[Noblesse] fic: The Names of His Comrades
Title: The Names of His Comrades
Fandom: Noblesse
Words: 3,903
Summary: The first flash of memory hit him in the midst of battle at a very inopportune time, causing him to stumble into the path of an energy blast courtesy of one of Dr. Crombell's new agents. Remembering was inconvenient, but M-21 welcomed it. Maybe, just maybe, he would finally remember his name and the names of his comrades.
Notes: Written for
darkicedragon for yuletide 2011 as a treat. I was pretty gleeful about writing this because I liked the idea a lot, heh, except my execution isn't so great (I also almost didn't make it in time, as I started this around the time Madness opened). More about that later in my Yuletide summary post! Thanks Dark Ice Dragon, for writing me so many giftfics again this year! Originally posted here.
The Names of His Comrades
The first flash of memory hit him in the midst of battle at a very inopportune time, causing him to stumble into the path of an energy blast courtesy of one of Dr. Crombell's new agents. They'd thought the Union had stopped being interested in M-21, but they were wrong. Dr. Crombell hadn't shown up personally, but from the people that had begun ambushing M-21 on the way home, they'd figured out the underlying goal. “They”, meaning Frankenstein and Tao. They, after all, were the ones who mused the most.
Dr. Crombell wanted M-21 back. He considered M-21 one of the few “successful” experiments. M-21 had scoffed at that when Frankenstein explained this around the living room table (him, a successful experiment when he and his comrades had always been called failures? don't make him laugh), but he shut his mouth when Frankenstein continued on and pointed out that even though Crombell hadn't yet accomplished his goal, he was still gathering valuable data about M-21's improved fighting abilities.
That would not do. He'd be endangering everyone...and he was doing a fine job of that right now with his lapse of attention.
"M-21!" Tao yelled out in warning over their earpieces.
Despite Tao's obvious concern for his current predicament, the energy blast was still heading his way, and M-21 was still falling forward as if in slow-motion, mind caught by what he had just seen. He made to protect himself, but his arms, even with their transformation, only did so much for him. The energy blast hit him full on, damaging his clothes beyond repair. He fell to one knee, head spinning, heart pulsing wildly.
“Shit, Takeo, get him out of there!”
M-21 thought he heard the sound of bullets flying past his ear, and he thought he saw magenta hair - it was pretty much smacking him in the face, much too close for him to actually see clearly - but he definitely smelled gunpowder.
In the midst of the confusion (that Takeo had generated for them as cover under Tao's instructions), Takeo quickly grabbed M-21's arm, careful not to cut himself on one of M-21's sharp nails, supporting him so they could make their way off the battlefield. As M-21 limped away, he couldn't help but think he had failed Tao and Takeo. He was supposed to be the one responsible for close combat, not Takeo, and this mess was all his fault in the first place.
Also, what the hell had he just seen?
Back at the house, Frankenstein tended to M-21's injuries but not without making tutting noises. The blond man shook his head at the state of M-21's shirt (or more like, the state of his not-having-any-shirt, as M-21's shirt had pretty much been blasted into oblivion, so there was no shirt for Frankenstein to shake his head at), though Frankenstein wasn't actually shaking his head at M-21's shirtlessness. It was just that not having a shirt made M-21's injuries completely visible at a glance, and they weren't light injuries, even though Crombell's agents were strong but not that strong. M-21's sudden lapse of attention in battle was what had gotten him hurt. That was concerning. Frankenstein wasn't the only one concerned.
“What happened out there?” Tao asked, always the first to plunge head-in, right to the heart of the matter. Frankenstein's expression told M-21 that he very much wanted to know what had happened too. The same went for Takeo who had also decided to stick around while Frankenstein treated M-21's more serious injuries.
M-21 hesitated, though his hesitation came more from not understanding what had happened than from not wanting to share. “I saw something. A vision. No...a memory, I think.”
“A vision? A memory?” asked Tao curiously. “What, did the battle remind you of something?”
M-21 shook his head, his mouth turned downwards in a severe frown that pulled at his scar. “No...that's the strange thing. I'm pretty sure what I saw has never happened to me before.”
“What did you see?” Takeo asked.
“Lots of strangers,” M-21 said with an odd expression on his face. “Mingling around outside. They were strangers...but they also seemed somehow...familiar.”
Tao snapped his fingers. “Those have got to be your memories from before,” he exclaimed excitedly.
“From before?” M-21 questioned, but he didn't have to ask further to figure out what Tao had meant. M-21's memories only went back up to the time when he'd woken up in the facility in a silent and large glass container. He had no recollection of his life from before the experiments, from before he had opened his eyes and found himself submerged in green liquid, oxygen mask sealing his voice. His life as he knew it had begun then, surrounded by green liquid and silent comrades subjected to the same treatment as him.
He very rarely considered that he might have had a life before the experiments. Somewhere inside of himself, he thought he knew that he must have had a life from before, as hard as it was to fathom, but he no longer gave more than a passing thought to it. He wanted to know who he truly was, but that life, however it must have been like, was no more. He was who he was.
