Mercy's hand bubbles and blisters where it remains pressed to 2B's chest, flesh and biomechanical parts fusing in their destruction as she makes a furious, tight in the throat noise. The miserable rain continues to patter down, diluting the gleaming wash of scalding Paleblood, and Mercy feels the android come apart beneath her palm. She is made naked and revealed by flame, her eyes pale and luminous and unseeing in the ruin of her loveliness, and there is nothing Mercymorn can do about any of it.
"Absolutely not," Mercy grits, obstinately, and on her chest, where she alit without notice, her Omen spreads shimmering wings and swoons into her sleep with a soft, whispering hush.
The wracked crumple of Mercymorn's face smooths out to serenity, save for a single thin line of concentration along her brow, and it is as if a lamp has been lit inside of 2B to cast away all shadows. Mercy looks into her even as her hand reforms itself to immaculate wholeness, and epiphany comes like grace.
Mercymorn cannot repair rent metal and ruptured tubes. She cannot knit wire and plex and alloy. But she does not need to. She must be lateral. If she cannot fix 2B's heart -
From the Paleblood already married strangely to the android's physiology, the Saint of Joy folds a heart, new and trembling and perfect. She shapes the vaulting chambers and the triumphant crown of vessels, sheathes it in its protective sac, and hangs it beside her disrupted black box. Between them, she spins out a lattice of new conduits, flesh latched to the exquisite complexity of machine, making whole what was ruined in a new cast. She fashions an array of rudiment-organs to support the whole, a proto-kidney, a thumb-sized lobe of liver, a slender, singular lung, a scaffold of marrow, and into these she infuses the Paleblood she may salvage from the gushing flood.
And the tide recedes before her. The cascade reverses course, thanergic burst collapsed at her will and hers alone, and the triumph in her half-lidded eyes is a lush and hungry one.
"I do not bid you go," she says, with soft surety, "I bid you return."
cw: continued horror, burns
"Absolutely not," Mercy grits, obstinately, and on her chest, where she alit without notice, her Omen spreads shimmering wings and swoons into her sleep with a soft, whispering hush.
The wracked crumple of Mercymorn's face smooths out to serenity, save for a single thin line of concentration along her brow, and it is as if a lamp has been lit inside of 2B to cast away all shadows. Mercy looks into her even as her hand reforms itself to immaculate wholeness, and epiphany comes like grace.
Mercymorn cannot repair rent metal and ruptured tubes. She cannot knit wire and plex and alloy. But she does not need to. She must be lateral. If she cannot fix 2B's heart -
From the Paleblood already married strangely to the android's physiology, the Saint of Joy folds a heart, new and trembling and perfect. She shapes the vaulting chambers and the triumphant crown of vessels, sheathes it in its protective sac, and hangs it beside her disrupted black box. Between them, she spins out a lattice of new conduits, flesh latched to the exquisite complexity of machine, making whole what was ruined in a new cast. She fashions an array of rudiment-organs to support the whole, a proto-kidney, a thumb-sized lobe of liver, a slender, singular lung, a scaffold of marrow, and into these she infuses the Paleblood she may salvage from the gushing flood.
And the tide recedes before her. The cascade reverses course, thanergic burst collapsed at her will and hers alone, and the triumph in her half-lidded eyes is a lush and hungry one.
"I do not bid you go," she says, with soft surety, "I bid you return."