'The World Where Yesternight You Died' - part 12
Finally! Sincerest apologies, my dear readers. I kinda suck at this sometimes. Mostly, the delay has been me being a dork and not actually *concentrating* on writing like I need to be. A very miniscule part has been my poor beta, darkhavens having computer woes to end all computer woes.
But now we have more! And we're getting closer to the end! And and and....
I am so very grateful for all the readers out there who are sticking with it, and again - apologies for my dragging ass.
(OMG so nice outside, *so* nice outside, warm and breezy and a little thundery and everything is green and flowers and clover and redbud and birds all tweeting merrily and whoooo! :) )
Also on AO3.
‘The Self is Peace; that Self am I.
The Self is Strength; that Self am I.’
What needs this trembling strife
With phantom threats of Form and Time and Space?
Could once my Life
Be shorn of their illusion, and efface
From its clear heaven that stormful imagery,
My Self were seen
An Essence free, unchanging, strong, serene. -A Meditation, by Paul Hookham
Jensen wasn't sure - he really wasn't sure - he believed what they'd told him. It all sounded pretty damn strange, and what ArchANGEL ever survived mustering out? What Angel survived being alone? Because he was alone, despite Sa- Jared, and the Doc, and all the others. Every time he tried to reach out - feel the space, check his safety, be certain of his six - he was met with blankness, just the numb buzz of dead connections that had once linked him to Jinx and Sinna and Kane.
It was like constantly reaching with a hand that wasn't there, and it made Jensen nervous and snappish and mean. Which he was sorry about, every time, but fuck… He couldn't help it, and he was sorry, but Jared had to quit expecting him to be…okay.
Jensen wasn't okay. He wasn't actually sure if he'd ever been okay. Maybe once, for a little while. Maybe on the Glorianna, with his set, and Sam, and the 'ponics garden blooming and things a little tight but nothing bad. The hope, that they'd come to their destination, or that someone would catch up with them, was all that was keeping them functioning. That FTL, or something like it, having maybe been discovered in the time the Glorianna was in transit, they could be rescued - reconnected. Someday.
Thing was, it had, and someone had, but not until it was far, far too late. Too late for Sam, and too late for the babies, and too late for Jensen, too. So he sat on the bed and did the little exercises with the resistance bands, until his muscles were screaming and his vision blurring. Ate what Doc gave him, never happier in his life than when, a week after he woke up, she took the tube out of his belly.
Two weeks after that, he was out of the bed, more resistance stuff, but walking, too. Trips around and around the room, then down the hall, shuffling in the weird hospital slipper things they gave him. Chilly in the soft pants and tee, he wanted his sweater. He asked Jared, and Jared told him it was gone - everything but his coat and scarf and his shinies, all gone - and Jensen...didn't hit. Didn't say anything, either, just shuffled away, back to bed, refusing to talk, or exercise, or eat for the rest of that day, and the next. He was pretty sure they were getting sick of him. Jensen was pretty sick of himself.
But you can't lay in bed forever, especially not with someone like Jared around. When Jared was off-shift, he'd come and pester Jensen endlessly, asking him what he'd done that day, was he hungry, he should drink, let's go for a walk. And when it wasn't Jared, it was one or the other of the Jo boys, or Doc. Endless questions Jensen couldn't or wouldn't answer, endless lists of things he needed to do, should do, had to do to get better.
Jensen mostly went along with it, because at least exercising until he could barely walk meant he'd sleep, exhausted - sometimes even nightmare free.. Otherwise, sleep was hard to find, easy to lose, slipping past him like a shadow, no weight; insubstantial. Without the 'net - without his Angels - that's how Jensen felt, too, like he was tied to nothing and no one. Adrift.
But he got better. He got stronger. He gained back a good bit of the weight he'd lost, layered muscle over his bones, and could walk without staggering. Even the fine motor control that had allowed him to strip out components from his armor and put in new, or break down and rebuild any weapon in the armory - that came back. They'd said, on Reveille, it never would.