Yet...
"M-21?" Tao prodded.
Yet, if it was possible for him to remember, wouldn't that mean he would also remember his name? And possibly even some of his comrades' names, if they'd known each other from before? Those "strangers" he'd seen in that flash of memory had felt so familiar. Strangers in appearance, but not in ways that mattered, was how he felt about them.
Even if he hadn't known his comrades very well in his life before, he might have at least met them once before they had all undergone the experiments.
What were his comrades like from before? M-21 believed they were more than just experiments, more than just barcodes and numbers. Even though M-21 didn't often wonder what his own life had been like, he'd wondered about M-24. He'd always thought that maybe M-24 had younger siblings before he had become an experimental subject. M-24 had always been kind and brotherly.
They were real. They had existed. And maybe, this would be definitive proof, a chance to reclaim a part of himself, an opportunity to fulfill a promise.
"Frankenstein, is it possible?" M-21 asked. That what he'd seen was one of his memories, from before. He looked up at the blond man for answers.
"Not impossible, I would say," Frankenstein murmured. "Not impossible."
But he didn't explain more.
Despite his grave injuries that would have killed any normal person or at least confined them to bed for a good month or two, M-21 was up and about by the very next day. Frankenstein jotted down notes on a clipboard and uttered "hmmmm" several times before he declared M-21 to be healthy enough to wash dishes.
"..."
"It's great to have you back helping again," Takeo said, "but sometimes I feel you heal too quickly."
Frankenstein had also mentioned something about how M-21 was healing quicker now. Which, should have been a good thing.
Takeo shared a sympathetic look with M-21. Both of them were once again wearing pink aprons and rubber gloves that were a dazzling hot pink. Behind them, Regis was declining all offers from the kids to help clean.
"Did you have any more flashes of memory since the fight?" Takeo asked as he scrubbed one of the plates the children had used for holding potato chips.
"No."
He hadn't. Tried as he might, nothing else had come to him. He didn't know what, if anything, had triggered that first flash of memory. Was it the location where they'd fought? Or the words they'd exchanged with that agent of Crombell's?
Without any other flashes of memory to aid him, M-21 had instead turned to examining the memory he'd seen, trying to recall the faces of those not-strangers, wondering if there was a clue there that he'd missed.
"Hm, it'll come in time," Takeo said, "if you want to remember."
At Takeo's tone, M-21 glanced his way.
Noticing M-21's attention, Takeo elaborated. "I thought I knew who I was, that I was an older brother with a younger sister I had to protect, but that turned out to be a lie. Sometimes, I remember things, but I can't tell if they're real memories, or if they're more lies."
Takeo held up a plate before M-21 could get a word in. "Don't worry, you don't need to give me another lecture on how good it is to be alive. I'm glad for what I have now. I didn't think I'd be here, alive, or that I would end up washing dishes like this, but the domesticity is kind of nice."
M-21 closed his mouth and took the plate. As he rinsed the plate, he remarked, "I was just going to say...that sucks."
"Oh."
It was with a light dash of pink on his face that Takeo turned back to washing dishes.
After a moment's pause where the two men silently scrubbed and rinsed, M-21 spoke once again. "Lies or not, if they're my memories, I plan on unraveling them. M-24 and I wanted to find the names of our comrades. This might be a clue."
He paused, an easy smile coming over his face. "But that doesn't mean I don't like my current life."
Just as he said this (and just as Takeo smiled in return), a crash came from behind. It sounded like something had shattered.
"It was Ik-han!" "It was Shinwoo!" came two simultaneous shouts.
M-21 and Takeo shared a look over the dishes.
"Would you, or shall I?" M-21 commented dryly.
"Be my guest," Takeo said, soap suds all over his rubber gloves as he gestured towards the scene behind them.
Clad in his pink apron and hot pink gloves (complete with fuzzy pink slippers), M-21 stalked over to the table.
"Who would like to explain this?" he demanded.
Both Ik-han and Shinwoo laughed guiltily. Shinwoo rubbed the back of his head. Yuna and Suyi giggled and whispered to Seira that he was doing quite an impression of the headmaster. Regis sniffed and told M-21 to leave. With the bowl broken into pieces, it was now Regis' job to clean it up, not the dishwashing crew's. Tao merely lounged on the sofa with a wide, Cheshire grin, laughing as M-21 and Regis started arguing (and M-21 never did find out who had broken the bowl, though when Frankenstein walked in, everyone quickly shut up). Throughout all this, Rai quietly sipped his tea.
This domesticity, M-21 liked it too.
All next week, M-21 had no new flashes of memory, but he did get ambushed by more of Crombell's agents. However, none of the ambushes triggered any new memories for M-21. Takeo dealt with many of the attackers with tranquilizers, and M-21 rendered them unconscious with a few well-aimed punches, nothing too extravagant. Unless he couldn't win without transforming, M-21 wanted to keep that in check. The less information about his powers that reached Crombell's ears, the better.
