Mercymorn the First (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
acidjail) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
acidjail) wrote in deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
acidjail) wrote in deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
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"Don't be ridiculous," she says, crossly, "You're the second most competent person in this building, notwithstanding myself - an excellent swordswoman, more than passably intelligent, meticulously disciplined, not a constant irritant, and you're surely aware of your looks."
Praise doesn't come readily to her. It somehow rankles to bestow it, or perhaps grinds against some sedimentary resistance to the idea, but there are matters of fact she would rankle more to omit. She has a low tolerance for falsehoods, and that includes the absurd idea that 2B lacks admirable qualities in the abstract.
"I'd be astonished if you didn't have admirers, of one type or the other, if I'm being quite honest," says a woman who never stints on telling people exactly what she thinks whenever it pleases her to do so.
no subject
She does remember. It came with the restrictions of a promise and of conspiracy. It pains her as much as it comforts her. It is an orb of light in the dark. The qualities picked are the qualities she would like to maintain. There is one, hidden, that she does not want. She has never wanted.
2B weaves her gloved fingers together and locks her thumbs so they have no place to worry and rub. It bubbles up here, too. A desire to say something, but what she gets is a rounded blockade that reads CLASSIFIED in her internal systems. It does not give her an error, but a limit. She cannot speak of it. She cannot change it. But if she was made in their image, made to feel even if she was meant to destroy— didn't that also mean she should have choice? She again questions what was once unquestionable.
"—Woe," she breaks the iced hesitation stretched too thin with an acute crack. "I'd like to be those things and more."
It feels as if her train of thought does not stop there. It lingers like uplifted dust in the air and waits for their settling descent.
no subject
Mercy does not know exactly what to say to that. Not knowing has never stopped her before, and it does not truly stop her now, but she hesitates.
2B is nothing to her. A fleeting acquaintance in a series of fleeting acquaintances, and one Mercy has no reason to believe will persist. There’s no reason to expend herself, invest herself, even in the slightest, least costly degree.
“Wanting to be anything,” Mercy says, observing 2B’s locked thumbs, “Is the first step to - “
The crash of a great force against the wards is as much felt as heard for Mercymorn, the impact of a massive body against the shimmering barrier enough to make her nearly flinch - as the rest of the people in the room do, followed by the silence Mercy abstractly notes seems to have finally been drilled into them.
“Ugh.” Mercy shudders, tucking back her shoulders and whirling in the direction of the noise, nose wrinkled in profound irritation. “Hold the thought - we have a caller.”
no subject
"I'm on it," she asserts, spiking a claim into the intrusion almost with a touch more of annoyance. She had been listening. She quite wanted to listen. This one would get the sharpest delve of her sword's teeth. It is nothing but a kink bothering the bridge of her nose, but the striding clacks of her heels read nothing less than urgent.
There were two wolves brawling within her— One that argued that this was purpose, that there was nothing else to focus on (The Mission this and The Mission that, so intent on seeing humans alive) and the other, with YoRHa's destruction in mind and at the slightest remembrance of buying a t-shirt after the end of a war that argued but what of me?
no subject
The monster there is a horror. They always are. This one happens to have configured itself as rather too much wolf married to the scuttling legs of a centipede, a hairy, twisting creature of thoroughly repulsive appearance and massive size, towering over the two of them like children. That isn't what leads her to roll her eyes and huff in the rain as the ward flashes in another collision.
It's that as soon as the Beast withdraws, shrieking, it knits itself back together in a way that she programmed the ward specifically to exclude, the taint of Beastblood easy enough to exclude from the forgiving lines of blood she set as their first line of defense. Regeneration - honestly.
"I give the ward another seven seconds," she says, crisply and thoroughly peeved, working a nodule of cartilage between her fingers, "I'll secure the limbs - you hack at it as you see fit."
She trusts the android to know her business of the sword, having seen her in action. This surely won't take too long, and then - she supposes they'll chat.
no subject
But she is much like a Ghost.
2B's strides have silenced their clicking once stone and tiles have become soft earth and grass meddled with rainwater. The beast is an ugly concoction, as most are, but the son of a bitch has to go. The android does not rely on Virtuous Contract, her white-iron katana that she always seems to bear preference toward. Today is not a day for speed— It is a day for potency in one swing. From her technological inventory of weapons materializes a thick, heavy sword that she uses the top of her thigh to help support its broad body with. Ironically, its name is Beastlord.
