The infirmary under the hushed whispers of the night was an entirely different circumstance for the individuals burdened by sleeplessness, for those who could find little comfort under the guidance of dreams, and for those pursued eternally by nightmarish qualms and shades that wailed and moaned unto their waking world. Too often did eclipses of shadow and darkness cling to the chasm of her heart and soul, wed to the edges of her deeply seeded malice and hate, her anger spun on high and vengeance often illustrated in her eyes from a void of encompassing cyan. Her earlier conversation with Katja spooled through her over and over, exposing a figment of the soul they all were adhered to and bound with, and for the first time in perhaps forever – or a long time rather, if she bothered with the self-reflection – quiet uncertainty compounded her steps and bid Amma to traverse through the hospital wing. A few steps back, appropriate in the distance and respectful to her musings, only one guard shadowed her midnight wonderings, her behavior as of late given to a lax courtesy. She did not bother to inquire about it, her therapy sessions earlier in the evening probing her thoughts and concerns about her teammates, a term she still refused to recognize even after the conclusion of the Trials, and when simply asked why, Amma had declined to answer.
The reality was far more complicated, one she was not ready for.
But, upon the summon of Blackjack’s likeness to her contemplations, she recalled another who was bound to the confines of the hospital like she was. A memory surfaced of those traded words she had heard from other nurses - broken, bleeding, dying. However, in her continued evaluations, Amma had also heard that he had pulled through miraculously and that many of the team had visited him. Her solitary confinement had denied any visitors – not that she would have any, and Amma was just fine with that – but had also denied her permission to visit him on her whims. She paused, head canted, and tried to confirm where he might be located, recollecting back to the jumbled mess of whispers that often carried through the medical staff even when they thought no one was listening. Amma turned left, taking another right at the end of the hall and here her guard spoke:
“Visiting hours are long past, Ms. Cahors.”
“And?” She lanced back, carelessly. “What’s your point? Would you rather wander around this place for another hour or two?” She went further down the medical hall before his door loomed before her, the name she mulled over once, twice before she muttered: “Gilbert, huh.” Amma’s palm ghosted over the door, but then, barely heard and perhaps hushed, were sounds familiar to her on any given night when peaceful rest submitted itself to the darkness within.
“Ms. Cahors –”
Amma spared her guard little acknowledgment before she permitted herself into his room and promptly shut the door at her back, her eyes suspended on Gil lost in the throes of a nightmare. She should have turned about and left, she should have continued her midnight trek and left him to the turmoils of his demons. There was no obligation to be had, one shared smoke did not guarantee the finer dressing of friendship, nor did it permit her to the suggestive confines of his room bathed in leagues of moonlight and shadow.
But, did she care?
No.
Amma does not know what compels her steps otherwise, but she is beholden to his figure all the same, similarly bound in gauze and wrappings and plaster, the machines quieted and disengaged from his person in his restless sleep. She knows what demons lance and canter through her own hellish world, the sorts of cruelty her own mind is capable of, and the memories therein that commit to her agony. Amma can only imagine what ailments he concealed beneath that facade of a fallen star. She does not know what benefit will spin from it, with her palm poised, not quite touching, but hovering still over his arm before she clasps down- her scars aflame with her intention.
“Gil.”
In Gil’s dream, he hobbled barefoot on a mangled ankle, in wet grass between rows of himself, carbon copies that had haunted him since he’d been pulled out of the Trial. At first, it was a slow walk, methodical, careful, only as his injury would allow, but as the way lengthened and escape became less and less clear, his pace quickened, ferried by burgeoning panic and a growing sense of threat, esoteric but very much present. As he gathered his footsteps, so too did the volumes of copies gather around him, and no longer were they static; they began to paw, step, reach out wistful arms that at first were easily brushed off but soon became insistent, urgent in their seizing. The rows became a thronging mass of groping hands and battered flesh, and Gil was running now, breakneck, crashing through limbs and bodies until finally breaching the phalanx and tumbling, tumbling, not wet grass but clinical linoleum and fluorescent lighting giving way beneath him. Hands reached after him; a few limp bodies even toppled over the edge themselves; but otherwise, the copies had been fled from.
When he landed, Gil was dazed and disoriented, his aching body protesting anew and his bones lighting a fresh fire at the base of his leg. He laid on the ground, cold and in pain and alone, for a very long while.
