Rise in Revolution (Chapter Fifty-Nine)
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saladloveChapter list: https://tanadin.dreamwidth.org/650.html
World map: http://tanadin.deviantart.com/art/Kaldri
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Duos
Street 3, Sector TZI. April 12, 2272. Time instance 842N.
“You’re sure you don’t remember anything?” Geluu persisted.
“I’m sure.” Shawn crossed his arms. “Cataclysm flew overhead, and then I was waking up to you guys. There weren’t any zombies or iced cyborgs before, and there were after.”
“And Matt?”
“Last I knew he was getting shot.” Shawn shivered. “I don’t know if he made it. I don’t know if he’s dead or what. I don’t know what happened.” He spun the bracelet around his wrist in anxious circles. Geluu, Geek, and Tac had been quizzing him over what had happened the previous day, and he had no freaking clue. He had managed to escape them, for awhile, but Geluu had found him and insisted upon talking to him.
Geluu sighed and nodded. “My only guess is that Cataclysm was radiating so much negative energy that it hit your more vulnerable core and made you temporarily lose control of your mental faculties and reasoning.”
“Wow. Fun.”
“On a slightly more interesting note, it seems like you can raise the dead, which could be useful.”
“They’re just corpses that follow my orders, Geluu. They creep me out and have no mind of their own.”
“No,” Geluu said carefully, “but they can bolster our numbers. Think about it. More meat shields that detract from the number of regular people dying each battle. Where a person would normally die, someone already gone takes their place.”
“No.” Shawn crossed his arms, a shiver going down his spine. “No. I won’t do that. No way. I wouldn’t want...I wouldn’t want some random guy raising my deceased loved ones’ corpses to use as meat shields. I’m not about to do that to other people.”
“This isn’t about your personal morals. It’s about what will get us through this.”
“Yeah, well, we seem to be doing just fine without them.” If I was capable of feeling nauseous, I would. “I won’t raise fucking zombies. I won’t. You can’t make me.” His fingers wrapped around his arms and tightened, trying to relieve some of the building stress about the whole situation and failing.
Fortunately, Geluu nodded, backing down. “I still think that you should but I won’t push you. That will accomplish nothing. Would you rather focus on the ice? I’m impressed that you managed that- almost at the cost of your own life.”
“Do I count as alive?”
“Yes.” Shawn looked at him, surprised at Geluu’s conviction, but he kept going. “Your body might be questionable, but your soul is still very much alive. You’re a living being as much as I am. As much as Tac is. Your life matters just as much as anyone’s in the revolution. Are the cyborgs alive?”
Shawn blinked. “I don’t...know?”
“Yes. They are. As much as some of them try to hide it, their souls are still intact- confused and with no memory of who they were, but they’re still there. They’re not that different from you, Shawn. Caught between life and something else, not what they once were but having no way back and, in their case, no memory of it.
“Those cyborgs are just as valuable as a normal human life. So are you. So stop thinking you aren’t and focus your damn magic.”
“I didn’t intentionally almost die!”
“No, but you’ll reach that point again if you don’t practice. That was a lot of ice magic out there. I don’t know how you got past their thrat detection systems, and I suppose I’ll never know considering that everyone there either doesn’t remember or is a bit too dead to tell us.”
A memory surfaced in Shawn’s mind, a memory of something that Nine had mentioned, once, in passing. “They’re dead, but they might still have information for us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cyborgs keep a video log of everything that happens to them. If any of them are functional enough for Xela to hook up to-”
“-she could access the log and see what happened! That’s brilliant! That’s the kind of thinking a spellcaster needs, and dammit if it isn’t useful in a revolution too. Come on! Let’s find her and see if she can connect to a cyborg!”
“Uh, Geluu?”
“What?”
“It’s daytime. She’s probably asleep and, if she isn’t, she’ll burn to a crisp.”
“...Oh. Right. Vampire. Okay, fine, I guess we’ll wait until nightfall.” Geluu rolled his eyes. “Inconvenient.”
“Very.”
~~~
Emma snapped awake at the sound of metal on the floor of the workshop, head jerking up and eyes searching the darkness for the source. Her ears rang with the sound of what was possibly the strangest set of footsteps she had ever heard.
Step. Shreeeee-clank.
“KYIR!”
Step. Shreeeee-clank.
“KYIR, YOU ASSHOLE!”
Cataclysm’s eye blinked open and he sat up straighter in his feet, looking confused at why Emma was snuggled against him for a moment before shaking it off and looking around. “What’s happening?”