"Think we should take these guys and have them brainwashed so they'd forget all this?" Tao asked as he leaped off the roof of the building next to M-21. Takeo walked forward to join them soon after. All three of them were dressed in their suits, having just come back from work before they'd been ambushed yet again.
"No, they didn't see anything incriminating, and Crombell already knows about me," M-21 replied. Besides, these agents were only slightly stronger than the average human. They felt more like...hired hands. They didn't know much. It was the energy-blast guy they had to look out for, and Crombell himself.
"Your decision, Number Four," Tao said with a shrug, foot nudging the unconscious men over so that they weren't lying about in the middle of the streets. "So, anything new?"
M-21 shook his head.
"Hmmm, you want to remember, right?"
"Yeah."
If remembering would help him find his name and the names of his comrades, then yes, he wanted to remember. Tao had tried to help by infiltrating the Union's databases, but all data about the M series had been erased and replaced with useless data. Only Crombell himself possibly had the answers M-21 sought, but even that wasn't a surety. This, this only depended on himself to recall a lost part of his identity. It was within his control, or so he wanted to believe. So much had been out of his control in his days as an experimental material that he wanted to believe in this if nothing else.
"Then, let's head to that building where we had that fight last week! Maybe that'll help you remember."
M-21 nodded.
Returning back to the building didn't jog any new memories, and it only brought them to a burnt wall. Tao whistled, as that wall had pretty much completely crumbled in. It had been blasted by the same energy blast that had hit M-21, but while M-21 was still in one piece, that wall was certainly not (and had seen better days).
"Anything?" asked Tao.
M-21 shook his head. The surroundings didn't resemble what he'd seen in his memory at all, so the location couldn't have played a part in triggering his memory.
Disappointed, the three of them returned home.
The second flash of memory hit him when he'd almost given up and had almost written off what he'd seen as a fluke. He sucked in his breath when he saw those not-strangers again at yet another inopportune time. He was, at the moment, almost about to be tasered.
Wrenching himself out of the way, M-21 slashed at his opponent with his claws. Howling in pain, the taser guy prepared to strike again when Takeo shot him in the leg and Tao came out of nowhere to clobber the guy on the head, rendering him unconscious.
"What happened to your whip?" Takeo asked.
"I've always wanted to try this," Tao replied.
Both of them turned to look at M-21.
"So, I take it you remembered something?" Tao asked.
He had. This time, he'd clearly seen one of the not-strangers grin wildly at him before the not-stranger turned and they'd started running up a hill together, yelling at the top of their lungs.
...maybe he had been a hiker?
"Are you sure you want to remember?" Frankenstein asked during one of M-21's routine check-ups.
M-21 gave Frankenstein a look, but Frankenstein didn't pay him any heed. The blond man made some notes and seemed as if he'd forgotten he had even asked in the first place, busy as he was with whatever data he was gathering now.
"What do you mean?" M-21 finally asked. "Do you know something?"
"Hm?" Frankenstein looked up. "What was that?"
Before M-21 could remind Frankenstein that he was the one who had brought up the topic, the machine next to Frankenstein chimed. Out popped a steaming tray of cookies.
"Oh, they're done! Master, the cookies are done!"
"..."
Pulling his shirt back on, M-21 left the laboratory as well to go and find the others.
In the living room, Frankenstein handed a cookie to his master. Rai bit on the cookie and watched M-21 pass by the living room to head to the other side of the house.
"Are you worried, Master?" asked Frankenstein. He too watched M-21 as he disappeared around the corner. "Perhaps I should caution him more?"
Rai picked up another cookie, closing his eyes as he took a small bite.
"Yes, you're right, Master," Frankenstein murmured. "Having hope is a good thing."
The flashes of memories came more frequently after that second time, and Crombell was sending more and more people after M-21. M-21 would be fighting when he'd suddenly get hit with another memory. He'd grown somewhat accustomed to them, enough so that they no longer hindered him in battle, but he still owed a lot to Tao and Takeo for having his back.
After each of his pauses, Tao would ask what M-21 had remembered while Takeo would also listen attentively. Together, they tried to piece together and make sense of what M-21 saw with each flash. Tao had taken to naming the not-strangers, not with actual names as they didn't know them, but Tao would refer to them by their behaviors and characteristics, such as that man with the wild grin was now called the grinner, and the woman who'd pointed out some constellation was the stargazer, and such. These not-strangers felt more and more familiar to M-21, but he hadn't been able to connect them to any of his comrades. He still had hope, however, that this would lead him to finding more about himself and his comrades.
Even if he never ended up recalling everything in perfect clarity, M-21 was already grateful for how much Tao and Takeo were helping.
"You must be some kind of nature lover," Tao said after M-21's latest flash of memory. "You keep mentioning hills and trees and watching the sky."
"An astronomer, maybe?" Takeo commented. "Or..."
Tao and Takeo shared a look.