It hardly manages to deter 2B's posture as she swings her legs forward with the same grace as something lighter, but clearly— it's heavy. She is more grounded, and snarls with the rumbles of the overhead storm:
"I'll have it dead in five," is what she promises, and she does not wait for the timer.
2B digs the tips of her toes and launches, bumping the hilt of Beastlord against her thigh upward with a lift that gives her the starting momentum to pull sideways until her arm was fully stretched. The swing over her head discharges the blade into the fleshy build, from its carapace to the ground beneath its legs. she's already sliced a portion of it from top to bottom and doesn't give it room to gasp between its cries. Like a lever, the impulse of the crashing sword is used to throw herself up into a spring that yanks the blade back to her.
She nearly spins from air to ground. Where the blade hauls, it mutilates.
no subject
There are very few things Woe appreciates looking at. The repetition of beauty has made much of it lose its capacity to move her in even the slightest degree. So it is that the wan kindling of fascination that she feels watching 2B whirl through her brutally graceful assault catches her own attention, an echo of her momentary bewilderment watching 2B marvel at the wonder of Woe's sewer-bound miracle.
It's enough that she is a little disappointed when 2B's mighty blows do not cleave the Beast wholly in twain, although the bite they take out of it remain impressive. The ward fizzles to a flashing end, blood inscribed on the earth spitting with heat as it flakes away, and Woe flicks out her wrist like one throwing a knife.
The bands of cartilage she so sends flying bloom with rows of sharpened teeth that sink into the wounds 2B carved open, lashing round and round the Beast and digging down, and in, and through as the construct gnaw and tighten. The Beast wails in fury as segments of it break loose of itself, until it loses the ability to wail, and then the ability to do much at all, slumping into a steaming heap under their combined efforts.
Woe doubles over, hands set to her knees, as she fights fierociously to avoid trembling, heaving, or anything else so undignified, beside the thin, bloody stream of spit she vents on the dirt. Blood sweat tacks her robes to her in a thin layer all over her body, and the tissue of her chest is far too friable, her lungs stretched and fragile, but it's bearable. A cup of blood, a sliver of siphoning, and she'll be made right.
"Rude," she squeezes out, wheezing like an underfilled plastic squirt bottle, "Nasty thing. I really can't st- you cannot be serious!!"
That last is addressed not to the universe at large or at 2B locally, but at the twitching, regrowing individualized chunks of the Beast. Woe's head snaps up, expression a mask of Vileblood and indignant outrage, and she twists herself into standing shortly after.
"Oh, fishsticks," she says, crossly, "2B - fall back to me - I require your assistance!"
Siphoning precludes the ability to fight independently. It is a shame to remove that elegantly murderous sword from the proceedings, but Woe requires the power she will derive from the unexpected presence of the android's strange-shaped soul to cauterize these particular unruly buds.
no subject
Walk faster, she thinks, she starts, too, the blade going missing in a pixilated flurry of gold to return to a hover behind her back, but the action of meeting Woe mid-way is interrupted by a jolt. She reacts to the moving corpse that shouldn't be moving at all. It all but lasts for a second— the android's dash is quick for the saint.
"Your orders," she readily acknowledges.
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As if the android will have a choice.
The discovery of the presence of that nascent soul inside the shell of the machine had come as almost a miracle itself. The housing of it in biomechanical mechanisms so much stronger than any human flesh, conjured up in defiance of all known pathways of the soul's glimmering formation, has presented a whole new vista of possibility in a field Woe thought long tapped. It's a bitter shame to render it down to jumper cables, even as she closes the gap between them and takes up 2B's fine and slender hand in her own.
But they have little other choice. 2B can bear it between than the ill-suited cluster of Woe's followers, their germlines not known to her. Even she can only buffer them so much from the consequences of this act.
Still.
Woe does not crinkle in concentrate. Her expression goes serene as she takes the cast of 2B's soul, flashed like medical imaging to ascertain its moorings before she begins to draw it with exquisite neatness from them. It's pulling a tooth, it's slipping a sword from its sheath. She takes 2B, the thinking, perceiving essence of her, from herself, and she sends her away, into the black waters that are not River here, and there is another mystery she has yet to understand.
