You stand up on shaky legs. Your hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Your shoulders half-hunched. You don't feel very intimidating but, really, that only makes sense because all things considered you don't
look very intimidating either. You're just Some Guy. Some Guy with a slightly bulkier than normal build hidden beneath basic, generic gear. Some Guy with a Nothing Special Sword huddling and hiding behind a mask. You look at Glowworm, still chained to his chair. He's stopped struggling and is currently doing his best to bore holes in the back of Jiaolong's head. The digital patch over his eye is dark. The sphere beneath darker still. Jiaolong pats you on the shoulder. Like he hadn't been seconds away from probably putting a bullet in your head. He presses his head close to yours and you fight down the urge to flinch away from the contact. The sudden intimacy.
"Hey," his voice is barely a murmur, "You're going to do just fine, alright? Worst comes to worst knock him around some, give him a good show. I've got him just about where I want him and all I need someone to be spooky at him. Anything goes wrong and I'll be there to pull you out. Okay?"
Your tongue feels like it's swollen two sizes too large for your jaw. You nod, shakily, not really trusting yourself to speak. And then he's giving you a familiar squeeze and this time you do flinch but it doesn't really matter because he's giving you a little push and you're stepping over the threshold and it feels like you've been shoved out on stage. The spotlight trained on you. The audience waiting on you. Glowworm is looking at you, looking right at you and the big vault doors grind shut behind you. Locking with all the finality of a jail cell door.
The air in here has a powdery, almost antiseptic quality. Like the empty space has been plastic wrapped. You look at Glowworm. He spreads his arms as far as he can, as if to say "well what is it?"
Packaged air pulled through your filters. Filling your chest. You are a river. A boiling, bubbling, cauldron of steam and embers. There's a choice, right there, at your fingertips. The thought of it terrifies you.
Aha, but it seems to whisper, unbidden, if it terrifies
you what will it do to him?
And you have no answer, nothing that'll stop the tightness beneath your skin. The aching cramp that's been building and building at the edge of sensation for hours. In that moment you want nothing more than to just...
Let it out.
Just a little.
"...Can I tell you a little about myself?" Your voice is warm, confident, alien. Your words, but you can feel the Drake's tongue, threaded through the your own. Its thoughts pulsing through your brain like the ebb and flow of a slow-kindling fire. You reach up to unhook the mask. It comes away with the click of buckles, the rustle of straps. You runs your fingers through your hair. Shaking it back out again. Glowworm snorts, doesn't even say anything but you can feel the absolute
contempt radiating off of him. You like that. You think you approve.
"Heh, fair enough. I've," you turn the faceplate over and over in your hands, "I've always liked
masks. Always liked the idea of just being someone else. Being faceless. I know you runners look down at that. You like standing out. You like the loud colors, all the flashy outfits and the cool names. And you...what do you call them? All those bland little parts -the people heh- who work for the corps? Wageslaves? Wageslaves. Like we're only there because someone's holding the leash. Like if we weren't chained to our desks we'd bolt out the door and never come back. But I liked what I was. Who I was."
You catch a glimpse of your face in the curve of the plate. You're wearing a small, sad, smile.
"It was better than where I came from. Better than being the fuckup I used to be. I used to think that all I was good at was ruining things and making people unhappy. Everything was always so fragile around me and I was so heavy, so clumsy. I'd break things without meaning to. And then I'd break more things trying to fix it. Until all that was left was broken trash. I'd...I'd try you know? Do my best. But it's hard to measure up to the ideas people have."
There's a long, long pause.
"What the hell are you playing at Anglo?" Glowworm's head is tipped back, his head half-fallen baring an unruly shock of hair and exposing his tattoos. You can see surgical lines stitched in his scalp. The scarring pattern of neural implants. Glossy and shiny in the sterile light.
"Mm?"
"You've never done this before have you?"
"Heh, nah. Not really." You say. Glowworm exhales, your hear his chain rattle then pull taunt. He gives it a sour look. Hand halfway to the bridge of his nose.
"Fuck man, send back in Jiaolong. Send in the
bitch-bot. I'd rather have a semi-professional then whatever, uh, this shit is. You're pissy that I'm not taking this seriously? Fine." His chains clatter as he tries to shrug, "Made your point. I'll be serious as you like. Just get me someone who's actually interested in talking shop than telling me about dear old daddy or mommy-the-streetwalker or whatever your fucking middle-class sob-story is."