"What?" M-21 demanded. "Did you think of something?"
He should have made the connection himself too, but somewhere inside of himself, he must not have wanted to.
Tao slowly turned to face M-21, eyes almost hidden by his bangs. He tried to brush his hair out of his face to no avail. "M-21...when have these flashes of memory been coming to you?"
M-21 tried to think back on all the times he'd been hit with a memory that seemed foreign yet familiar to him. He knew the first one was in the midst of battle - that memory had almost done him in - and the second one had been in the midst of battle as well... Had all the memories come to him during battle?
"I think, during battle?" M-21 murmured.
"Yes, but not every battle, right? When during battle?"
Before M-21 could make sense of Tao's words, Takeo yelled for both of them to duck. They all ducked not a moment too late, for a scorching energy blast flew over their heads.
"Great, the energy-blast guy is back," Tao said.
"Let me deal with him," M-21 said.
Tao nodded. Both Tao and Takeo quickly moved out of the scene to assist M-21 from a distance.
The energy-blast guy was a cut above all the rest of the men Crombell had taken to sending after M-21. He wasn't terribly fast, and he took some time to charge, but he was strong, both in defense and offense. M-21 tried to fall the man through his speed, but the guy's stomach was like steel. Punching him made M-21's hand smart.
"Is that all you've got?" the man taunted.
"You wish!" Tao exclaimed over the earpieces. M-21 thought he heard Takeo snort.
"The goal is letting Crombell find out as little as possible," Takeo reminded Tao.
When Crombell's lackey aimed a kick at M-21 and then followed that up with an energy blast, M-21 transformed without a second thought to defend himself. In one swift motion, heart pulsing crazily, his claws appeared on both hands, fur lining his arms all the way up to his shoulders and chin.
Tao whistled. "You're looking good, man!"
This time, it was M-21's turn to snort. He threw himself back into battle, matching each of the energy-blast guy's attacks with one of his own. With each slash, his heart pulsed stronger and stronger, adrenaline running heatedly through his veins, until another memory seized him in the heart of battle yet all he was aware of was Tao's question before the battle.
"M-21...when have these flashes of memory been coming to you?"
A single "shit" did not at all cover what M-21 currently felt.
He did not need to see this next memory to know his mistake, but he saw it anyway, like watching a silent horror film he couldn't pause. There he was, under the moon, laughing with those not-strangers, watching those not-strangers shrinking and changing before his eyes...
These were not his memories.
These were the memories from the werewolf heart Crombell had stuck inside of him.
Those not-strangers were strangers.
Howling in grief with the realization that these memories had only ever hit him after his transformations, that these memories would never lead him to the names of his comrades because they weren't even his memories in the first place, M-21 slashed at the energy-blast guy furiously, ending his attack by burrowing his claws into the man's stomach, warm blood gushing over his arm.
"Whoa, looks like we don't have to help you this time. Thought we might've needed to," Tao commented idly. "Should we get the guy to a hospital?"
Takeo looked down at the guy. "Frankenstein's a better choice. And he knows too much to let him go back to Crombell."
"Right, new housemate!" Tao declared. "Or maybe Rai will do his brainwashing thing. Energy-blast guy seems kinda...brawny for us."
Tao threw an arm around M-21. M-21 thought his face felt strangely wet. "Come on, Number Four, let's go home." With a pat on the back, Tao skipped forward and helped Takeo lift the fallen man up.
M-21 closed his eyes. "Yeah, let's do that."
As he followed Tao and Takeo, M-21 touched the place above his heart. He'd thought he was recovering bits and pieces of himself from before, that he was finally fulfilling his promise with M-24 about finding out who he was. He'd thought he was one step closer to uncovering his comrades' names - he had been so hopeful, going over every single detail with Tao and Takeo, wondering about each person he had seen - but everything had been for naught.
No, he thought to himself as he glanced at Tao and Takeo's backs. He was M-21. He still didn't know what he had been like before, or who he had been before, but he was M-21, and M-21 was a man with a werewolf's heart. This heart...even though it hadn't always been his...he would learn more about too, as it was also a part of him, an essential part of who he was now.
Perhaps one day he might even meet the man Tao called the grinner, and the woman they'd taken to calling the stargazer, and all those other not-strangers that had felt so familiar to M-21. Perhaps one day, he would gain even more comrades thanks to the strong heart beating inside of him. He would, after all, keep remembering these memories that belonged not to his mind, but to his heart. He didn't know how he would react to those not-strangers, or how those not-strangers would react to him, but he thought perhaps they might be able to come to some sort of understanding. Just like him, those not-strangers were people who had lost a comrade too. Even though the comrade they'd known no longer existed in the form they'd known, that comrade of theirs still lived inside of M-21, and that was what kept M-21 alive.
M-21, if nothing else, had a strong will to live.
"Are you coming?" Tao asked. "This energy-blast guy isn't light, you know!"
"...you're not the one carrying him, Tao," Takeo said.