Because if she cannot find the River, she does not know where the invisible boil of power that bubbles up in the void of dislocation comes from, or why it has not changed.
no subject
She was gone, rushing high to a roof that didn't exist, then sailing like a gentle flag in pure white light and a neverending, a pooling chill that dragged down yet rose as an elevated cloud would, ascending from mist and terrain to denser skies. Vibrations exponentially drove through her essence like— electricty. There was laughter. Silence. Peace. An embrace that welcomed and immersed as the break of coiling waves would. There you are. They weren't words. Sensations, at most. Pixilated and transcribed. She had a soul.
Her body does not fair the same without it. It is an empty chassis, and it should stay that way with minimal damage— but it doesn't. 2B's husk does the opposite of waiting in cold stupor. The errors continue without her, the mechanisms break down until they're breaking apart. Her internal temperature rises to a dangerous height. The smell is not rotten, but acrid and metallic. Her carbon fiber skin goes iridescent in spotty blotches until it flakes and retreats into a crimp as ash would. It leaves the metal underneath close to malleable, if not flaccid. It exposes her skeletal structure, second by second. Wires rather than tendons, tubes rather than veins and arteries, but they are made with materials of biological nature— they grow with her, and they wither as she does. With its breakdown, milk-pale blood oozes from the cracks.
No one has to hold her up if she is falling down; a rag doll that cannot lock its weight beneath her as one of balled joints and porcelain would. Her black box is compromised, and from within her empty casing come biting sparks, snapping wires, and a whistling, high-pitched beep that has an ugly end.
cw: body horror
The world pales around them in a numinous, earthly glow, and Woe turns back to the creature (creatures, now) with her hand upraised, and she unleashes hell upon them. The blood spilled around them bubbles and rises madly, filling with jagged clots and lavish globules of fat that engulf the Beasts and smother their still-healing patches. Through it, she reaches - she finds the immune system, unfamiliar and bucking against her, but with the power she holds now it is nothing to pin it down by the throat and command it.
She does not turn it off. She incites it to riot. The Beasts shriek as she turns their own healing against them, their bodies whirling inward to devour themselves as swiftly as they once healed. They collapse into swelling, malformed heaps, twitching and dying in another wonderous flash of thanergy, and she has not felt so much like a Saint since -
The hand in her hand is wrong.
Woe looks to 2B again, at last, and she forgets the Beasts. She forgets herself, lambent with the aura of siphoning, as she slaps her other hand to 2B's beeping chest and pulses her with thalergy, forgetting that 2B is not human even with the brutal, ugly evidence laid bare before her, and in this forgetting she does not recall that she cannot understand the strangeness of this body, so she does.
"2B," Mercymorn says, "I bid you return."
She knocks aside the stakes she planted down in the anchors of 2B's soul and reaches out to it even as the power in her gutters out, a thread cast where a rope should have been.
"I bid you return. I bid you return - I bid you return - you are not done, do you hear me?"
cw: continued horror (and one boom)
It is her first breath in moments of gentle, chilling suffocation. It is the only breath she could take before her ricocheting soul settles into its original container, bides the catastrophic power it contained, and heats up too fast, at once—
And bursts.
The small-scale eruption happens within her, at most, expanding a close fraction from her frame. Anything or anyone immediately close would receive the ringing heat in a single blow. Burns are possible, as the fabrics of her visor and workwear have singed down to scant. Wet grass has been burnt dry. Had she still a softer portion of her face intact, the blue irises within her bulbous sockets might have been beautiful.
Ribbons of smoke rise from her torso and dissipate in the pelting rain. Her core, her Black Box—her heart— still pulses with life, but in the surge between soul and broken body, her cylinders and conduits have either snapped or melted apart. She bleeds into her stomach chamber and airways without them. She gasps inward, chokes, outward— and gurgles when air does not pull through. Paleblood, fuming like heated milk, spittles outward like a geyser awakening from a deep slumber.
There are so many errors. Visual. Audio. Sound sounds like muted, muffled crackling, or the occasional white noise. 2B is trying to look, but cannot see apart from a static black-and-white. She motions to her chest, but doesn't have the motor function to seize what is wrong. She is alive, and twitching, but she is in distress.