You consider for a second, tilting your mask in your hands. Looking at your own reflection. "Nah."
"Well okay then. Guess we're just going to sit here and listen to you ramble."
"...I'm not rambling, heh." You sound mildly offended, but you're bemused than actually hurt. The feeling in your throat isn't entirely unpleasant. "I'm trying to make you understand. What this is. Why this is happening. I," you mull the words over, picking and choosing, "I'm good at all kinds of things now. I
want things now. I want to know things,
feel things. It was like I was living in a world of paper and I was terrified of pushing anything too far. Worried that something would break or rip and tear. But now part of me wants to light it all up. Set a spark and watch it go. You know what that feels like don't you? I know you do. Information terrorist. Hactivist. Sure you had your morals and your code or whatever. But part of you just liked seeing those big, monolithic, things crack and crumble and fall. Watch all the high society types eat each other alive."
Your mask falls to the floor, crinkling the plastic beneath it. Your jacket slips to the ground beside it in a pile of reinforced fabric. The undershirt peeled away from your flushed flesh, pouring all silky and sleek onto the ground. Baring warm skin to the cool air of the cell. Glowworm's looking at you warily. Eyes narrowed down to nearly slits. Watching you. Gauging you. It's the kind of look you'd give an alley dog.
"You're just fucking unstable aren't you?"
"Yeah," you admit, rubbing the back of your neck and grinning a shy little smile, as your eyes darken, turn black, golden irises adrift in a sea of oil. Darkened veins bulging around the sockets "a little. But don't blame me."
Scales swimming against the skin, a flash of reptilian flesh dimpling the parchment thin membrane. It coils across your ribs. It circles around your chest. A rubbery creaking, latex rubbing against latex, your body straining. Your voice drops an octave. Bleeds into a raw, rasping, growl. Some inhuman sound, wet and hacking, torn from the depths of your chest.
"Blame my upbringing."
Walk towards him. Lips peeling back, porcelain spilling from your mouth. Little bloody ingots of enamel that fall like rain; bursting into embers at your feet. Walk towards him as he struggles and strains away; desperate little whines escaping his mouth. Your muscles snapping and tensing, bone pressing against the caul. Your spine a mountain range of spikes and spurs. Circle around behind him, lacing an arm around his neck. Golden scales crawl across the surface in psychotic mosaics. The skin cracking, splitting apart. Charring in the heat of some invisible fire, crumbling to flakes of ash in his lap.
"I don't know what you did." A soft murmur, right in his ear. You can taste the alkaline fear. Feel the clever retorts choke in his throat.
"I don't really care." Your tongue splits like a banana peel, ragged petals of bitter cinders spreading as something longer slithers free. Tasting the air. You reach up with your free hand. You dig your shining claws into your cheek, beneath your cheek. Hooking them into the false meat, the mask, the rubbery membrane.
Ripping it away in one, long, broad, swathe that stretches from ear to ear. Freeing golden jaws. Exposing dripping fangs beneath a ragged tear. Your breath rolls hot and wet against his cheek, reeking of carrion and burning meat. What's left of your face is loose and sagging, wrinkled and puffy, an ill-fitting suit draped over what lays beneath.
"But I've never eaten a person before. I know dragons do. I almost want to try it. You don't need both your arms." You bare rows of curving butcher's knives. They shine in the light. "Do you?"
You open your mouth wide. A snake-like yawn. So wide he can see down your charred, parched, throat. Glowworm is screaming. Screaming in the back of his throat, lips pressed together. He's scared. All you had to do was scare him. But you're already here and it'd be easy, so easy. So easy to just take one, single...
Bite.
Your PDA rings. You freeze. Glowworm's shoulder in your mouth, trickles of blood running beneath the punctured fabric. Your eyes roll in your head. Flick down, searching for the noise. Glowworm is softly sobbing to himself. Your spine creaks, bristling in frustration. You finally get the right pocket and pull your PDA from your pants.
[EXEMPLARY PERFORMANCE.
DO NOT EAT HIM.]
You groan. Your frustration a palpable thing.
[NO.]
But you-
You want-
...What are you doing?