When he mentioned it to Doc, she got real excited; told him it was the ANGEL system coming back online, fixing damage and growing new nerves, new fibers, all over him. She showed him how it was advancing through his system, a fine tracery of blue lines on her machine, coiling down his spine, spreading out like cracks in glass through his brain. He could feel it, making him stronger and faster, more like he had been.
Doc told him he'd never be quite the same, because they didn't have access to all the stem-cell therapy, to grow the tough connective tissue he'd had, that made him able to use his armor without dislocating joints and ripping tendons free of their anchors. But he could beat Jared in a fight - though he wasn't much of a fighter - and the Jo boys themselves, and this kid they knew, a tough, rangy merc from one of the pirate crews, her hair clipped up in a topknot of thread-wound dreads, nearly every inch of her covered in precise, exacting lines and swirls of keloidal scars. She was military taught, lethally fast, and knew a few dirty tricks Jensen had never seen.
But he still took her down, third fight - fourth? - just too fast, too strong, too good; muscle memory he'd thought he'd lost, moving in a bubble of time where everything seemed a little slower, and he was just...so...fast.
That night, in the warm dimness of the room, Jensen closed his eyes and breathed very slow and tried - until his head pounded and his body ached from holding himself rigidly still - to find Kane. To find Jinx or Sinna, or anyone. But he couldn't, not a flicker. It took the gloss off everything else, made it all seem pretty damn pointless. He was, because what the fuck was he doing? Ex ANGEL, ex prisoner, forever and always a criminal and a murderer. An orphan who had done...unspeakable things.
Jensen's brain shied away from those memories, hazy and static-jumpy as they were. Blood and cold meat, decomposition reek; watching the light and life go out of a person (babies, not even really people yet, just empty blue-grey eyes and tiny, shaking fists…) with all the disinterested, absent attention he gave a dropped hair or a pared bit of fingernail.
After that night, he spent more time in the gym, throwing himself into fight simulators and at heavy bags, the Jo boys - the walls. Shedding blood got to feeling like it was the only way he could ever shift some of that rot in him. He kind of wanted to shed it all, and knew that wasn't good, but he wasn't really sure what to do about it. Fuck knew, he didn't want to end up on some cocktail, zombied in a corner. He didn't tell about the nightmares, either, but that was just habit. His Nephilim had known, but they had had them, too - memories of past lives and not-so-long-ago missions - and they'd comforted themselves with drugs and sex and simple touch. Here, at least, he was alone at night, and didn’t have to explain.
Seven weeks After, Doc said it was time. Time to test this thing. She had Jensen sitting with his shirt off on the edge of the bed, hunched over a pillow as she carefully, methodically, put a needle into his spine - sort of - so she could draw off fluid. To make the vaccine, she said, to make the serum to fight the Company virus, the Company cancers.
Jared stood opposite him, looking horrified and like he might cry or something, and Jensen just watched him, puzzled. Doc was done after only a minute or two, smoothing something over the tiny hole she’d made, and Jared was sitting weakly down into a chair, shaking hands between his knees, face white as the sheets.
“I’m the one got stabbed,” Jensen said, and Jared laughed breathlessly.
“Sorry, I just...I can’t stand…. Sorry.”
“It’s over,” Jensen said, still not really getting it, and Doc came around the end of the bed, little tube on a tray, gloves already off. She fished in a pocket and pulled out a sucker - bright red on a purple stick - and offered it to Jensen.
“You did good,” she said. Jensen took the thing, unsure of it, and Doc got another one out, lurid orange on a green stick. “Here, Jared. Thanks for not puking.”
“Fuck you,” Jared muttered, but he snatched the candy, jerked the wrapper off and shoved it into his mouth. Jensen slowly did the same, and hastily yanked it out again when it burned.
“Ow! What the hell?”
“Cinnamon,” Jared said, sliding his out of his mouth with a pop. Jensen hopped down off the bed and, in one motion, grabbed Jared’s candy and shoved his own at Jared’s mouth. Jared made an undignified squawking noise. Jared’s candy had a cool, sharp, tingly flavor. Jensen couldn’t name it, but he liked it.