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."
no subject
She was alive, repaired with foreign parts— but as her nanocells overlap technology and biology with probing curiosity (is this a virus? an intruder? is this causing harm?), they accept the new and forget the old. They flow through her blood and embrace the chambers of a new heart that pumps . . . Differently. She can hear it beat like a Doppler's pulse. The organic bumps caused by particular electric signals felt like skips. Oxygen allows her brain (a complex hub of too many parts) to work. She hears, from muffled to the clear pelt of rain. The color returns to her eyes. The world was vibrant, and no longer dying.
And she could not be happier. It wasn't like being programmed into a new chassis in Bunker, this was like seeing the world for the first time. Wanting to be returned, and being returned. Her fingertips meet the curvatures of Woe's cheek like feathertips, and when she feels it, the warm, smooth sensation, she speaks. The android smiles— albeit missing her ripe red lips, the repair to missing tissue should come with time. They already work with newfound vigor, powered by sealed Paleblood to bring color back to the surface, wefting minor vacancies the way an organic body would repair its own wounds. It could not have done what Mercy has.
"Woe," all but a whisper from her crackling voice smoothing with each breath. It was thanks, grace— It was hopeful admiration.
no subject
They are in a broken, fallen world, beset on all sides by fire and sulfur, and it has made a broken thing of 2B, and still, she smiles. She touches Mercy like she is a precious thing, like she does not know what she has beneath her hand, like she does not care that Mercy was the one who threw her into hell before tearing her back out of it.
(Mercy, she said, calloused fingers on her damp cheek, blood between her teeth, and smiling, smiling, smiling.)
Her Omen pulls herself from Mercy like a rotten tooth falling from its socket, and Mercy remembers she is cold as the butterfly flits from her. She brings her hand up to capture 2B's fingers firmly (gently) and draws them away, turning back towards the shelter of the building and tugging the android after her. If she weaves on her feet, her shoulders curled in on herself as a sweeping, throbbing exhaustion sets in, she has come to expect that.
(She is still connected to the heart, even as 2B's body adopts it as its own, in a process she can perceive but still not yet quite comprehend. It beats beautifully, each contraction as it should be, every part of it an anatomical picture of a heart. She has always thought the heart one of the most gorgeous of the organs, that fist-sized, fearsome muscle.)
"You are going home," she says, or slurs, drunk on the void yawning inside of her, "Today. Now."
no subject
It was disbelief shattering her, and words being spun quickly with strain. "No—" she says, by the end, it is a plea. "No, Woe—"
She could barely sink her heels to the ground in rattled rebellion. Her feet continued to kick forward but her torso, newly knit, angles, objecting the reason for their advancement. Even their acclaimed helpers rush to support their saints once the coast of the tall, barred doors and short staircases were free to usher out from, Mercy on one side (even if she did shoo them off) and 2B on the other. 2B rejects the aid and pulls the hand that physically summons her.
"I can't," the android nearly gasps with her breath so new, expanding in her chest with the thick muscle of her new heart. It beats harder. "I won't, I'm not done—"
no subject
“You are done,” Woe insists, heated and rushed, waving off her would-be attendants exactly as 2B anticipates. This is not an argument to have in front of any of them - but this is not an argument, and she does not care, in the glistening, taut bubble of her certainty, what anyone else thinks.
“You are in no condition to continue. I forbid it. You are going back with-” and her hurricane eyes affix on the girl with the braid “-Amity.”
(She will not, does not, remember their names. The glittering pink thing stuck to her like a gaudy brooch shall, and so what is the difference?)
Her fingers are still clinging. She yanks them away, impatiently, or like 2B is still as heated as a stove top, and folds them to her chest as if yet burned. There is something clanging in her skull. Her teeth do not suit her mouth. Her teeth do not suit the interior of her bones.
“I am referring you,” she says, absurdly, “To a specialist.”
no subject
It burls inside of her, a falling coldness and blaring heat that stings her eyes. She refuses to blink them, whether or not she even had the eyelids to. She does not understand. She rewinds in her fused anger, the face that Woe had held before her, seconds from her decision. Was it memory? Regret? In the flurry of her own emotions, 2B hadn't realized. Not at first. There was much to talk about. There was much to understand. There was so much and she is being— referred to a specialist?
