Chapter Text
Spider slams his fists against the glass and screams, louder than Kiri's ever heard him, loud enough to make her ears twitch. He rears back and hits again, again, face twisting with hate and fury and terror in a way that looks impossibly wrong on him, a mask stitched awkwardly, painfully, into his skull.
"Kid's completely feral," the Sky Man sitting at the desk says, tapping at his computer screen. She can see images flashing by--Spider staring hollowly into a camera, a shot of the Sky Woman whose picture lives above his bed, side-by-side pictures of his father's face in two different bodies. "He thinks he's one of them."
Feral. It makes her skin crawl, even more than the contempt in them. Spider's not feral, none of them are feral, just because he dresses and behaves differently and wants them to fucking let him go doesn't make him some kind of thing, how dare they--
Something shatters in her hand, warm liquid splashing across her palm.
"Shit." Colonel Quaritch looks down at the broken coffee cup, shaking dripping pieces into the nearest trash can. He hadn't even heard or felt the fucking thing break.
"You all right, sir?" the tech asks, blinking up in that twitchy little way all the techs seem to have around him.
"Fine, fine. Still adjusting, I guess." He grabs the offered towel and wipes his hands, rolling his shoulders in an attempt to head off the headache that's suddenly started to pulse at the base of his queue.
The kid starts trying to break the window with the chair again and Quaritch sighs. At this rate, he'll be lucky if he doesn't end up with a full-blown migraine.
Kiri gasps, eyes flying open. Her siblings crouch in front of her, three sets of wide yellow eyes, gathered in the little corner of High Camp they'd snuck off to when Mom and Dad talking about leaving had become too much to bear.
"Did you See him?" Tuk asks, low and breathless. "Did you See Spider?"
"I--he's okay. He's alive. I don't..." Kiri shakes her head; she can't talk about the way Spider looked, how terrified he was in that bare little box. How easy it had been to slip into the skin of the man who'd put him there, the monster who'd hurt them all, to blend with him until their bones were the same.
She sags and her siblings gather around her, pull her into a tight hug. The absence of who's missing from their cluster is palpable, but she's grateful for their arms anyway, the weight of their bodies a much-needed pressure on her aching, oversensitive skin.
"We'll get him back," Lo'ak whispers. "We'll kill them all if we have to. We'll get him back, Kir." She can feel his heart beating fast and wild.