“WHERE THE HELL IS-” a loud crashing sound- “KYIR?”
“Neves?”
“FUCK YOU.”
Cataclysm gently pushed Emma off of his lap to stand on her own before getting to his feet, kneeling down and helping Neves up from where he had fallen. “What happened?”
“Leg locked up,” Neves snarled. “Can barely walk.”
Cataclysm took a deep breath and bellowed, “KYIR!”
He’s surprisingly loud for someone so short, Emma thought, then grinned to herself. Then again, so am I.
It took her several seconds to realize how that could be taken the wrong way and was privately glad she hadn’t stated her observation aloud.
“KYIR!”
“Other people are trying to sleep in this building, call back when it isn’t ass o’clock in the morning,” Jase’s voice snapped from the other room.
“It’s important!”
“Sleep is important. Whoever it is can wait until morning. Crash on the couch. Shut the fuck up.”
Cataclysm looked at Neves helplessly. “Not really much I can do. There’s no arguing with Jase.”
“Bullshit. I’ll argue with her.”
“No, you won’t,” Emma said quickly, stepping forward and shaking her head. “I don’t want to be in the building when that happens. Just sleep on the couch.”
Neves complained the entire way over to the couch, and complained louder when Cataclysm set him down and started leaving.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
“Bed. To sleep.”
“You seemed just fine out here before!”
“You weren’t here and complaining before.”
Emma laughed at that, seeing Neves’ robotic eye turn to face her in the darkness. “You’re an asshole.”
“I know,” Emma said cheerfully. She started to step forward in order to follow Cataclysm, but hesitated, stepping back again. I should probably not follow him to bed. That would be weird and...yeah. “I’ll...see you tomorrow, I guess, Cataclysm.”
“Oh.” He sounded guilty. “Um. Right. Tomorrow.”
Emma made her way outside, leaning against the door once it was shut and closing her eyes for a moment.
Tanadin would question why she was getting back so late- they usually shared a room temporarily to preserve space- and she wasn’t sure she wanted the prying. Assuming Tanadin was in, anyway. Emma glanced around but found no way to tell the time other than the sky, and she had no idea whether the moon was rising or setting. Usually she was back before midnight, which could be in an hour or could have been awhile ago.
...Although, she hadn’t shown up the previous night. That had been concerning, but not unduly so- elementals could go for longer periods without sleep, and she was probably dealing with revolution leader nonsense.
Still, it was enough to drive Emma to make her way back to the room they shared and knock carefully on the door before entering. It was strange to her not to have to use her ID to open the doors, but they had fried the locks fairly quickly due to how horribly inconvenient they were. Emma felt her pocket, noting that her ID was still there. Habit, I guess.
As she pushed open the door, the first thing she noticed was that the room was dark. She glanced over to Tanadin’s bed and, seeing it lacking in her friend, flipped on the light. A cursory glance confirmed that she was alone and she shut the door. She sat down on her bed and glanced at the clock, frowning. 3:48. It was unlike Tanadin to be out this late, especially for two nights in a row. She drummed her fingers on the bed before getting up again, leaving the room and shutting off the light.
She was worried, dammit, and she knew how Tanadin was.
~~~
Tanadin stirred slightly in her sleep, eyes opening to slits in time to see the door shut. Her tired mind ran that over a few times before filing it away for later, when she was thinking more clearly. The felt the form she was snuggled against tense, prompting her to hug him tighter. They were sitting in the corner, Seven’s back pressed against the wall and Tanadin curled against him. His arms shifted to pull her closer, a mumbled reassurance quelling the spike of anxiety that formed at the open door.
How did I get here? Tanadin wondered, racking her brain for the memories. She was tired, and yet, the confusion pulled her away from the tempting warmth of sleep. As consciousness flooded back to her, the memories revealed themselves.
The previous day had been hell, she remembered. She tensed and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. They had lost a lot of rebels, a decent chunk of them cyborgs. She, herself, had almost died with an anti-magic pulse to the chest and a three thousand unit’s gun pointed at her head.
She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten out of that one, but she dismissed it. She had.
The rest of the day had been bad, recovering from the battle and making a speech with Nine, counting the dead and helping the wounded. That night she had been unable to sleep, incapable of sitting still- flashes of images, from that battle and those previous, haunting her mind. Anxiety and fear had tumbled in a familiar cycle, a rut in her mind, a beaten path through her thoughts and emotions that caused her heart to race and blood to pound. She had been tempted to switch forms, but that would be no better, lighting up her anxiety like a beacon and changing the fearful sensations instead of removing them.
