PART THIRTEEN [CLOSED]
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As a new guideline: for the time being, I'd like to put a damper on the re-requesting going on. Please only re-request something if it has been more than a month since you asked for it and it still hasn't been filled. I'd like to remind everyone that old parts still have many ( Read more... )
All in a rush, he goes quiet. His hands have finished their work but he does not take them back.
“It feels like we were supposed to die,” he says then, softly, “and this is our punishment for surviving. I’m trying to think; but that must be it. We didn’t do anything else, we didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t do anything.”
Nero closes his eyes.
“You’ll be cold,” Ayel mutters, shifting around until they are laid out against each other.
Nero sleeps.
-
Morning klaxons. There is no day or night on Rura Penthe, just disembodied cycles sketched by howls that run in the blood like metal shavings.
The Klingons come as if summoned by the sound, moved by it.
They take Ayel away.
-
It’s a bit like waking up in a strange wasteland; he searches stubbornly for landmarks that simply don’t exist, for reassurances that aren’t going to come, for people who aren’t there. Sometimes he regains consciousness among friends and counts heads with a kind of tired desperation. Sometimes he lies back in the dark, in the fetid clutch of his own ruined skin and bones, eyes tracking into greasy corners, and sees - fleetingly - an ethereal path home.
But that’s not for him. Not now.
Ayel, he thinks, could be anywhere; locked in an isolation cell, loose in the mines, writhing for the Klingon specialists or turning inward, away from the flesh and toward the glistening towers of high memory, the sight of all-things-in-better-times, what he had once and lost. Perhaps he is dead.
Dead. That would probably be best.
Don’t be selfish.
Hope that he is dead.
-
Another of his own sessions passes in banal agony. Afterward, Nero is granted the privilege of walking back to the prisoners’ quarter under his own power; they think it’s funny, the specialist and his quartet of guards. They just want to see if he can do it.
And of course he can, the brainless beasts, the eunuchs, the thoughtless, rankless sons of nothing; as if they could cut the shrewdness out of him, the implacable frenzy to be with those-who-belong-to-him, as if they have any idea what his kind can bear and for how long-
And Ayel is knotted in with the crew when he finds them packed together at the back of the dry caves, off-shift. It’s the space of a heartbeat before Nero recognizes him. He looks skinny and pale but otherwise strangely unharmed; and he raises a keen eye, catches sight of Nero and nudges bodies aside to present himself formally. A subtle limp ruins the symmetry of his gait. Nero’s heart squeezes on the darkest anger he has ever felt, and he doesn’t want Ayel to bow to him; he wants to say: you must never bow to me again, what have I done to deserve your respect? He starts to kneel first, to make the signs of self-reproach, but then Ayel drops down in front of him, just lands in a careless heap and grabs both of his hands, nearly crushes them with his strength. Enough of that is left to him.
“I’m not going to forgive you for things that were not your fault,” he says. “I am not.”
The words are faintly slurred. Nero does not look up, only studies the tangled knit of their fingers and pushes his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth to interrupt the sensation that he is about to weep like a child. He is not sure how they accomplish it without really looking at each other, but Ayel turns his mouth up and Nero bends toward the warmth of his breath and then their lips are very close but not quite touching; and they don’t quite touch for a very long time. And then they do.
Afterward, Ayel seems to want to ask him a question, but there’s no time, no point. Everyone is glad to have them both back at once, and Nero wouldn’t have much to say on the matter anyway.
-
Ayel’s tongue has been slit open on either side. It’s healing but swollen, and he shies away fractionally even when Nero licks only the softest little hasps after the taste of blood.
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