-pale, cool colors and watery eyes. She smiles at him, and keeps smiling even as he doesn't match the motion. Her thin arms are full of poorly-balanced items, a meal tray cantilevered on top of two books--dry coursework bullshit, he reads from the spines--and a medical kit, all of it dumped onto his desk with a clumsy kind of urgency, like she's scared to drop it.
(Or scared if having no hands free.)
“Good morning, Zero,” she says, and he can't help but notice her jump just a little--just the tiniest twitch--at the derisive snort that punches out of him, sudden and explosive. It's funny how she tries to make his case number sound like some kind of dignified nickname, familiarity she chirps out in that nightingale chitter of hers. It's funny because it's the only name he has now; he let them take his real one back when he thought making himself agreeable, getting all willing supplicant would mean he'd have an easier time of it. But shit, he was a stupid kid. If he'd known then that all they wanted was to strip him like Lucretia, he would've fought for it, clawed out some fucking eyes for it. Didn't, though. Now he's Zero and halfway to a weapon designation: because that's what they do to weapons, isn't it? Name them after numbers and animals?
(Sometimes he thinks about what dumbass animal name they'll assign him when he's out of here and laughs at every prospect.)
He doesn't respond to her, but he never does, just slides into the desk chair and tilts himself back on two legs, long-limbed and casual, stretched like a jungle-cat. She works to shed the plastic from a hypodermic needle, fetching a bottle from the depths of her coat pocket. His lip curls.
“Let's hold off on that,” he says, reaches over to the plate of food, plucks a slice of apple with his fingers and chews on it thoughtfully. There's a headache starting to bloom right behind his eyes, something thrumming in his veins that's blue and electric, close enough that he can taste it, enough that not even food can drown out the tang of it. Like sucking on a battery. He works his jaw like he paces: there's just too much energy there, and it all feels stinging, acidic. “I wanna rap about something to you first.”
She fails to hold back a look of surprise, cocking her head to the side. Yeah, he'd be surprised too if he were her; he makes it a point to keep his silence, if only because it's just one more thing he can own. “Of course. We can talk about whatever you like.” Her smile never fails, though, and even tugs with a little bit of warmth, that the shock might even be a pleasant thing, and she clasps latex-gloved hands together, nudging half of herself to sit on the corner of the desk. Casual, like him; meeting him in the middle. An olive branch.
“This implant,” he starts, and runs a thumb along the stitches again. Habit, now. It itches like a motherfucker. “Been thinking about it. Kinda weird they'd risk full-on lobotomizing my shit just for an upgrade. Don't they usually just slap in new amps and call it a day?”
She sucks in a tiny breath and takes the pause to consider. “Well, yes, usually. But based on the data gathered by the research team, we--that is, the medical staff--decided that the benefits far outweighed the risks. Don't worry; you had the best surgeons Cerberus could--”
“Do I look worried? I'm not staggering around like a stroke victim so I thought it was pretty obvious nobody fucked up their job.” Her mouth snaps shut and he only shakes his head. “Might wanna think about making the swap to public relations, though, see if they can teach you a thing or two. They've got covering their asses down to a science, and between you and me? I don't think you're cut out for this whole nursing business.”
He settles into a blasé smirk and full-blown bastard confidence while her own lips draw themselves into neutral lines. Still dangling that olive branch; still trying to be friendly, trying not to upset him. He wonders if she even knows how full of shit she is. “Okay. That's okay. You miss your old nurse--”
“Nope.”
“--or maybe I'm doing some things differently that you don't like? You can tell me. I'm very accommodating, Zero.”
He shrugs, a long, exaggerated rolling motion that transitions smoothly into an outstretched arm that sweeps the bottle off the desk. It's a tiny thing, fits end to end between his thumb and forefinger, full of a clear kind of liquid that looks like water but goes into his veins burning. They never used to have to use this shit on him; coercion worked at first, until he grew out of his dead retarded adolescent years and forgot what it felt like to want to please anyone, and then threats were fine, because it's not like one kid could go head to rifle barrel with Cerberus security staff. That all changed when they cracked his skull open and shoved in that first implant, though--when that tinny hum in his veins became a song, when he could finally reach out and touch something real, something tangible that he could shape with all the ease of firing synapses. That's when they decided it was time to leash the dog.