“This is better. Thanks,” Jensen said, grinning around the stick at Jared, who stared at him for a long moment and then grinned back, taking the stick in his fingers and working the sucker around in his mouth.
“Both of you, get the hell out of here, I got work to do,” Doc said, making shooing motions, and Jensen slid off the bed and got his shirt on, then a sweater Jared had found for him, and his coat. He looped the scarf around his throat but not his head, deliberate. Trying to be less of a freak, trying to just be human again.
He had his palm-blade, though, and new gloves, with the fingers cut off, and boots with steel toes and soles that, again, Jared had got for him. To make him feel safe, to give him some armour.
“Don’t be bugging me anymore for at least ten hours,” Doc ordered, over her shoulder, on her way out. Heading to her lab, she said, to make the first dose of vaccine. The first trial.
Jared was going to be the test. Jensen…didn’t really like that. At all. But Jared was a stubborn bastard, he’d come to learn, and there wasn’t any point in arguing with him. So instead, they were going up, to Carousel. Jensen needed something done, and Jared was coming along for the ride.
The needles burned their way along Jensen’s shoulder, following the old lines, renewing them. Jensen sat stock-still in the chair, gaze fixed on Jared, who was twitching and sweating and looking pathetically uncomfortable. As if he were the one in the chair, feeling the sting and the burn, the heat blooming in newly-pierced skin.
Jensen watched himself in the mirror opposite, over the curved shoulder and back of the artist. The man had a bioware spine and arm, the machine socketed into his hand, part of him, and it was the 'net all over again, it was a honing of abilities with an alien scaffold to support it, and it was fitting. How it should be, altered human to altered human.
Jensen watched the lines that knotted and twisted up from his fingers to his throat deepen and grow richer, blue and green, yellow and red, black and white. His first armour; his first weapon against others. It had made him different. It had made him stand out; made him the Leader, when others wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
Captain. Sam was dead, and he couldn’t be co-pilot anymore, he had to be Captain, Star Chaser Captain. He had to take care of them, had to make the decisions for the little ones. Jensen was the one who decided the sickest, weakest ones had to be sacrificed. Jensen picked which babies seemed strong enough to be taken from the incubators and nursed along on the emergency rations and whatever infant food hadn’t gone rancid. Jensen decided, when there was so little left that they were dying, two or three in a day, that there was meat to be had, and they would have it. Jensen decided….
Jensen closed his eyes, willing away the images. He was decades older, but it seemed that he’d been on the Glorianna just last month, last week. It seemed he’d never get that cold, poisoned reek out of his nostrils, off his skin. Never scour his soul clean enough to be free of it. Despite that, he had to have this. Jared was right, there was no guarantee the Tiamat would let him live. No guarantee his Angels would understand. And he had to be himself; had to be whole. Had to have everything back, good or bad, right or wrong. To face them, to meet his fate. Judgement at his Angels’ hands.
When the lines were done - the echo of the wires Jensen had wrapped himself in for so long they’d galled him, cut into his skin and festered there - the artist added three more things. First Tiamat, just under his heart, on his ribs. Then his own Angel name, Quemuel. And then Sariel, Kane’s name. Jensen had had to take Jared’s word for it that they were spelled right, and he held the paper they’d been written on in his hand as they walked out, back down to the Devil’s hidden rooms, and Doc’s experiments. To add them to his shinies, to keep forever.
Or as long as they let him live.
When they got back, Doc was there, sitting on her stool, knee bouncing, fingers twisting, something playing in earbuds that she jerked out the moment Jared and Jensen walked through, her eyes impossibly wide behind the scan lenses.
“Where the fuck have you been? Nevermind. It’s done. Jared, it’s done. It’s time,” she said, and Jensen saw the little vial clutched in her fingers, pale-gold liquid. The key to everything, Jared’s cure. Maybe the end of the Company.
Jensen had never been quite so terrified in his entire life, and beside him, Jared pulled in a jagged, hitching breath, and his long fingers curled into Jensen’s, squeezing tight.