There's a moment where the world turns watery. Where everything swirls and spirals and breaks apart. You can feel the Drake pouting. You just feel sick. Stomach roiling. Another man's blood on your tongue. You spit his shoulder out; you barely nicked him, there's nothing on your tongue but his jacket. But he's nearly insensate. And you? You feel like retching. Your stomach twisted into a solid knot, bile burning its way up your chest. You feel the false flesh returning as you gather your clothes. Binding you up, locking you down, and you welcome it. Because you can feel the beast beneath your skin: hot and eager and racing, so close to breaking free. Greedy, the one narrow sip, one snatched gasp of fresh air not nearly enough to satisfy it.
You're just shrugging your coat back on as the door opens. Jiaolong looks from you to the wreck of Glowworm. You see his eyebrows slowly rise. Genuine surprise, he didn't see-
Didn't see you-
Your mind seizes up, as twisted and tangled as knotted, rotted, rope. You barely hear what he says.
"Well okay then. I-"
"Need some air."
You shoulder past him. Sense more than see him tense up for a second, fraction of a second, before letting it go. Voices drift up behind you but you don't pay them any mind. You don't care. The vault door cycles shut again. Fenrir and Nyx watch you work the secondary shutter open. Neither tries to stop you. You roll under on your hands and knees the moment the door's cleared the ground. Standing, rising, in a dark hall.
Breathe. You just need to breath. Just need a second to catch your breath.
It's fine right? It's fine. You didn't eat him, that's all that matters. You wouldn't have. Even though y-you
Wanted to. Even though you wanted too.
You feel the Drake splayed on your back, feel it bearing you down. A reptilian weight that presses through your clothes and seeps into your skin. Grinding together bone and gristle and gut. Like it's pinned to you. Like it's nailed to you. It's purr a lazy drone in your ear as you stumble to one of the windows. Can't crack it, can't trigger the alarm. But you can press your forehead against the cool glass. Enjoy the chill.
The street below you is empty. The guardbox that covers the gate still lit by the warm, yellow glow. You watch the figure behind the frosted glass for long, long minutes. See them lift a blurry thermos to their lips. Hunched over, reading something off their desk. Not a great job, pennies compared to what you make. To what you made. You've never felt such intense envy for a complete stranger.
The rasp of rubber on asphalt. The dark below washed out by electric headlights. You ignore it for a second. Two. Then glance down, curious when you hear the deep, thudding, music.
There's a mix of cars parking on the side of the road. A few sedan type things. An absolute beast of an SUV that looks like its mother was military surplus and its father a fucking freight train. A motorcyle or two. Doors are opening. Helmets coming off. Gaudy hair, curving mohawks and sculpted spikes and well groomed manes. Trendy clothes; tight jackets and sleek pants, big, billowing, coats. Everything patterned black and blue, from dyed hair down to the casings of their guns.
...Oh.
You lean off the window.
Oh.
There's a buzz from your pocket. You fumble for your PDA, all but clawing it out of your pants. "Esser. "
"It's Jiaolong," his voice is clipped and curt, "King in Yellow said there was a breach."
"Y-yeah there's," your eyes flicking from the cars to the guardbox and back again. They're milling in the street. There's no military precision just a big, rowdy, group of friends. You can hear their laughter from here. "Two dozen. This side of the building. Gangers, they're going to roll through the front."
"Ah." He doesn't swear. You almost wished he would have swore. It would have at least been something familiar. "Nyx is going to punch us a way out on the opposite side, secondary exit plan. Drive she had gives her admin access to the security drones, so she's got plenty of cover. Fenrir's going on the roof; crossing to your side. I need you to tell me if I can move Glowworm. I've interrogated him and gotten a fair bit, could get more but he's slippery. I don't want to chance losing him in the chaos."
You look outside, mask clutched in a half-numb hand. The new arrivals are moving with a purpose, closing fast. You see the shape in the box turning in their direction. Your heart beats heavily in your chest.
Glowworm.
[ ] Advise him to chance moving Glowworm. The decker could get loose. Jiaolong could get hurt. You'll cover them as best you can. But more than that: you don't want to be the one who kills him. Not after what you did.
[ ] Advise him to deal with Glowworm. It's a big pack of people and they're coming right for you. Jiaolong's crew is top-notch but even they'd be hard pressed. This is safer. So just bury it deep down and don't think about it.
The Guard.
[ ] Save him. You don't know him. He doesn't know you. It'll be dangerous. But you're fast and strong and "good at all kinds of things". Remember that?
[ ] Let him die. You don't know him. He doesn't know you. It'll be dangerous. And you're not that fast or that strong; you're just sensible and afraid.
