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all of a sudden you're a hostage to things you thought you wanted
( open for messages, action, overflow. )
( open for messages, action, overflow. )
( open for messages, action, overflow. )
( open for messages, action, overflow. )
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[ Quiet, gentle -- cool like Elan's fingers against Four's skin. He pretends to have misunderstood Four's intentions and takes the other's hand in both of his. If Four lets him, the hand that already clasped Four's will turn it, hold it still at the wrist as the other carefully peels the glove away. Permet is dreadfully beautiful for how it pulses in the lines and wrinkles at the surface of Four's palm. Together like this, even in the pale light of Four's bedroom, Elan can tell -- the other's fingers are longer, more delicate; Four's whole hand gives the impression of being slightly smaller than Elan's own. The contact is burning him but it doesn't matter. If Four stays still, Elan will trace the fleshy pad just below Four's thumb with his index finger. Four should be able to see how red it becomes; but instead of drawing his finger away, Elan will add another.
And if Four refuses him: Well, he'll press and rub the hand that had been holding Four's with his free one, as if putting some feeling back into it -- or prolonging the pain.
Why? Elan doesn't know. His first iteration was botched, and he felt nothing. His second iteration botched himself, and he felt nothing. His third did -- such a good job, sometimes a better one than Elan, and he felt... next to nothing, when he'd heard how his exit interview had gone; when Three had finally, after a life's exertion, fallen to pieces. Just a blip of understanding, the researcher had said, and a deluge of data -- then gone. Unsalvageable. The next should conserve his strength.
(Elan supposes that wing of the research committee's responsible for Peil's decision against rolling the clones out in parallel. Why wasn't he consulted about this? Why isn't he consulted about anything?)
Elan knows that if he gives Four any more than what's already been said, the other's likely to deflect, to latch onto whatever Elan adds and bear them both away from his initial request. That, too, is for Elan's own sake. He still feels nothing. In spite of how raw his skin has become, the sweat collecting at his hairline, his heartbeat -- less noticeable against that dull permet sting (or its echo) -- he insists to himself: He just wants to be surprised, to (see himself) break character. To resist vicariously, retrospectively. To extract just a bit more authority. To feel less gratuitous, less alone. ]
no subject
— that he tries to avoid moments like this.
stillness to put statues to shame, four watches his point of new origin remove the glove, watches his fingertips grow red and raw with a promising burn, watches the glide of them along his own palm afire with permet and the weakening constitution of its vessel. he feels it, the sting of cold cutting through the heat like a single arrow flung through the eye of a needle.
an attempt to read elan's face is as laughable as it is hopeless. four can't even see properly to begin with at this point, vision spotty in a way that reminds him of his beginnings with peil. it takes him longer than it ever would have before to withdraw his hand, shaking violently. a knee-jerk part of him suggests apologizing, while another part demands prolonged silence. still another part is too messy, makes chaos of four's neatly stored boxes of extraneous thoughts and feelings. all of the rooms of closed doors find themselves flung open, keyless and foreign even though they belong to him.
something is unraveling.
in another timeline, a witch from mercury pulls at the thread which is somehow four's labyrinth, minotaur, and way out all working against each other, the liminal space where neither fiction nor reality will do. in this one, it is elan ceres himself. the red of a dead star unwound to form a path but for what? elan ceres asked him a question. elan ceres offered him something. there are enough rote ways to reply. yet four can muster none of them.
the hand he reclaimed curls against his own chest, the room so unpleasantly full of his breathing that he wishes he could get it under control or just let go. don't notice me. it was easy to tell himself that was the most benign way to coast through this legal identity borrowing. simple. to call it a tactic rather than a personal preference. a want. four slumps forward, from crouch to all but kneeling, his other palm flat on the floor to keep himself from collapsing the rest of the way. if only elan ceres would leave.
because four will be fine.
until he's not.
it doesn't matter anyway does it?
there are others.
why he had asked and he wonders at the same time that he has no idea what elan ceres wants of him when he's been pushed to this point. would admitting that he wants...
...
...no.
even thinking it more clearly would be too much.
once, four's hair was longer. darker. he wore glasses. his frame was even slighter. once, four put his memory to dedicated use because physical books were nowhere to be seen in the conflict torn part of earth he came from. remembering none of this, four only knows his image as that of the man in front of him. peripheral vision shows the familiar nondescript shoes — expensive in that they are nondescript but undoubtedly made just for him, and clean. could it truly just be boredom that brought him here? is there any point in four of all "people", wondering these things?
his limbs feel impossibly heavy, and a sigh traps itself in his chest, swarmed by the strangle of other breaths vying for enough time and space to do four any good. his mind is as much a creature of passivity and habit though: if i can just wait...
until elan ceres leaves. until it's over. until.
to fight against the threat of passing out, four bites his tongue until he tastes blood, and it's true that sometimes the simplest fixes are the most effective; it works, despite its crudeness. no words come to him, but even if they did he isn't sure he could speak properly. the permet flares across his collarbone beneath the uniform, spreads up his neck and blooms in his cheeks.
when the roiling nausea from before resurges, it's instinct to curl on the floor with his head tucked, bare hand shoved against his mouth. his body convulses, a slender grotesqueness that seems as disgusting as it is practiced; the controlled sickness of someone who has done this before, and after four swallows, he gasps against his own palm. the heat of it matches with how it grows everywhere else, and there's no relief for managing to not vomit all over elan ceres' shoes or well pressed pants. even if four were completely alone, he would have held it in.
because...