Lips quirking up, M-21 followed them home.
the end
Fandom: Noblesse
Words: 3,903
Summary: The first flash of memory hit him in the midst of battle at a very inopportune time, causing him to stumble into the path of an energy blast courtesy of one of Dr. Crombell's new agents. Remembering was inconvenient, but M-21 welcomed it. Maybe, just maybe, he would finally remember his name and the names of his comrades.
Notes: Written for
darkicedragon for yuletide 2011 as a treat. I was pretty gleeful about writing this because I liked the idea a lot, heh, except my execution isn't so great (I also almost didn't make it in time, as I started this around the time Madness opened). More about that later in my Yuletide summary post! Thanks Dark Ice Dragon, for writing me so many giftfics again this year! Originally posted here.
The Names of His Comrades
The first flash of memory hit him in the midst of battle at a very inopportune time, causing him to stumble into the path of an energy blast courtesy of one of Dr. Crombell's new agents. They'd thought the Union had stopped being interested in M-21, but they were wrong. Dr. Crombell hadn't shown up personally, but from the people that had begun ambushing M-21 on the way home, they'd figured out the underlying goal. “They”, meaning Frankenstein and Tao. They, after all, were the ones who mused the most.
Dr. Crombell wanted M-21 back. He considered M-21 one of the few “successful” experiments. M-21 had scoffed at that when Frankenstein explained this around the living room table (him, a successful experiment when he and his comrades had always been called failures? don't make him laugh), but he shut his mouth when Frankenstein continued on and pointed out that even though Crombell hadn't yet accomplished his goal, he was still gathering valuable data about M-21's improved fighting abilities.
That would not do. He'd be endangering everyone...and he was doing a fine job of that right now with his lapse of attention.
"M-21!" Tao yelled out in warning over their earpieces.
Despite Tao's obvious concern for his current predicament, the energy blast was still heading his way, and M-21 was still falling forward as if in slow-motion, mind caught by what he had just seen. He made to protect himself, but his arms, even with their transformation, only did so much for him. The energy blast hit him full on, damaging his clothes beyond repair. He fell to one knee, head spinning, heart pulsing wildly.
“Shit, Takeo, get him out of there!”
M-21 thought he heard the sound of bullets flying past his ear, and he thought he saw magenta hair - it was pretty much smacking him in the face, much too close for him to actually see clearly - but he definitely smelled gunpowder.
In the midst of the confusion (that Takeo had generated for them as cover under Tao's instructions), Takeo quickly grabbed M-21's arm, careful not to cut himself on one of M-21's sharp nails, supporting him so they could make their way off the battlefield. As M-21 limped away, he couldn't help but think he had failed Tao and Takeo. He was supposed to be the one responsible for close combat, not Takeo, and this mess was all his fault in the first place.
Also, what the hell had he just seen?
Back at the house, Frankenstein tended to M-21's injuries but not without making tutting noises. The blond man shook his head at the state of M-21's shirt (or more like, the state of his not-having-any-shirt, as M-21's shirt had pretty much been blasted into oblivion, so there was no shirt for Frankenstein to shake his head at), though Frankenstein wasn't actually shaking his head at M-21's shirtlessness. It was just that not having a shirt made M-21's injuries completely visible at a glance, and they weren't light injuries, even though Crombell's agents were strong but not that strong. M-21's sudden lapse of attention in battle was what had gotten him hurt. That was concerning. Frankenstein wasn't the only one concerned.
“What happened out there?” Tao asked, always the first to plunge head-in, right to the heart of the matter. Frankenstein's expression told M-21 that he very much wanted to know what had happened too. The same went for Takeo who had also decided to stick around while Frankenstein treated M-21's more serious injuries.
M-21 hesitated, though his hesitation came more from not understanding what had happened than from not wanting to share. “I saw something. A vision. No...a memory, I think.”
“A vision? A memory?” asked Tao curiously. “What, did the battle remind you of something?”
M-21 shook his head, his mouth turned downwards in a severe frown that pulled at his scar. “No...that's the strange thing. I'm pretty sure what I saw has never happened to me before.”
“What did you see?” Takeo asked.
“Lots of strangers,” M-21 said with an odd expression on his face. “Mingling around outside. They were strangers...but they also seemed somehow...familiar.”
Tao snapped his fingers. “Those have got to be your memories from before,” he exclaimed excitedly.
“From before?” M-21 questioned, but he didn't have to ask further to figure out what Tao had meant. M-21's memories only went back up to the time when he'd woken up in the facility in a silent and large glass container. He had no recollection of his life from before the experiments, from before he had opened his eyes and found himself submerged in green liquid, oxygen mask sealing his voice. His life as he knew it had begun then, surrounded by green liquid and silent comrades subjected to the same treatment as him.
He very rarely considered that he might have had a life before the experiments. Somewhere inside of himself, he thought he knew that he must have had a life from before, as hard as it was to fathom, but he no longer gave more than a passing thought to it. He wanted to know who he truly was, but that life, however it must have been like, was no more. He was who he was.