Thanks again, everyone. :)
Chapter thirteen here.
Originally entered at http://tabaqui.dreamwidth.org/185606.html - comment where you please!
But now we have more! And we're getting closer to the end! And and and....
I am so very grateful for all the readers out there who are sticking with it, and again - apologies for my dragging ass.
(OMG so nice outside, *so* nice outside, warm and breezy and a little thundery and everything is green and flowers and clover and redbud and birds all tweeting merrily and whoooo! :) )
Also on AO3.
‘The Self is Peace; that Self am I.
The Self is Strength; that Self am I.’
What needs this trembling strife
With phantom threats of Form and Time and Space?
Could once my Life
Be shorn of their illusion, and efface
From its clear heaven that stormful imagery,
My Self were seen
An Essence free, unchanging, strong, serene. -A Meditation, by Paul Hookham
Jensen wasn't sure - he really wasn't sure - he believed what they'd told him. It all sounded pretty damn strange, and what ArchANGEL ever survived mustering out? What Angel survived being alone? Because he was alone, despite Sa- Jared, and the Doc, and all the others. Every time he tried to reach out - feel the space, check his safety, be certain of his six - he was met with blankness, just the numb buzz of dead connections that had once linked him to Jinx and Sinna and Kane.
It was like constantly reaching with a hand that wasn't there, and it made Jensen nervous and snappish and mean. Which he was sorry about, every time, but fuck… He couldn't help it, and he was sorry, but Jared had to quit expecting him to be…okay.
Jensen wasn't okay. He wasn't actually sure if he'd ever been okay. Maybe once, for a little while. Maybe on the Glorianna, with his set, and Sam, and the 'ponics garden blooming and things a little tight but nothing bad. The hope, that they'd come to their destination, or that someone would catch up with them, was all that was keeping them functioning. That FTL, or something like it, having maybe been discovered in the time the Glorianna was in transit, they could be rescued - reconnected. Someday.
Thing was, it had, and someone had, but not until it was far, far too late. Too late for Sam, and too late for the babies, and too late for Jensen, too. So he sat on the bed and did the little exercises with the resistance bands, until his muscles were screaming and his vision blurring. Ate what Doc gave him, never happier in his life than when, a week after he woke up, she took the tube out of his belly.
Two weeks after that, he was out of the bed, more resistance stuff, but walking, too. Trips around and around the room, then down the hall, shuffling in the weird hospital slipper things they gave him. Chilly in the soft pants and tee, he wanted his sweater. He asked Jared, and Jared told him it was gone - everything but his coat and scarf and his shinies, all gone - and Jensen...didn't hit. Didn't say anything, either, just shuffled away, back to bed, refusing to talk, or exercise, or eat for the rest of that day, and the next. He was pretty sure they were getting sick of him. Jensen was pretty sick of himself.
But you can't lay in bed forever, especially not with someone like Jared around. When Jared was off-shift, he'd come and pester Jensen endlessly, asking him what he'd done that day, was he hungry, he should drink, let's go for a walk. And when it wasn't Jared, it was one or the other of the Jo boys, or Doc. Endless questions Jensen couldn't or wouldn't answer, endless lists of things he needed to do, should do, had to do to get better.
Jensen mostly went along with it, because at least exercising until he could barely walk meant he'd sleep, exhausted - sometimes even nightmare free.. Otherwise, sleep was hard to find, easy to lose, slipping past him like a shadow, no weight; insubstantial. Without the 'net - without his Angels - that's how Jensen felt, too, like he was tied to nothing and no one. Adrift.
But he got better. He got stronger. He gained back a good bit of the weight he'd lost, layered muscle over his bones, and could walk without staggering. Even the fine motor control that had allowed him to strip out components from his armor and put in new, or break down and rebuild any weapon in the armory - that came back. They'd said, on Reveille, it never would.
When he mentioned it to Doc, she got real excited; told him it was the ANGEL system coming back online, fixing damage and growing new nerves, new fibers, all over him. She showed him how it was advancing through his system, a fine tracery of blue lines on her machine, coiling down his spine, spreading out like cracks in glass through his brain. He could feel it, making him stronger and faster, more like he had been.
