She was a robot? She was a ROBOT? (mithrigil) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-01-27 23:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | a: mithrigil, f: digital devil saga, r: valentines |
Digital Devil Saga -- Heat/Sera -- Lobotomy
Title: Lobotomy
Author/Artist: mithrigil
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga (and 2)
Pairing: Heat/Sera, Angel/Heat, O'Brien/Sera
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers. Semi-explicit Ephebophilia. Angel. The canon.
Recipient: puella_nerdii
Puel, you are awesome.
Lobotomy
digital devil saga
Mithrigil Galtirglin
for Puel
“She’s my child,” Angel says. Angel says. “Surely a predator like you can sense that.”
Heat knows nothing about children, but the word ‘predator’ makes everything inside him twist. The words connect.
“Oh that’s right,” Angel says, Angel says, “how shortsighted of me to forget the limits of your experience.” Angel smiles the way Harihara did. Does. “Children tend to resemble their parents.”
The last time Heat heard any talk about children was Lupa in the sewers. ‘In my dream, he calls me father.’ Heat growls when this starts to make sense. “You’re her father.”
“You’re the first person to assume it in that direction.” There’s something proud, something mocking, something top-of-the-tower in her voice. “Perhaps Sera didn’t render you completely hopeless.”
“You—”
“Yes,” Angel says, “I’m her father. And her mother as well. You were a famous geneticist at one point, maybe you can dredge up what that means.”
Whatever it is only makes his blood boil,
Angel doesn’t explain it. “You’ve always wanted her.”
And his fists curl,
“You can’t have her.”
And the Atma surge,
“So service me.”
And Agni roar.
-
Heat sees the Junkyard everywhere and doesn’t know how, in a world that’s dry and slick and bright, so goddamn fucking bright even where the black sun doesn’t reach. The glass walls are Mantra grids. The ward is Muladhara with white walls and not as many shrines. Samsara’s the Society network, which makes enough sense to hurt.
The EGG’s ground zero. The shape of it, the tracks, everything. If Heat squints he can see the Vanguards in the gaps in the walls. Argilla’s sniping perch is up in the control room, what a joke that is. Serph leads the charge down the plank that leads to the thing itself, gets stalled, Gale’s cover fire isn’t enough and this is just fucking great. She really did build one world in the image of another.
She’s in there talking to God right now. O’Brien always wanted to know what that was like. Heat just wants to walk up to God, grab him by however many heads he’s got and rip them off one at a time.
The sounds are wrong. Instead of rain, wires and sputtering and gas in the walls. The place is cold and if there’s an opposite of soaking wet, this is it. It’s like everything in the room’s been sucked into the machine, all the life and all the noise and all of his attention. Even the tracks on the ceiling and the tubes in the floor all gather there like a Tribe making a last stand.
No wonder. They only take her out to clean it and run tests on her that they can’t without breaking the shell. They haven’t since he got here. He can see her in boxes and on screens. She never says anything aloud but she’s done that…song, thing, at least once, when Cuvier told her to.
Heat walks up to the machine, puts his hands on it, his forehead, his mouth. It’s cold like his gun feels after he’s been Agni, cold like rain.
-
“You’re beginning to understand,” Angel says. Always says.
Heat shoulders off the wall, turns away, keeps walking. “She’s not just your child. She’s a child.” And that means something different, something that makes more questions well up under his knuckles, makes them crack.
“With limited cognitive ability, yes.” Angel’s office sucks the sunlight in through glass thicker than concrete and still manages to cast shadows taller than Heat is, long tracking shadows like Atma on a soft floor that makes no sense. “Humans are dishonest. That’s one of the flaws I always saw in the Junkyard design. You can’t know how hard it is to program duplicity into an AI.”
So she saw what she saw. She lived in walls and masks and talking to people who never really listened.
“But when the demon virus was introduced, well, that improved the very nature of the experiment.”
“Shut up.”
Angel ignores him but gets up from the desk, goes to the windows, hands clasped. “I was much more interested in obtaining information on what would transpire in an effective environment, a realistic one. Emotion is always a factor in decision. It is the most base compulsion of any sentient creature, human or demon of God.”
That’s what—“God’s also a child, isn’t it.”
