Chapter Text
The window is open, and here they catch wisps of Haust’s distinctive fragrance on the wind; the rot of leaves, the soil made fat and rich by minerals drawn up by the encroaching rains, the wheat grains and gourds plucked from their stalks. Of a planet preparing to hibernate. Their mother would cook with a foreign spice, here, at this turning of the season.
Their throat clogs with the desire to call out for her.
Their mouth is sewn shut.
“No,” a voice answers this thought. “Your threads were cut. But what of that thing out there?”
Their uncle’s voice, beside them inexplicably. They cannot turn their head– cannot move. Their eyes remain locked firmly onto the treeline through the window. Pine and cedar sway, like metronomes, in the windsong. Their uncle is also looking through the sill, they know.
“Will you be the one? To cut its threads?”
You are dead, they think, mournful at the sound of this long-gone voice beside them.
“Perhaps, once before. Perhaps even still. Or . . . perhaps something in-between. Are you?”
What do you mean?
“Are you the one–”
The trees outside swing with unnatural severity. Surely, they will snap themselves in half at this rate. The breeze floating in through the open sill is a gentle thing, and it carries petrichor in a silken cradle. The cedars rake like clawed fingertips against the sky.
“Are you the one who will carry the bowl?”
They cannot move. The threads between their lips cinch tighter, and it is difficult to breathe.
Beyond the treeline echoes an agonizing howl, metallic and molten in its fury.
Their uncle’s hand rests heavy against the back of their neck, like a noose, and smoke skirts their body as it fills the room and flees the open sill. Their back is overhot as the flames grow closer, but they still cannot move; their body is paralyzed, here, condemned to do nothing but stand and watch.
A tree falls, in the woods. Smoke floods their periphery, and it stings at their eye like needles.
They cannot breathe.
They cannot breathe.
There is too much smoke.
They cannot breathe.
A deafening crash, as the trunk of the tree meets the rotting earth, and Bloodhound jolts back into their hospital bed.
“Revenant?”
The word– name– leaves their un-sutured mouth before their mind is even fully conscious of it. An instinctive thing. A reach for a comfort they were previously unaware of.
They wait, in the interim. Claustrophobic silence stuffs up the room, making everything overhot and unbearable. Faces flicker and meld in ghostly afterimages across their retinas . . . faces they haven’t seen in decades now warping into one, coming back to look at them through the glass of their borrowed welding goggles.
Their head feels overheavy and unsteady upon the pillar of their neck.
A gentle arhythmic ticking beats against the window.
Does it rain, here, so high above the clouds? No . . . it is– these are just more of Hammond’s clever innovations. Synthetic weather patterns upon Syndicate orbital cities. Enrichment for their worker drones and their lab mice. Little miracles to break up the monotonies. To keep their conscripted employees from festering– Zoochosis, a term they recall– to keep the unhappy many from pacing in their cubicles covered in company platitudes.
Pacing, back-and-fro, like–
The door opens–whether it has been seconds or minutes or hours, it matters little–and the scent of ash and oil fill the room.
It does not suffocate them.
“What’s wrong?”
His grousing is a familiar thing; a strange balm against this unexpected burning in their lungs, and the fever they feel beneath their skin.
Their mind still feels . . . too loose . . . as though the grey matter has become unmoored from their skull.
“I thought I heard something,” they admit, feeling rather foolish all of a sudden. Childish. This anxiety died with their youth. Or so they had thought. The sudden reappearance of it rankles them. “It sounded– well . . . I was not sure if I had heard you.”
Him, or something more sinister. An unwelcome omen.
“Oh, yeah. That. Just stubbed my toe outside is all.”
He is cavalier in his dismissal, as always. And they, despite themself, cannot help the amused exhale that follows. Laughter, in as much as they will allow themself.
“I see,” they hum, for lack of a better retort. The once-sharp edges of their tongue now feel dull behind their blunted teeth. Their mouth is full of molars, and they think little of their canines.
They look at him, here in this lull between their exchanges. They study him, as one studies an overly complicated and frustrating book.
“So . . . did you call me in here just to stare at me, or is there some point to your slack-jawed gaping that you haven’t gotten to yet?”
They wonder what it is that has made them imprint on him so; were it that he has no need for sleep, and thus can never be caught unaware? Or that he is the only thing in all of creation that Death has no claim over?
Others can be ambushed, they can be torn asunder, and they can be rendered lifeless hulls; Bloodhound has seen each of these things come to pass, before their very eyes. Flesh and bone and steel and wire all the same. All but him.
“Could you hurry it up? Just ‘cause I’m immortal doesn’t mean I’ve got all day.”
Or . . . perhaps it is the way he understands their pain so intimately, strung up with wires like marionettes on strings, as they are. The way he refuses to coddle them with sympathetic tones and pitying looks–handling them like some half-drowned kitten. They know, should they ever again make it out of this bed, he will not diminish their skill and strength simply because their captors had bested them once before.