It feels like an amputation. Phantom feeling. He wiggles where fingers of rage should be and only gets responses from contempt; indignation returns mild irritation. Everything else is hacked off at the joints and only comes in as a dull ache, feeling that he should be feeling in all the same ways as he remembers remembering. It all exists. It's all real. They just won't let him reach it.
But damn, looking at that bottle, twirling it, reading the label, glancing up to the nurse with her post-rainstorm puddle eyes, and he feels that song and it's sounding pretty fucking gorgeous, crystal clear and bright, bright blue at the edges of his vision. It's close enough that he could reach out and--
“Please put that down,” the nurse says, and he snaps his eyes to her. He'd have to be dead to miss that rickety train car shake that starts at her hands and travels up her arms.
“Sure.” There's a marriage of their two old smiles on his face now, false and uncomforting and devil-smug, but he complies. The bottle makes a hollow noise on the desk. “You know what you do different?” he continues, lowers his chair onto four legs with a gentle thud. “See, the old nurse--and this is where I drop why you suck old men for quarters at nursing, so you might want to grab a pen and take notes--she would adjust the dose every once and awhile. Turns out height and weight are sort of important. Who knew, right? And after getting fitted with new amps, shit. Couldn't even get out of bed. Lady built a career on knocking my ass out.”
“Well,” she starts, shifting her weight off the desk, crossing arms over her stomach, “I decided that the proper course of action would be to--monitor your behavior, and if you showed any changes...”
And that's their real problem, he thinks: that in the middle of trying to make him into something different, they forgot to notice that he's been changing all on his own. Maybe it's dawning on her, and that's the shimmery thing he's seeing in her eyes as he stands up slowly, so strangely fluid; that they fitted him with claws, gave him a song, gave him something he could finally grip onto so tightly that he can't ever let them try to take it from him again.
Or maybe she just realizes that she fucked up and took the wrong posting at the wrong time. She was never ready to climb into the lion pit, this one. Not like the old one with her chain-smoker laugh and prison matron clip; not like the old doctors, the old scientists, the ones who engineered this whole fucking tragedy. Maybe he should be grateful. He's been needing some change.
“Thanks.” It's almost friendly, the way he says it; the way his hand lances out and grips her jaw is nothing short of brutal, though, sinking fingernails into soft buttermilk skin, deep enough to draw jagged lines of pink and she makes a strangled squeaking sort of noise, all mouse caught in the mousetrap. “You know, I'm glad we had this talk. I think we really accomplished something today.”
And he flares with that bright, supernova blue, that beautiful song in his head, wrenches her head to the side until all her little partridge neck-bones give out in easy firecracker snaps. She slumps, hits the desk where she falls, splays out on the tile floor where he's worn it down from years and years and she matches all the dead colors in the room. Something warm and ugly bubbles up in him, bridging that gap between feeling that he hasn't crossed in years.
And he's not gonna lie.
It feels pretty great.
(He's thirteen years old and curled on his side, gripping rough cotton bedsheets with blanched knuckles and trying his damnedest not to roll over and show his stomach to the floor. Moving hurts. Breathing hurts. They cut him open and jammed shit inside of him and he feels like an interstate car accident now, some high speed splatter of metal and flesh. Unidentifiable. He's supposed to be a person, he thinks, but being a person right now is too hard, and thinking is too much of that, too, so he closes his eyes and stops doing both of those things.
When he dreams, he wants to dream of people, of the faces missing like paper cutouts, of the names that his tongue searches for but never finds; he wants to dream of the family nine years gone, who never came back for him. He wants to dream of the divergent path.
Instead, he dreams of flowers.)
4.) The Teltin Facility is on fire. That's his fault. He'll take the blame for that one. Turns out that's what happens when you lift a combat mech like it's a paperweight and launch it right into the chemical storage unit.
It hadn't been his intention, actually; he's just not a fan of security detail shoving rifle barrels in his face, and he wasn't about to let two hulking tons of titanium lay down a thick polish of his organ meat on the floor. What the else was he supposed to do? Put his hands behind his head and surrender like they were shouting at him over that ear-shredding alarm?
Fuck that.