I forbid it, rings in her ears well before an uncomfortable silence takes the fortress' interior. Her hands are tight by her sides. Her jaws set and her teeth bare effortlessly, but not violently. Where were the lips to put them away, anyway? They are stained with white blood.
2B dips her head, in muted anguish, and shows nothing. There is nothing to show. There is nothing to say. For the others to see not the wetness that dribbles from her sockets, she storms down the closest opposite hall. No running, but an urgent, still poised clack, clack, clack of her heels, as if she had something important to see to.
Leave me, she barks, hotly at that, to any soul who thinks it safe to follow after her.
The Commander has done this, once. Why, then? Why must she run through these cycles only to be torn from them, again and again? Why must she feel only for it to be pulled from her? She doesn't know the answer.
no subject
Mercymorn watches her go with a hard jaw, her teeth grinding hideously like a rock tumbler, an endless rolling wear. When she stalks off back to the outdoors, no one attempts to follow her. Amity stands in the middle of the main room longer than anyone else, forlorn, looking after both women uncertain of who to follow.
It is nearly half an hour before Mercymorn comes back inside, filthy with blood sweat and the last gritty remnants of the rain. No one rises to their feet as she crosses the room and enters the hallway, their eyes deferentially averted to their tasks, even those they invented on the spot as excuse.
(The heart still beats. It pulses in her ears, in the joints of her fingers.)
"I assume you've made your preparations," she says, without preamble, as soon as she comes across the android. Her gaze sweeps over her with all the clinicalness she lacked when she reached inside of her and erected a cathedral.
no subject
She does not want to leave, but she was not made to disobey an order. She wants— she has more wants than she's ever realized, and none of them have an inkling to do with departure. The more she questions it herself, the more 2B doesn't know what Woe is to her. A human she should protect. A woman she shouldn't leave. An ally. A formidable caster that has put a spell within her and kept her alive.
Scratched and torn skin is repairing itself— slowly. She is less of a mannequin, but not yet at her standard appearance. She can blink her eyes just enough to consider them a blink— these pale, sea blue orbs that bare so many questions and too many directions to speak them.
"— I want to know what happened."
But there is not a lick of anger in her voice to listen to it. She wants to know. She is both awed and conffused. It's the first want she could perhaps successfully have.
no subject
The want in her eyes is as terrible and raw as a freshly hatched chick, all bobble-headed and slickly bedraggled. The dampness of newborn things long ago lost any compelling attraction it might have once had for her, if it ever did, and she knows she could reach out as easily as anything to snuff out this particular trembling vulnerability.
"I siphoned you," she says, with cut glass syllables, the lilting roll of her voice cut away like skin lifted from meat on a surgical table, "I took hold of your soul, and I sent it away from you, so I could make use of the energy which pools in the differential space. It had a more dramatic effect on you than I - anticipated."
Hesitation, like she's some fumbling novice, flinching at the sacrifices required of her. It isn't that. It's the unexpectedness of the dissolution, the revealed similarities between what 2B is and what she has claimed she is not.
"I had to implement substitutions for your vital functions." Mercy glances at 2B's still imperfect chest, mouth thinned. "An extremely experimental procedure, and one I can't-" cut glass goes jagged, inward turned "-assure the success of."
no subject
She can't help her own losing any aggressive steam. She would have definitely done the same. She has done the same.
What comes out of Woe's mouth, word by strict word, has 2B wavering in her stand. She nearly sits, but fastens her legs to remain upright like a stilted doll. "I have a soul," she murmurs, in a way so dumbfounded it seems she's still trying to convince herself of facts that were once only idle speculation.
It hadn't mattered if it was experimental, she was alive, with the same tattered chassis she arrived with, the same hard drive and the same bank of memories. The her of today and now had been saved when not a single superior had once cared. Only one had cared enough to try it, then one became two, then a few more. She could count the on her charred black fingers. She was expendable to YoRHa.
2B has enough strength in her legs to kick them into a stride, steady and stiffened to give her enough balance. The closer she steps to Woe, the more her height exceeds the woman's. Her own features too, incomplete but forwarded with the quietness of her voice, give way to honor: "And you gave me a heart."