Yet...
"M-21?" Tao prodded.
Yet, if it was possible for him to remember, wouldn't that mean he would also remember his name? And possibly even some of his comrades' names, if they'd known each other from before? Those "strangers" he'd seen in that flash of memory had felt so familiar. Strangers in appearance, but not in ways that mattered, was how he felt about them.
Even if he hadn't known his comrades very well in his life before, he might have at least met them once before they had all undergone the experiments.
What were his comrades like from before? M-21 believed they were more than just experiments, more than just barcodes and numbers. Even though M-21 didn't often wonder what his own life had been like, he'd wondered about M-24. He'd always thought that maybe M-24 had younger siblings before he had become an experimental subject. M-24 had always been kind and brotherly.
They were real. They had existed. And maybe, this would be definitive proof, a chance to reclaim a part of himself, an opportunity to fulfill a promise.
"Frankenstein, is it possible?" M-21 asked. That what he'd seen was one of his memories, from before. He looked up at the blond man for answers.
"Not impossible, I would say," Frankenstein murmured. "Not impossible."
But he didn't explain more.
Despite his grave injuries that would have killed any normal person or at least confined them to bed for a good month or two, M-21 was up and about by the very next day. Frankenstein jotted down notes on a clipboard and uttered "hmmmm" several times before he declared M-21 to be healthy enough to wash dishes.
"..."
"It's great to have you back helping again," Takeo said, "but sometimes I feel you heal too quickly."
Frankenstein had also mentioned something about how M-21 was healing quicker now. Which, should have been a good thing.
Takeo shared a sympathetic look with M-21. Both of them were once again wearing pink aprons and rubber gloves that were a dazzling hot pink. Behind them, Regis was declining all offers from the kids to help clean.
"Did you have any more flashes of memory since the fight?" Takeo asked as he scrubbed one of the plates the children had used for holding potato chips.
"No."
He hadn't. Tried as he might, nothing else had come to him. He didn't know what, if anything, had triggered that first flash of memory. Was it the location where they'd fought? Or the words they'd exchanged with that agent of Crombell's?
Without any other flashes of memory to aid him, M-21 had instead turned to examining the memory he'd seen, trying to recall the faces of those not-strangers, wondering if there was a clue there that he'd missed.
"Hm, it'll come in time," Takeo said, "if you want to remember."
At Takeo's tone, M-21 glanced his way.
Noticing M-21's attention, Takeo elaborated. "I thought I knew who I was, that I was an older brother with a younger sister I had to protect, but that turned out to be a lie. Sometimes, I remember things, but I can't tell if they're real memories, or if they're more lies."
Takeo held up a plate before M-21 could get a word in. "Don't worry, you don't need to give me another lecture on how good it is to be alive. I'm glad for what I have now. I didn't think I'd be here, alive, or that I would end up washing dishes like this, but the domesticity is kind of nice."
M-21 closed his mouth and took the plate. As he rinsed the plate, he remarked, "I was just going to say...that sucks."
"Oh."
It was with a light dash of pink on his face that Takeo turned back to washing dishes.
After a moment's pause where the two men silently scrubbed and rinsed, M-21 spoke once again. "Lies or not, if they're my memories, I plan on unraveling them. M-24 and I wanted to find the names of our comrades. This might be a clue."
He paused, an easy smile coming over his face. "But that doesn't mean I don't like my current life."
Just as he said this (and just as Takeo smiled in return), a crash came from behind. It sounded like something had shattered.
"It was Ik-han!" "It was Shinwoo!" came two simultaneous shouts.
M-21 and Takeo shared a look over the dishes.
"Would you, or shall I?" M-21 commented dryly.
"Be my guest," Takeo said, soap suds all over his rubber gloves as he gestured towards the scene behind them.
Clad in his pink apron and hot pink gloves (complete with fuzzy pink slippers), M-21 stalked over to the table.
"Who would like to explain this?" he demanded.
Both Ik-han and Shinwoo laughed guiltily. Shinwoo rubbed the back of his head. Yuna and Suyi giggled and whispered to Seira that he was doing quite an impression of the headmaster. Regis sniffed and told M-21 to leave. With the bowl broken into pieces, it was now Regis' job to clean it up, not the dishwashing crew's. Tao merely lounged on the sofa with a wide, Cheshire grin, laughing as M-21 and Regis started arguing (and M-21 never did find out who had broken the bowl, though when Frankenstein walked in, everyone quickly shut up). Throughout all this, Rai quietly sipped his tea.
This domesticity, M-21 liked it too.
All next week, M-21 had no new flashes of memory, but he did get ambushed by more of Crombell's agents. However, none of the ambushes triggered any new memories for M-21. Takeo dealt with many of the attackers with tranquilizers, and M-21 rendered them unconscious with a few well-aimed punches, nothing too extravagant. Unless he couldn't win without transforming, M-21 wanted to keep that in check. The less information about his powers that reached Crombell's ears, the better.