He'd laughed with the sheer invincibility of it, a biotic field strong enough to wrap a mech in self-contained zero gravity, bullets meant to sever limbs held in stasis--he'd show them fucking asari matriarch, one man army--that barely even tickled his nerve endings. The way he shot that goddamn metal goliath right into four armed guards, bowling them into bloody, black-armored smears, was almost--artistic. Effortless.
(jesus, and that song in his veins)
Then the wall buckled and the whole sparking, leaking mess of it tumbled metal-over-bodies into a bank of containers and he didn't stick around long enough to watch the fireworks. He was gone, running down a side hall in strong, purposed strides because he did not just snap a woman's neck and crush four members of the asshole a-team just to get pincushioned by an oversized, accidental pipe bomb.
And he's still running because if he stops, he's dead or as good as dead and that's just not going to happen; he's running because the whole east wing has collapsed behind him and there's a thrill in that, a levity that makes him feel like a fucking god, legs pumping like he's got wings on his feet. And he's still running even as the guards keep coming, as they stack themselves in neat military rows, a hallway blockade made of bodies--and he charges, blows through them like a speeding train. His world reduces down to single points of meaty snaps, skulls crunching under pressure; and the ones unlucky enough to live, the ones he sees over his shoulder trying to stagger back up in the aftermath, get lifted up like strings of black paper cranes, helpless and dangling.
He slams them into the wall again, and again, and again, until the shiny white paneling is streaked red like a fingerpainting and not a single damn one of them gets back up.
(and he runs right by the other kids, runs by their shitty, tiny cells, runs by arms reaching out for him, doesn't even look, because he can't fucking save them all and they hate him anyway and he's not going to die like that, heroes die and cowards live and he's going to get out of here no matter what that means)
He knows he's going the right way when he finally hits labcoats, all the non-combat staff stark against the black of Cerberus armor as they're escorted out--on their way to the evac shuttles, white rats jumping ship--and he just grins something sharp and fierce when he grabs the first one from behind, wraps her in biotics and pulls and barks a laugh as she sails over his head. It's the anesthesiologist; the last face he always saw before he went under. And in the half a wide-eyed second she sees him as her body twists midair, before line of sight breaks and she leaves a glass divider in cherry-red fragments, he wonders if she finds the reversal as ironic as he does.
He wonders if any of them do. God, if the guards are a joke, the scientists are just the punchline; they're soft without that armor, without those energy barriers, just cloth and skin and 206 bones that break like promises. He counts them down one by one--neck-snapping whiplash for the psychologist, quick and easy, because they could've been on decent terms in another life, maybe; but he's gentle on the fucker who liked to play fast and loose with electroshock equipment, bounces him from ceiling to floor to wall like a pinball, force too light to kill him until he's sick of the screaming. Physicist, biochemist, neurologist; the research team that liked to run his tests after surgery. The doctor who did all his physicals and the nurse who stuck to her shadow. He leaves a trail of Cerberus' best and brightest behind him, walks with sticky footprints at a clip almost too casual for escape because who’s going to stop him now?
He sees real light--natural light--for the first time in over a decade, a wet, watercolor grey on the other side of the rooftop atrium glass; he sees Pragia outside in all its overgrown glory, shoots of ambitious vine already grasping at the edges of the landing pad. It's raining. It's raining. He reaches for memories, tries to grab for the smell and the feel of it. All he can come up with is an approximation, cold water and a leaky showerhead and the chill of air conditioning after.
And maybe that's why he's a little more forceful with the head researcher's guards as they run for the door, just feet away from escape. He seizes them in bright, violent blue, pulls them back like he's winding up a pitch and hurls them through the glass, off the side of the building, and it's a long, long way down. Pragia soaks up all their sounds.
(but that air rushes in, that scent of a world scrubbed clean, mud and soaked concrete and the strange, tinny smell of wet metal and oh, he remembers)
And he grabs the last man standing, too, before sidearms can be drawn from beneath that labcoat that makes the guy look half a mad scientist. Just a half, though; the rest of him looks almost friendly. Charismatic. Maybe that's what won him this position, that offensively pristine smile and the willingness to bullshit through it until he got his funding. Yeah, he remembers this guy. It's hard to forget the face that tells you to fight for your life.