Whatever the core answer might be, there is something comforting in all of his sharp edges and unyielding metal. A firm support so sorely needed.
“I suppose this means you have not retrieved my things, as I have asked?”
It is all they can think to say, in the wake of all of this Nothing swirling so pervasive around their hollowed skull. A gnawing fixation, grinding at their flattened teeth; their tactical gear has become them. Without their iconic ventilator, helmet, sonar . . . what are they?
Who are they to become?
“Workin’ on it,” he grunts. Annoyed by his lack of progress, perhaps; he has never taken failure well, within the arena or without. “Got called back to . . . handle somethin’. But the kid and I found a lead.”
“Oh?” They feign the open curiosity he wants them to have, if only to shepherd him to his point a little quicker.
Slowly, he crosses the room to return to his proclaimed chair. His chosen vigil. He drops down into it with his usual grace–or, lack thereof–and once again lifts his legs to cross them at the ankles, pillowing his feet against their stomach.
“Yeah,” he drawls, reaching over to pluck at the cords and cables of their monitors. An oversized cat playing with string. “Gotta say, whoever your buddies are, they sure work fast.”
His arm extends further, stretching the joint of his elbow and every knuckle of his fingers. All in order to reach the stack of brochures on their bedside table. Just to knock them carelessly onto the floor for someone else to clean.
An oversized, annoying cat.
They will not take his baiting. He waits for their hackled snarling; they are no friends of mine, he wants them to say– to rabidly defend with tooth and claw all degree of separation between them and their attackers. But they will not delight him with such a thing. The quiet staring that they level him with is a wolfish thing in nature.
“Is there, perhaps, some point in your ranting that you have not gotten to? What did you find, djöfullvel . . . speak plainly, and quickly.”
His shoulder plates flex apart, and the ball joints of his shoulders begin to extend. Now whose hackles have been raised, they wonder, amused. He never takes kindly to having his own words parroted to him, they have noticed.
His reaction is . . . less rewarding than they would have expected– or had hoped.
Perhaps this is why he so consistently goads and antagonizes everyone he speaks to; perpetually chasing after a satisfactory high that can never be achieved.
What a sad addiction to feed an already sad existence.
“We found a warehouse full of skinsuits. Not one of them had your shit, but they had com chains . . . they’re working in groups. Bouncing cargo between safehouses, always staying on the move. They got orders from someone to complete ‘the assignment,’ but couldn’t tell you what that is . . . whole message is encrypted, and I ain’t the decrypting type of mech. You’ll have to get some other sap to help you with it.”
He wraps an elongated finger around the cord of their bedside phone, and with the barest twitch he sends the entire device clattering to the floor– receiver and all. “That plain enough for you?”
He says it in the equivalent of one breath – one ventilator pulse. His tone is level, as always; crooning and sardonic. But they read between the velveted lines into the language of his body itself. His irritation speaks to them not in tone or vocabulary, but in the tectonic shifting of his chassis.
The cracking of knuckles and grinding of teeth, they have seen it in other people. In humans.
Human . . . that is what he was, once.
Is still?
Revenant can no longer grind his teeth, as it were. But is this what gatekeeps humanity from him?
Is Octavio any less human for losing his ability to twist an ankle that he no longer has?
They do not have answers to such questions. Perhaps no one does.
“It is sufficient,” they answer to him, instead.
He rises from his preferred perch, “Now if you don’t mind, I got a job to finish.” He stops, one step from the door, barely sparing them a cursory glance over his shoulder, “By the way . . . Fitzroy brought you something. Giving a book to a bookworm . . . groundbreaking.”
Their eyes drift, to the tempo of their hospital room’s door sliding shut, down to the firm weight at the foot of the bed that they failed to register until that moment. Their heel beneath the blankets knocks against the haphazardly wrapped gift, and the shadow of a smile pulls at the corner of their still-healing lips.
A box, they would have assumed at first, but now know otherwise.
It is no disappointment to have this surprise stolen from them. No amount of his bitterness and discontempt for life and all those living within it could rob Bloodhound of the simple joy of peeling back paper and layers of too much tape, all composed by the thoughtful hands of a loving friend.
On the cover, a simple illustration of a white mouse. Within, a simple hand-written note:
‘Been on the hunt for this beauty since you told me how your old copy got lost. Sorry it took so long.
Gave it a read myself before I wrapped it up . . . gotta say, mate, not much of a happy experience. Can’t say I understand the appeal much, but maybe you’ll get this old dog to understand, next time we have one of our little talks.
Hope this makes up for being stuck in a room for so long. Suppose this fella knows how you feel.
Cheers, Fusey’
Does it rain, here, so high above the clouds?
No . . . but their vision swims, all the same.