"Think we should take these guys and have them brainwashed so they'd forget all this?" Tao asked as he leaped off the roof of the building next to M-21. Takeo walked forward to join them soon after. All three of them were dressed in their suits, having just come back from work before they'd been ambushed yet again.
"No, they didn't see anything incriminating, and Crombell already knows about me," M-21 replied. Besides, these agents were only slightly stronger than the average human. They felt more like...hired hands. They didn't know much. It was the energy-blast guy they had to look out for, and Crombell himself.
"Your decision, Number Four," Tao said with a shrug, foot nudging the unconscious men over so that they weren't lying about in the middle of the streets. "So, anything new?"
M-21 shook his head.
"Hmmm, you want to remember, right?"
"Yeah."
If remembering would help him find his name and the names of his comrades, then yes, he wanted to remember. Tao had tried to help by infiltrating the Union's databases, but all data about the M series had been erased and replaced with useless data. Only Crombell himself possibly had the answers M-21 sought, but even that wasn't a surety. This, this only depended on himself to recall a lost part of his identity. It was within his control, or so he wanted to believe. So much had been out of his control in his days as an experimental material that he wanted to believe in this if nothing else.
"Then, let's head to that building where we had that fight last week! Maybe that'll help you remember."
M-21 nodded.
Returning back to the building didn't jog any new memories, and it only brought them to a burnt wall. Tao whistled, as that wall had pretty much completely crumbled in. It had been blasted by the same energy blast that had hit M-21, but while M-21 was still in one piece, that wall was certainly not (and had seen better days).
"Anything?" asked Tao.
M-21 shook his head. The surroundings didn't resemble what he'd seen in his memory at all, so the location couldn't have played a part in triggering his memory.
Disappointed, the three of them returned home.
The second flash of memory hit him when he'd almost given up and had almost written off what he'd seen as a fluke. He sucked in his breath when he saw those not-strangers again at yet another inopportune time. He was, at the moment, almost about to be tasered.
Wrenching himself out of the way, M-21 slashed at his opponent with his claws. Howling in pain, the taser guy prepared to strike again when Takeo shot him in the leg and Tao came out of nowhere to clobber the guy on the head, rendering him unconscious.
"What happened to your whip?" Takeo asked.
"I've always wanted to try this," Tao replied.
Both of them turned to look at M-21.
"So, I take it you remembered something?" Tao asked.
He had. This time, he'd clearly seen one of the not-strangers grin wildly at him before the not-stranger turned and they'd started running up a hill together, yelling at the top of their lungs.
...maybe he had been a hiker?
"Are you sure you want to remember?" Frankenstein asked during one of M-21's routine check-ups.
M-21 gave Frankenstein a look, but Frankenstein didn't pay him any heed. The blond man made some notes and seemed as if he'd forgotten he had even asked in the first place, busy as he was with whatever data he was gathering now.
"What do you mean?" M-21 finally asked. "Do you know something?"
"Hm?" Frankenstein looked up. "What was that?"
Before M-21 could remind Frankenstein that he was the one who had brought up the topic, the machine next to Frankenstein chimed. Out popped a steaming tray of cookies.
"Oh, they're done! Master, the cookies are done!"
"..."
Pulling his shirt back on, M-21 left the laboratory as well to go and find the others.
In the living room, Frankenstein handed a cookie to his master. Rai bit on the cookie and watched M-21 pass by the living room to head to the other side of the house.
"Are you worried, Master?" asked Frankenstein. He too watched M-21 as he disappeared around the corner. "Perhaps I should caution him more?"
Rai picked up another cookie, closing his eyes as he took a small bite.
"Yes, you're right, Master," Frankenstein murmured. "Having hope is a good thing."
The flashes of memories came more frequently after that second time, and Crombell was sending more and more people after M-21. M-21 would be fighting when he'd suddenly get hit with another memory. He'd grown somewhat accustomed to them, enough so that they no longer hindered him in battle, but he still owed a lot to Tao and Takeo for having his back.
After each of his pauses, Tao would ask what M-21 had remembered while Takeo would also listen attentively. Together, they tried to piece together and make sense of what M-21 saw with each flash. Tao had taken to naming the not-strangers, not with actual names as they didn't know them, but Tao would refer to them by their behaviors and characteristics, such as that man with the wild grin was now called the grinner, and the woman who'd pointed out some constellation was the stargazer, and such. These not-strangers felt more and more familiar to M-21, but he hadn't been able to connect them to any of his comrades. He still had hope, however, that this would lead him to finding more about himself and his comrades.
Even if he never ended up recalling everything in perfect clarity, M-21 was already grateful for how much Tao and Takeo were helping.
"You must be some kind of nature lover," Tao said after M-21's latest flash of memory. "You keep mentioning hills and trees and watching the sky."
"An astronomer, maybe?" Takeo commented. "Or..."
Tao and Takeo shared a look.
"What?" M-21 demanded. "Did you think of something?"