Doc told him he'd never be quite the same, because they didn't have access to all the stem-cell therapy, to grow the tough connective tissue he'd had, that made him able to use his armor without dislocating joints and ripping tendons free of their anchors. But he could beat Jared in a fight - though he wasn't much of a fighter - and the Jo boys themselves, and this kid they knew, a tough, rangy merc from one of the pirate crews, her hair clipped up in a topknot of thread-wound dreads, nearly every inch of her covered in precise, exacting lines and swirls of keloidal scars. She was military taught, lethally fast, and knew a few dirty tricks Jensen had never seen.
But he still took her down, third fight - fourth? - just too fast, too strong, too good; muscle memory he'd thought he'd lost, moving in a bubble of time where everything seemed a little slower, and he was just...so...fast.
That night, in the warm dimness of the room, Jensen closed his eyes and breathed very slow and tried - until his head pounded and his body ached from holding himself rigidly still - to find Kane. To find Jinx or Sinna, or anyone. But he couldn't, not a flicker. It took the gloss off everything else, made it all seem pretty damn pointless. He was, because what the fuck was he doing? Ex ANGEL, ex prisoner, forever and always a criminal and a murderer. An orphan who had done...unspeakable things.
Jensen's brain shied away from those memories, hazy and static-jumpy as they were. Blood and cold meat, decomposition reek; watching the light and life go out of a person (babies, not even really people yet, just empty blue-grey eyes and tiny, shaking fists…) with all the disinterested, absent attention he gave a dropped hair or a pared bit of fingernail.
After that night, he spent more time in the gym, throwing himself into fight simulators and at heavy bags, the Jo boys - the walls. Shedding blood got to feeling like it was the only way he could ever shift some of that rot in him. He kind of wanted to shed it all, and knew that wasn't good, but he wasn't really sure what to do about it. Fuck knew, he didn't want to end up on some cocktail, zombied in a corner. He didn't tell about the nightmares, either, but that was just habit. His Nephilim had known, but they had had them, too - memories of past lives and not-so-long-ago missions - and they'd comforted themselves with drugs and sex and simple touch. Here, at least, he was alone at night, and didn’t have to explain.
Seven weeks After, Doc said it was time. Time to test this thing. She had Jensen sitting with his shirt off on the edge of the bed, hunched over a pillow as she carefully, methodically, put a needle into his spine - sort of - so she could draw off fluid. To make the vaccine, she said, to make the serum to fight the Company virus, the Company cancers.
Jared stood opposite him, looking horrified and like he might cry or something, and Jensen just watched him, puzzled. Doc was done after only a minute or two, smoothing something over the tiny hole she’d made, and Jared was sitting weakly down into a chair, shaking hands between his knees, face white as the sheets.
“I’m the one got stabbed,” Jensen said, and Jared laughed breathlessly.
“Sorry, I just...I can’t stand…. Sorry.”
“It’s over,” Jensen said, still not really getting it, and Doc came around the end of the bed, little tube on a tray, gloves already off. She fished in a pocket and pulled out a sucker - bright red on a purple stick - and offered it to Jensen.
“You did good,” she said. Jensen took the thing, unsure of it, and Doc got another one out, lurid orange on a green stick. “Here, Jared. Thanks for not puking.”
“Fuck you,” Jared muttered, but he snatched the candy, jerked the wrapper off and shoved it into his mouth. Jensen slowly did the same, and hastily yanked it out again when it burned.
“Ow! What the hell?”
“Cinnamon,” Jared said, sliding his out of his mouth with a pop. Jensen hopped down off the bed and, in one motion, grabbed Jared’s candy and shoved his own at Jared’s mouth. Jared made an undignified squawking noise. Jared’s candy had a cool, sharp, tingly flavor. Jensen couldn’t name it, but he liked it.
“This is better. Thanks,” Jensen said, grinning around the stick at Jared, who stared at him for a long moment and then grinned back, taking the stick in his fingers and working the sucker around in his mouth.
