She was a robot? She was a ROBOT? (mithrigil) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-02-25 01:10:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | a: mithrigil, f: digital devil saga, r: reversathon, recipient: puella_nerdii |
[fic] DDS2, Serph/Heat/Sera, "In the Darkness Under Scorpio".
Title: In the Darkness Under Scorpio
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga 2
Pairing: Serph/Heat/Sera in at least six different permutations.
Rating: Hard R
Warnings: Spoilers. Violence. Vore. Xenokink. Hermaphroditism. Dubcon. Galatea. Ephebophilia.
Request: See title.
I never find what I am looking for
And each time I return older
With my ugliness intact
But with the knowledge that if it isn’t there
In the Darkness Under Scorpio
it isn’t anywhere
digital devil saga (2)
Mithrigil Galtirglin
after Richard Sheldon
Serph’s intestines sputter. They’re warm even to Heat, tangled under his wrist, the acid eating at his claws.
It explains. Everything. The grey in Serph’s eyes is that acid, that blackness, that—
“Why’d you just—stand there?” Heat manages, finding—everything.
Serph smiles, grabs Heat’s collar, draws his mouth close (like his hand’s not already inside him, like—like there’s closer even than that), and.
Speaks.
There’s staggering, then falling, then the smell of Sera and blood, the slap of the EGG inhibitor across his face, rising up to pummel him.
O’Brien died before he got in here, Heat thinks.
-
They’re burying a little girl and Heat isn’t crying.
There’s a man dressed in ink with a knife dangling from his neck. He’s made of words. The knife has a—an effigy—of a man pinned against it like he couldn’t stand up without it. Heat can see that from where he is, at the far end of the hole they’re putting the girl in. He doesn’t see the girl but he knows she’s there, in the box, and she’s made of stone, that’s why the box was so heavy. He remembers carrying a corner of it, that’s how he got close. He helped put the box down. He’s one of six that are still standing near the box and they’re all men and they’re all older than him but not old, not Cuvier-old. They’re comrades. He’s one of six. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
The words crumble away from the man with the effigy on his neck and fill everyone else with ink too. The Tribe color is black like Sera’s hair. The girl in the box had black hair before she turned to stone too. She cried a lot and she held him and her elbows had frozen like that in the end because she slept holding herself, holding her blankets, holding her
brother
when she was just that small, but she isn’t that small in the box. She’s heavy. He’s strong enough to lift her but not enough to cure her. If she still has a name, it’s Lizzie but that’s not what it says on the other thing that’s made of stone. Behind the box. Heat reads it over and over and he’s still not crying.
It’s night. The world is a cluster of boils pretending to be hills and it swallows up the box and the man and the effigy and the entire Tribe, except for Heat and one more, maybe she’s not part of the tribe because she isn’t wearing black, she’s wearing white and her hair is the color the sun’s supposed to be and she has no face and she comes up to Heat’s elbow and takes his hand. She’s not crying either because she has no eyes, only mouths, but it still sounds like sobbing when she turns her face down into Heat’s side (so small, so fragile) and devours him there, leaves rips in the tribe cloth and his skin and he’s letting her, he wants it, he hates it he deserves it he’s
weak
and soon one of her mouths is on his groin and the sun is black, too.
-
“—I—”
“They told you,” O’Brien says, like he knows. ‘That’s good. That’s—”
“You’re—”
“Dead,” he says. “Yes. You aren’t. Don’t.”
“What the fuck—”
“There’s a lot I don’t know either.” When O’Brien—sighs, that’s something Heat. Doesn’t. “Just pry your hand out of his body and get up, that’ll make things easier.”
Heat does, snarls, knows he’s straining against—thicker than water, the inhibitor, he’s at the bottom of the EGG. He looks up, those are the tubes he always sees attached to Sera, on the screens, the boxes, the cycles. He rips his arm out of Serph, lets Serph fall. It’s slow. It’s heavy. The dead, they’re. Heavy.
O’Brien isn’t. He’s whole, not like the last time Heat saw him in a dream, legless and bleeding and he died to get here, box, cycles. When Heat stands, O’Brien seems smaller and larger at the same time, tall and straight but still. Not.
“I’ve got a lot to say to you,” Heat tells him, clearer than he can see.
“Start, then.”
-
There’s shrapnel in the sky.