“Very good,” Angel says. Turns around. Nods but doesn’t smile. “God is vindictive. God is petty. God is angry. God creates things that are, to say the least, imperfect. God is soothed by something as simple as a song.”
“Sera’s God.” Heat says it before he knows it.
“Very good,” Angel says again, stronger, and now that Yaksa smile curls up, now the shadows of the room get into Angel’s face, Angel’s curly black hair. “And Sera is also me.”
Heat snarls.
“So service me.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“We’ve been through this already.”
-
Heat sleeps with his back on the EGG and dreams about O’Brien. He knows what dreams are because of Sera and that he’s having one because he’s in it.
O’Brien’s crawling on his belly because one of his legs is back up in the control room and the other one’s dangling off the ladder that leads there from here. The stripe of blood he leaves is as wide as the plank, drips off both edges and down to the tubes and the wires. He should be dead, maybe he is, but there’s something drawing him to the EGG like everything else in the room. He pulls himself along with his arms, hair sticking to his face. It’s like Heat’s now, blood-colored, not watered down. It’s in his eyes but he knows where he’s going.
He reaches through Heat and does to the EGG what Heat does to the EGG, puts his hands on it, his forehead (takes longer), his mouth (barely gets there). He pulls himself up against it so close that his hand doesn’t just go through Heat, it goes through the shell and the wires and everything that keeps Sera alive and with God.
Heat turns around—the shell’s still there for him but he can see through it. O’Brien’s still pulling himself along, through the tubes that feed Sera until he gets to her. He doesn’t reach through her. He does to her what Heat does to the EGG, his hands in her hair, his arms tangled in hers and the tubes, everything under that a swarming orange mess of blood and inhibitor and his insides, like the poisons but rougher. Sera’s unconscious at first.
When she wakes up, Heat hears it, but O’Brien’s already still and sinking.
When he wakes up, his muscles are tight and the shell’s less cold.
-
“You’re never gonna take her out, are you.”
“We have to, on occasion,” Angel says. “She’d go insane, otherwise.”
“Everyone’s insane.”
“Haven’t you turned out to be the pessimist.” It’s a word Heat doesn’t know, but Angel smiles. “O’Brien was anything but.”
“I’m not him.”
“You aren’t and you are.” Angel slows to look at a window, not out it, at the copies of them that are thin in the glass. “Sera’s the glass. O’Brien’s on the other side. She pulls him in and you’re the result.”
The way she describes it makes him think of the dream, the EGG. “I’m her child.”
Angel stiffens. “There’s a genius geneticist in there after all. Bravo. Bravo, Heat.”
-
They put her in something smaller and white with scanners and dials and pure, piercing light. Heat remembers that from ground zero. She’s never conscious. She’s always asleep. There’s a story about that and Heat hates it.
They throw around words of what to do with her. Can she still talk to God if her brain isn’t whole? Does talking to God actually require a brain? (Heat knows the answer to that but doesn’t say anything, someone else gets there first.) Do they want to risk hurting her for the sake of keeping her?
Agni creeps out when Heat listens too much, burns under his arm and then up through his neck, his cheeks. He tells the person who suggested that what he’ll do if they hurt her any more than they already have.
“This would take away her pain,” Angel says.
“Your pain, you mean. If she’s you.”
“Heat. This is what happens when there’s more to protecting someone than having your arms around her. You run into choices. I understand that you don’t actually remember any of your practitioner ethics but that was one of them. Choice.”
“She’s not—”
“She’s God,” Angel says. “It’s not as if I can do anything to her without her consent.”
-
It’s supposed to happen. So Sera wants to forget. Heat still doesn’t comprehend it all but if it makes him want to tear everything he sees to shreds it’s probably not—
They put her back in the EGG because they want the sun to rise and not kill them all. The thought of it killing them all isn’t a bad one. It makes the shell warmer where Heat’s pressed into it, still, trying to find how O’Brien got in there and held her. Maybe he has to be dead. Maybe he has to stop listening. Maybe she has to want him there.
-
“She’s your child,” Heat says, “but she isn’t like you.”
Angel smiles. “Service me.”
“Burn in Hell.”
“Exactly,” Angel says.
--
--
.