She had stumbled into Seven and had just started crying when he asked what was wrong. It wasn’t exactly her most noble or smoothest moment, but it was her reaction, it was always her reaction when it all became too much.
He had hugged her, then, trying to reassure her that it would be okay in his awkward and socially inept way, and damn him, it worked. When she had shown no signs of leaving, he had pulled her off into a secluded section of the control center, sitting down in the corner and holding her in a silent, reassuring vigil until morning. They hadn’t spoken of it, other than a quiet thanks from Tanadin, before continuing about their business the next day.
She hadn’t slept, but it made her feel better as she threw herself into her work the following day, burying her worries and anxiety in things that taxed her mind as she planned with Nine and aided wherever she could. Then the sector slowed at the coming of night, and her mind was free to travel down those well-worn paths again. The tightening, the shivering, the helpless feeling in every tissue and every fiber of her being, driving into her spirit and making it curl inwards and away from the world.
She sought Seven out, then. Not consciously, but in the unfamiliar sector of TZI, it was the only safe haven she knew. It wasn’t like a kirinax to seek the comfort of a mortal, but Tanadin was seemingly more mortal than most other full kirinax, and damn her anyways, she liked him and there was nothing she could do to calm herself down without him, not at this stage.
He hadn’t even looked surprised when she walked right up to him and hugged him tightly, shaking from the effort to not just disintegrate from the stresses tearing her apart. They had returned to the corner and, somehow, she had slept.
She quietly wondered whether or not Fan would tell everyone what she had seen when she peeked in through the door. For her, this was like finding a gold mine.
Tanadin sighed and shut her eyes.
She could deal with it in the morning.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-04 11:03 pm (UTC)“What do you mean?”
“Cyborgs keep a video log of everything that happens to them. If any of them are functional enough for Xela to hook up to-”
“-she could access the log and see what happened! That’s brilliant! That’s the kind of thinking a spellcaster needs, and dammit if it isn’t useful in a revolution too. Come on! Let’s find her and see if she can connect to a cyborg!”
Wow so Nine mentioning in passing about deleting memory footage of Geek and Vel'kex 'catching up' comes into play to have some tactical use, nice.
Emma snapped awake at the sound of metal on the floor of the workshop, head jerking up and eyes searching the darkness for the source. Her ears rang with the sound of what was possibly the strangest set of footsteps she had ever heard.
Step. Shreeeee-clank.
“KYIR!”
Step. Shreeeee-clank.
“KYIR, YOU ASSHOLE!”
IT'S IIRKOLAV CROSSING OVER STORIES!!
“Leg locked up,” Neves snarled. “Can barely walk.”
Nope just Neves.....XD
He’s surprisingly loud for someone so short, Emma thought, then grinned to herself. Then again, so am I.
Loud things are in small packages? XD
“I know,” Emma said cheerfully. She started to step forward in order to follow Cataclysm, but hesitated, stepping back again. I should probably not follow him to bed. That would be weird and...yeah. “I’ll...see you tomorrow, I guess, Cataclysm.”
Yup falling asleep snuggling on the couch is one thing, following him up to his bed is an entirely different matter XD
Tanadin stirred slightly in her sleep, eyes opening to slits in time to see the door shut. Her tired mind ran that over a few times before filing it away for later, when she was thinking more clearly. The felt the form she was snuggled against tense, prompting her to hug him tighter. They were sitting in the corner, Seven’s back pressed against the wall and Tanadin curled against him. His arms shifted to pull her closer, a mumbled reassurance quelling the spike of anxiety that formed at the open door.
The start of Tanaven? XD
She quietly wondered whether or not Fan would tell everyone what she had seen when she peeked in through the door. For her, this was like finding a gold mine.
Fan now has two sets of couples to talk about XD
no subject
Date: 2016-10-05 01:19 am (UTC)-Observing Anon
no subject
Date: 2016-10-05 01:25 am (UTC)Also Kyir would take one look at Iirkolav's leg and immediately want to take it apart to find out how it works.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-05 10:02 pm (UTC)"AAAH CYBORG"
"WHAT THE FUCK IS A CYBORG AND WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT"
"IM AN AVEN"
"WHATS AN AVEN"
no subject
Date: 2016-10-05 11:13 pm (UTC)-Observing Anon
no subject
Date: 2016-10-06 08:12 pm (UTC)Iirkolav points at RiR Tanadin
"You." Stands in front of Blame. "SCREW YOU"
Dissapears.
Everyone: WTF was that.
Kyir; I like him.