He should have made the connection himself too, but somewhere inside of himself, he must not have wanted to.
Tao slowly turned to face M-21, eyes almost hidden by his bangs. He tried to brush his hair out of his face to no avail. "M-21...when have these flashes of memory been coming to you?"
M-21 tried to think back on all the times he'd been hit with a memory that seemed foreign yet familiar to him. He knew the first one was in the midst of battle - that memory had almost done him in - and the second one had been in the midst of battle as well... Had all the memories come to him during battle?
"I think, during battle?" M-21 murmured.
"Yes, but not every battle, right? When during battle?"
Before M-21 could make sense of Tao's words, Takeo yelled for both of them to duck. They all ducked not a moment too late, for a scorching energy blast flew over their heads.
"Great, the energy-blast guy is back," Tao said.
"Let me deal with him," M-21 said.
Tao nodded. Both Tao and Takeo quickly moved out of the scene to assist M-21 from a distance.
The energy-blast guy was a cut above all the rest of the men Crombell had taken to sending after M-21. He wasn't terribly fast, and he took some time to charge, but he was strong, both in defense and offense. M-21 tried to fall the man through his speed, but the guy's stomach was like steel. Punching him made M-21's hand smart.
"Is that all you've got?" the man taunted.
"You wish!" Tao exclaimed over the earpieces. M-21 thought he heard Takeo snort.
"The goal is letting Crombell find out as little as possible," Takeo reminded Tao.
When Crombell's lackey aimed a kick at M-21 and then followed that up with an energy blast, M-21 transformed without a second thought to defend himself. In one swift motion, heart pulsing crazily, his claws appeared on both hands, fur lining his arms all the way up to his shoulders and chin.
Tao whistled. "You're looking good, man!"
This time, it was M-21's turn to snort. He threw himself back into battle, matching each of the energy-blast guy's attacks with one of his own. With each slash, his heart pulsed stronger and stronger, adrenaline running heatedly through his veins, until another memory seized him in the heart of battle yet all he was aware of was Tao's question before the battle.
"M-21...when have these flashes of memory been coming to you?"
A single "shit" did not at all cover what M-21 currently felt.
He did not need to see this next memory to know his mistake, but he saw it anyway, like watching a silent horror film he couldn't pause. There he was, under the moon, laughing with those not-strangers, watching those not-strangers shrinking and changing before his eyes...
These were not his memories.
These were the memories from the werewolf heart Crombell had stuck inside of him.
Those not-strangers were strangers.
Howling in grief with the realization that these memories had only ever hit him after his transformations, that these memories would never lead him to the names of his comrades because they weren't even his memories in the first place, M-21 slashed at the energy-blast guy furiously, ending his attack by burrowing his claws into the man's stomach, warm blood gushing over his arm.
"Whoa, looks like we don't have to help you this time. Thought we might've needed to," Tao commented idly. "Should we get the guy to a hospital?"
Takeo looked down at the guy. "Frankenstein's a better choice. And he knows too much to let him go back to Crombell."
"Right, new housemate!" Tao declared. "Or maybe Rai will do his brainwashing thing. Energy-blast guy seems kinda...brawny for us."
Tao threw an arm around M-21. M-21 thought his face felt strangely wet. "Come on, Number Four, let's go home." With a pat on the back, Tao skipped forward and helped Takeo lift the fallen man up.
M-21 closed his eyes. "Yeah, let's do that."
As he followed Tao and Takeo, M-21 touched the place above his heart. He'd thought he was recovering bits and pieces of himself from before, that he was finally fulfilling his promise with M-24 about finding out who he was. He'd thought he was one step closer to uncovering his comrades' names - he had been so hopeful, going over every single detail with Tao and Takeo, wondering about each person he had seen - but everything had been for naught.
No, he thought to himself as he glanced at Tao and Takeo's backs. He was M-21. He still didn't know what he had been like before, or who he had been before, but he was M-21, and M-21 was a man with a werewolf's heart. This heart...even though it hadn't always been his...he would learn more about too, as it was also a part of him, an essential part of who he was now.
Perhaps one day he might even meet the man Tao called the grinner, and the woman they'd taken to calling the stargazer, and all those other not-strangers that had felt so familiar to M-21. Perhaps one day, he would gain even more comrades thanks to the strong heart beating inside of him. He would, after all, keep remembering these memories that belonged not to his mind, but to his heart. He didn't know how he would react to those not-strangers, or how those not-strangers would react to him, but he thought perhaps they might be able to come to some sort of understanding. Just like him, those not-strangers were people who had lost a comrade too. Even though the comrade they'd known no longer existed in the form they'd known, that comrade of theirs still lived inside of M-21, and that was what kept M-21 alive.
M-21, if nothing else, had a strong will to live.
"Are you coming?" Tao asked. "This energy-blast guy isn't light, you know!"
"...you're not the one carrying him, Tao," Takeo said.
Lips quirking up, M-21 followed them home.
the end