It doesn’t fall. It stays there like the rain did when it stopped, like when it turned into clouds.
It glows like smoke and teeth and magic and the sky isn’t a sky, the parts that should be grey are black. The only grey is Serph and Agni is throttling him, holding him over the edge of the castle like Bat held Sera, don’t move, moron, or I’ll crush her skull.
Serph, not Varna, this is like he never changed, never—
“I’ll get her back,” Agni says. “I told you I’ll get her back.”
Serph’s hands shiver and flail and he holds on to Agni’s wrist like that’ll help, strangles the wrist like a neck he can’t snap. His eyes never changed. He’s always been flat and grey and a hole to fill.
“You trust me,” Agni says, both mouths, around spit, around hunger. “You need me.”
Again, no words, not even in the eyes.
Both mouths, and another, somewhere not here shot against the wall, growl, “Let me.”
There’s another Serph shining down from higher than the castle, one that’s smiling, one that’s pulling, one that’s only a massive grey eye. It has no flesh, only bones, it’s made like a skull, things that used to move and change now pretending to be
one.
Agni pulls the Serph he holds onto close, devours his face. The Serph in the sky only glows brighter.
-
But it’s not easy to find the. Where to start. Where so much is. Why Heat sees what he does, feels what he does. Who he was. What this means, what this. Is. He is.
“Are the dreams true?”
“I don’t know what you dream,” O’Brien says.
The inhibitor stirs. Ink and acid coil down like smoke from Heat’s arm, gobbets of Serph’s insides falling just as fast as anything else. That. Makes sense. “Sera,” Heat says. “The ones of you and Sera.”
Harley’s face doesn’t suit O’Brien at all.
“Does that mean that you—”
“No,” O’Brien says, quick and. Honest. Heat can still smell the fear but it’s Sera’s fear, not. Not his own. And O’Brien’s fear smells the same as his own, he knows. “No, I never did.”
“Did what?”
“…What do you dream?”
-
There’s no one else in the foyer. Then there’s no one else in the hall. So Heat walks them because he knows Sera’s here somewhere. He walks through the paintings
this is Ajna, the future says
Then there’s no one else in the courtyard. Then there’s no one else in the hall. There are sounds, and they’re not night-sounds, they’re animal-sounds, and Heat slows down, listens, takes—comfort—but he knows he’s here because Sera wants him here, that’s the only explanation, the only
directive
Then there’s no one else in the library. Then there’s no one else in the hall. The books are muttering too, laughing like they’re on fire (and they will be, someone says, but don’t worry, these are only copies and all the pages are blank) and they tell him, the doors of this place, the paintings, they don’t go where they’re supposed to, they go where Sera wants them to go, and he can’t get in unless she wants him to get in, and he can’t find her unless she wants to be found.
But there’s no one else in the dining room. Then there’s no one else up the stairs. Then there’s nothing but the noise of
cat’s bells
and a doorknob slicking with sweat under his palm.
“Hello! Um—” the picture says, shattered on the floor, “—today we all came here to the beach!—Hello! Um—today we all”
She’s wearing less than she does at the.
Serph is too.
But she’s—under—him, so Heat can’t see. Anything.
“came here to the beach!—Hello! Um—”
Except what she wanted him to see.
-
“More than one thing,” Heat says. “You can’t just say you’ve done nothing. None of this. I—” do not comprehend, ha, just fine, a time like. This. “I was never you.”
O’Brien closes his eyes. They’re the same color as his hair, Heat sees that now. They’re right. For even the Junkyard, they’re right.
“So how much of what I’m seeing is because she knew? And how much is because she put it there? And what—what are you doing? To me.”
“I didn’t want her that way,” O’Brien says, and if it’s a lie Heat will tear him to shreds for it.
He doesn’t.
-
“One of the more colloquially applied definitions of ‘insanity’ is ‘repeating the same sequence of actions and expecting a change in results’.
It’s Sheffield. Heat doesn’t bother looking. “What do you want?”
“A change in results,” he says, and that smirk (is like a shot to the back but that comes later much much later) freezes on his jaw. “Which precludes a change in methods.”
Heat sighs, closes his computer
numbers
and leans on the lid, looks at the door, Sheffield Sheffield Sheffield “I’m listening,” and he shouldn’t be.
“God likes it when she sings,” Sheffield says, comes closer, comes too close, pretends to be a comrade, “but not when it’s because we tell her to.”