“Can't believe I let them talk me out of a control chip,” is all the man says, his face nothing but a full on grimace, venom in a voice that knows what's coming. “They said it'd compromise the integrity of the experiment. You know what compromises the integrity of the experiment? When the goddamned monster gets out.”
“Yeah,” he deadpans. “Hate it when that happens.”
It's instinct, when he does it. He's been imagining this shit for years and years, playing scenes out in his head over and over in place of counting tiles while he tried to get to sleep, but he'd never come to a decision; he never thought it'd really happen, maybe, just wishful thinking and even more hopeless dreaming, little escapist fantasies to keep himself sane. But with the guy hanging in midair, almost literally in his hands, he makes a decision that's nothing like any of it, unpracticed but perfect and natural and hollow in the way he thinks he should feel sick, but doesn't.
He tugs the field in opposite ways, slow enough to really watch; the effect is like the straining of seams, pink stress lines blooming in an imperfect, jagged line from forehead down to where his collarbone disappears under his shirt. The man bites his lip at first, huffs out pained breaths, Cerberus-trained to the core; but then he jacks up the tension, sees skin split open like a rotten peach, and the researcher screams, a ragged sound that drowns the alarms, drowns the rain, almost drowns his concentration before he shuts it out and redoubles.
(they just spent twelve years turning him into this and fuck if he's going to let it go to waste)
And when he ends it, it's not out of mercy; it's because he's been craving this since he was nine and knew that people could die in awful, pleading ways that happened at his own hands, sometimes, craving the crunch of this man's bones, the oily slide of cartilage and muscle. He gives one last final jerk in two directions and splits him down the middle, cracking him open like a holiday bird. Blood jets in impressive, explosive sprays; the atrium is a Jackson Pollock of shredded viscera and pink bone splinters, paint brush splatters of burgundy that trickle down the windows. He rubs his face with his shirt, angry scrubbing motions to wipe off what flecked onto him. The feeling of it is disgusting, too warm and too viscous.
Goddamn if the rest of this doesn't feel just right, though.
He keeps footing through the no-traction, slip-slide mess he's made, steps over to the half that's got the labcoat on the pocket protector side, and reaches down into jutting peaks of a ribcage with a hand protected by his shirt. It's gross and warm anyway, makes him gag a little, but he gets what he wants: that dangling, plastic-laminated ID card that he'd never, ever wanted to look at before, but feels obligated to now. He's going to leave this place behind in a fucking vapor trail, but he'd be an idiot if he thought it wasn't going to stay with him forever; no lucky breaks here, just wetware he can't take out of his head and names branded into the back of his throat. Teltin, Pragia, Cerberus, Zero.
May as well add one more. May as well take something back, claim it as his. And fuck, if the name was good enough for that monster?
He wipes the blood off the gloss with a thumb, reads the black print beneath, and decides that Dave Strider is good enough for this monster, too.
And when he walks out into the rain, tastes clear water on his tongue, takes in deep lungfuls of that air, so fresh it stings his sinuses, he can't do anything but laugh.
(He's four years old and holding hands with his sister, watching the city melt under a thunderstorm. Houston smells more like itself during the rain than any other time, damp bricks and wet steel and slaked lime; the street shimmers with neon lights swirling down storm drains. He feels invincible with the sister who's sort of a pain at his side and a brother built like celtic masonry at his back, so he drags her along as he runs forward, squeezes between the bumpers of parked cars and jumps up on the curb. The city makes him stronger and faster and bigger.
In four blocks, they'll be separated; they'll take him to a back room in the hospital and tell him to come with them, that his family is waiting for him, and it'll be the last time he'll trust anyone, the last time come too late, Castor severed from Clytemnestra; in four blocks, his life will end;
but right now, though, they jump together--left foot, right foot, mirrored golden twins shining--into a puddle, spraying color, arcs of supernova blue and atomic green. “Slow down,” his sister says. She tries too hard to be their mother, but she can't hide the tiny smile or how she wiggles her toes in soaked sandals like she's playing in the mud.
He doesn't, though; he can't slow down, not once, not ever. He only runs down the sidewalk, head tilted to the sky and worshipping the rain.)