“Both of you, get the hell out of here, I got work to do,” Doc said, making shooing motions, and Jensen slid off the bed and got his shirt on, then a sweater Jared had found for him, and his coat. He looped the scarf around his throat but not his head, deliberate. Trying to be less of a freak, trying to just be human again.
He had his palm-blade, though, and new gloves, with the fingers cut off, and boots with steel toes and soles that, again, Jared had got for him. To make him feel safe, to give him some armour.
“Don’t be bugging me anymore for at least ten hours,” Doc ordered, over her shoulder, on her way out. Heading to her lab, she said, to make the first dose of vaccine. The first trial.
Jared was going to be the test. Jensen…didn’t really like that. At all. But Jared was a stubborn bastard, he’d come to learn, and there wasn’t any point in arguing with him. So instead, they were going up, to Carousel. Jensen needed something done, and Jared was coming along for the ride.
The needles burned their way along Jensen’s shoulder, following the old lines, renewing them. Jensen sat stock-still in the chair, gaze fixed on Jared, who was twitching and sweating and looking pathetically uncomfortable. As if he were the one in the chair, feeling the sting and the burn, the heat blooming in newly-pierced skin.
Jensen watched himself in the mirror opposite, over the curved shoulder and back of the artist. The man had a bioware spine and arm, the machine socketed into his hand, part of him, and it was the 'net all over again, it was a honing of abilities with an alien scaffold to support it, and it was fitting. How it should be, altered human to altered human.
Jensen watched the lines that knotted and twisted up from his fingers to his throat deepen and grow richer, blue and green, yellow and red, black and white. His first armour; his first weapon against others. It had made him different. It had made him stand out; made him the Leader, when others wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
Captain. Sam was dead, and he couldn’t be co-pilot anymore, he had to be Captain, Star Chaser Captain. He had to take care of them, had to make the decisions for the little ones. Jensen was the one who decided the sickest, weakest ones had to be sacrificed. Jensen picked which babies seemed strong enough to be taken from the incubators and nursed along on the emergency rations and whatever infant food hadn’t gone rancid. Jensen decided, when there was so little left that they were dying, two or three in a day, that there was meat to be had, and they would have it. Jensen decided….
Jensen closed his eyes, willing away the images. He was decades older, but it seemed that he’d been on the Glorianna just last month, last week. It seemed he’d never get that cold, poisoned reek out of his nostrils, off his skin. Never scour his soul clean enough to be free of it. Despite that, he had to have this. Jared was right, there was no guarantee the Tiamat would let him live. No guarantee his Angels would understand. And he had to be himself; had to be whole. Had to have everything back, good or bad, right or wrong. To face them, to meet his fate. Judgement at his Angels’ hands.
When the lines were done - the echo of the wires Jensen had wrapped himself in for so long they’d galled him, cut into his skin and festered there - the artist added three more things. First Tiamat, just under his heart, on his ribs. Then his own Angel name, Quemuel. And then Sariel, Kane’s name. Jensen had had to take Jared’s word for it that they were spelled right, and he held the paper they’d been written on in his hand as they walked out, back down to the Devil’s hidden rooms, and Doc’s experiments. To add them to his shinies, to keep forever.
Or as long as they let him live.
When they got back, Doc was there, sitting on her stool, knee bouncing, fingers twisting, something playing in earbuds that she jerked out the moment Jared and Jensen walked through, her eyes impossibly wide behind the scan lenses.
“Where the fuck have you been? Nevermind. It’s done. Jared, it’s done. It’s time,” she said, and Jensen saw the little vial clutched in her fingers, pale-gold liquid. The key to everything, Jared’s cure. Maybe the end of the Company.
Jensen had never been quite so terrified in his entire life, and beside him, Jared pulled in a jagged, hitching breath, and his long fingers curled into Jensen’s, squeezing tight.
Thanks again, everyone. :)
Chapter thirteen here.
Originally entered at http://tabaqui.dreamwidth.org/185606.html - comment where you please!