“You’ve never been to church in your life,” Heat says, the words just come out and it’s not him speaking, it’s. He is. “Prayer’s something you don’t fabricate. –Can’t,” he corrects, “fabricate.”
“Tell that to every composer who wrote for his glory,” Sheffield says, and something hisses out of him between a sigh and a scoff and a “Hell, tell that to Bach. There’s nothing intuitive about Bach. Bach’s math. The Saint Matthew Passion’s the musical equivalent of a probabilistic proof.”
Heat shakes his head (inside it’s burning spinning indignant not him). “Caged birds don’t sing.”
“See, I tell myself that sometimes too,” Sheffield says and the mockery’s just—damn—everything, “and then I ask, why would I stay home and listen to Bach if such precision could have happened for an infinite number of monkeys with harpsichords?”
-
“I won’t—can’t—deny…shouldn’t, actually. Shouldn’t deny that I, before I came here, was close to someone like her. Two someones…and only one of them the way Sera wants you to want her. She’s powerful. Maybe…maybe she picked up on it, maybe Sheffield told her…probably just picked up on it. Sera…” O’Brien looks around the EGG like he can see her in it, but no, no one but him and Heat and Serph’s dead body, “Sera looks, at everything, but she doesn’t always see. And maybe it’s just because she was a little girl with her stories—and Sheffield’s stories, but I can’t blame him for everything. And I won’t.”
Heat holds on to those eyes. His own are getting narrow, dazed, gold.
“I wanted what was best for her,” O’Brien says. “And for the world. I made my choice. And I lost.”
-
They’re one.
They’re neither of them and they’re both of them and they’re one and there’s nothing more beautiful and hateful in this world except maybe the sun itself. Maybe.
They’re welcoming him, touching him, putting him on his knees and this makes sense, he turns up his throat but this isn’t about that, she. She says so. She knows. And he—Serph—Heat’s already done this for Serph, already
submitted.
The world’s dead and God’s not listening and the whole point of this was that He’d stopped caring and Heat does too, throws his arms around Their knees and pulls Them close. He feels the cold of Them on his cheek the armor the cloth growing warm from underneath and that’s victory, that’s want, that’s Them wanting him accepting him tearing off Their armor for him and it’s both of them there too, both of them wet and wanting and Heat devours it all.
The ground burns.
-
“So your answer,” O’Brien says, “is…whether the dreams are true or not, it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”
“How do you fucking dare—”
“Heat.”
He sounds like himself.
“It doesn’t.”
-
He should apologize—
“No,” Sera says. “No, it’s all right. I.”
She’s—herself. And he’s himself, he thinks. And this is nowhere, this is the white gate at the top of the tower. He held her, there, and holding her there brought him—
“Here,” she says. Shy. She opens her arms and she’s the O’Brien kind of naked, the one that’s just because she’s—young, and nothing’s wrong, and nothing’s. There’s. Want. But.
But she doesn’t.
She casts no shadow. The light of the world sucks the black out of even her eyes, even her. Her. Her hair is the first to.
There’s no sun but this is what the sun does.
“No,” he. Growls. Says. Thinks. This is wrong.
She shakes her head, corrects him, “Yes. I—” and the those tracks are like atma but curling, marble veins, Temple statues, “You—you want—” and they grow into needles and tubes all dangling out of her, stone hair, stone arteries, “And this is the only way you can—have—”
Her legs are spread on the ground, her hips as parted as they’ll.
They’ll.
Heat puts his hands on her. Her cheeks. Her shoulders. There’s no bone, only rock, but that’s what’s. Supposed. And the curve of her hips is welcoming, and the frozen hair between her thighs somehow yields and
the Syndrome isn’t contagious
but like this she’s open for him. He kisses Sera’s mouth. Holds her. Gathers her. He’s strong enough to lift her but not enough to cure her.
He thrusts in his hand.
He’s strong enough to break her, too.
-
—Cuvier wails. Up, where the hatch is still open, where the light is, where Sera’s scream still rings and tangles with a solid gunshot. Bone snaps. The world shivers.
“It doesn’t,” O’Brien says again. It’s not a plea, but there’s. He is.
“It doesn’t,” Heat agrees. His arm aches—he flexes his claws, his teeth. “But my choice does.”
---
.
.