...?
he shivers, head cloudy.
subtle: the permet in his hand is a touch less bright.
less subtle: his breaths still too loud and too fast. incongruous.
and there's the errant, automatic thought: this would probably be decent data, if he were back at peil's labs. )
it's sensitive narcissism hours
The extent to which his clones suffer, degenerate, are pushed to breaking point until they die or are made to die -- isn't unknown to Elan. Until today, his knowledge of it has come in the form of hearsay; reports shorn of those details that aren't pertinent to Peil's missions; numbers that he supposes their researchers take to be countdowns. The strange feeling that followed his third iteration's execution coils up in him again now, as Four wrenches his hand away from Elan's, brings it to his chest, his mouth, collapses and writhes on the floor in front of him. The sting that's left in Elan's hands pales in comparison to what permet, as a substance, has done and continues to do to the other's body, the burns it's left on his skin a far cry from that awful flush covering Four's face. And all the while, Elan watches -- surprised, as he sees him(self) break character, convulsing; as Four resists -- something; as the gulf between their respective positions grows wider -- or so it might seem.
For a brief moment, Elan has the horrifying thought that this -- Four's breakdown -- could have happened anywhere; could have been seen by people, important people; could have been timed by Peil just so, kept in reserve as a playing chip for a future in which they might wish to consolidate their control --
But that flight of paranoia's a mere distraction from the distress he's witness to now, a wretchedness Elan has -- would -- never let himself feel and that frightens him to his core. Abstractly, he'd known he could only pay for his own longevity in other persons' lives. He'd hardly given it another thought when he'd hacked that "S" on the Peil Grade's piloting evaluation into a "C" -- just in case. That was before he'd been made privy to Peil's life-sucking mobile suit technology, before the duels for Miorine's hand were instituted, before the perverted brainiacs at the company had seen a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in these circumstances to explore what they had sold to its executives as "human enhancement." Elan had shrugged and signed off on it all. He should have realized -- it would be harder to countenance suffering when it bears your own face.
Elan underestimated Peil. His clones, too, could eventually be used as a vector for control, manipulation, blackmail. Granted, they probably never expected Elan to bother with them, so -- Elan's done this to himself. (Distantly, he remembers there are three more of him, each superior to the last. Five isn't a threat. Six's resemblance to himself is uncanny, but his abilities are so far unremarkable. Seven. Seven is the problem. Seven, when they're done with him, might --)
It's Four's ragged breathing that finally snaps Elan out of his thoughts and back into the other's bedroom. He notices blood at the corner of Four's mouth and that, more than anything else, tells Elan that his request to Four -- the one that had set all this off -- is meaningless. Four will die regardless of what he wants. (And yet a little voice inside Elan reminds him, that's true of us all, isn't it?)
Again, Elan's hand seems to have moved of its own accord. He sits with his back against the desk's drawers now, eyes trained on the blankness of the wall ahead, as his fingers -- some less feeling than others -- thread through Four's hair. When he finally speaks, the emotion in his voice disgusts him. ]
We're both such suckers, aren't we?
[ Yes. Elan Ceres gets (almost) everything he wants. But he is still gratuitous; still, probably, alone. ]
elan ceres the solar eclipse
later, four will think about it. he'll start to have questions about the rest of that which makes up the world he knows and serves and look at his handbook and consider the history of messages, less sporadic than would be negligible. what is it you wanted? what did you mean "both" of us? why did you come here?
later.
but now, elan ceres speaks. his words travel the minimal space between four and himself but the space and time is elongated, perceived as sound underwater. the disconnect helps four. if he were "well", he might flinch back from his touch. on the threshold between consciousness and lack thereof, his only movement cages itself in his inhales and exhales that still seem to struggle to disappear. not wanting the slight weight of elan ceres' fingers in his hair to be comforting does not automatically void it as such. inconvenient. frustrating. confusing. maybe he did not want to admit it out loud — not only that there might be a part of him that truly wants to live, but to admit that someone could do that for him.
would.
life and non-life is easier in boxes that stay closed but that's not the nature of reality.
despite four's intentions, elan ceres will feel when the remaining threads of tension collapse out of him. his last coherency is the discordant sense of shocking cold, the quieting of the permet which fades until his wrists and hands are the only places it glows. )