There was…dripping. Faint and distant but ever-so-steady, a constant tapping, something thick and viscous. Gil raised his head, a sluggish, heavy movement made with considerable effort. Off in the distance were pinprick lights flickering in an unfelt breeze.
With every twitch and motion feeling like he bore Atlas’ weight upon his shoulders, Gil pulled himself to all fours, then a knee, then two knees; he knelt for a while, prostrated before the unknown, catching his breath. Then - breaking through the heavens themselves - he stood, and began to walk once more, following the wisps in the dark, chasing the steady drip-drip.
He came up on them quickly, and the flickering lights revealed themselves to be candles, held by further figures, though not of Gil - he recognised these uniforms, these coifs and curls of hair, the armbands and accents. These were PRCU students, and by the dim candlelight he could see that these were Blackjack; each positioned around him, holding their own dancing flame. Lorcán next to Rory next to Haven next to Harper; from Harper to Calliope, then Banjo and Katja and finally Amma. They bowed their heads over their candles, eyes closed, at peace or in stasis or asleep, impossible to tell. The dripping continued, and Gil saw now small pools of wax at each set of feet, collecting from where they fell from the melting stalk, gently flowing over interlaced fingers.
He limped closer, unsure what to do or even who to approach first, if he should approach any of them at all; but as he crept closer he noticed something wrong with their skin. The light didn’t quite hit it right; the luster was off, glistening in a way it shouldn’t. They were still, as well, too still - he’d thought the tremble in the candle’s flames were from their muted breaths but close-up there was no rise and fall of the chest, no inhale-exhale shoulders. They weren’t breathing at all.
He poked Lorcán’s cheek. It was soft, pliable, and when he pulled his finger away the dent remained.
Wax.
He moved around the circle, inspecting each face, prodding arms, hands, foreheads. One after the other, just a wax recreation.
A drip fell from the tip of Amma’s nose as he came to the end of the row. Her…face was melting. Gil looked around. Everyone’s faces were melting. The features softened and began to run, liquefying and spilling to the floor. The rendered wax faces collected with the splashed candle wax and it all began to run together, combining into a greater and greater pool.
Amma’s face was last, slipping from her skull through Gil’s fingers as he desperately tried to mold it back to its half-remembered shape. He turned, watching her features flow into the reservoir of wax that now lay at his feet.
All at once, there was a dull roar; the wax shifted and flowed, forming a crude, vaguely-human facsimile of a face. The mouth opened; the roar got louder, and louder, a cacophony that shook Gil to his bones; and then, just as he was about to slip into the abyssal gullet before him, Amma’s faceless figure seized his arm, and he woke up.
“Gil.”
Gil woke sharply, his arm turning beneath Amma’s grip to seize his own claw upon her skin, feeling unconsciously the ridges of it beneath his fingertips, gently brushing across raised ink and old scars alike.
“You’re going to eat me alive.” He hissed.
And then a fog seemed to clear from his eyes, and he looked Amma in the face properly, letting go of her arm and sitting back.
“Amma?” He said, reconciling his lingering dream with her actual presence. The room was dark, moonlight drifting in through the window and fluorescent bulbs from the hallway pushing an eerie, antiseptic glow through the crack in the door, illuminating Amma’s face - Amma’s mercifully present, solid face - in profile. He rubbed his eyes, trying to shake the sleep that threatened to claw him back down into dreams of wax maws. “It’s late. Or early. Can’t sleep? Or refusing to?”
Her response was instantaneous, a bloom of red unfurling through the night, bidden around her arm where he had seized her with a vice-like grip that spindled through her skin alive now in a shiver that coiled up through her shoulder. Full mouth peeled back in a hiss, teeth against her pout, little words to be spared for the statement that lanced betwixt her ears and nestled there, refusing to budge. An unfurling swell of hunger, perhaps, suddenly planted within her chest, eerily sluicing between her ribs before settling just beneath her pounding heart.
“All of the above.” She whispered, not quite prepared to acknowledge that before shuffling back, gaze flickering down where a chair had been dragged up to his bedside. She decided it looked entirely uncomfortable and made a vague gesture towards the foot of his bed before she settled herself upon the edge, scooting closer to leave one leg swinging over the side and its opposite to bend at the knee where she nestled her hands upon the seat of her lap.
“Not easy to sleep when you’re in solitary. Small windows and all that, suffocating room. At least they don’t cuff me to the bed anymore.” Amma made a curious pass over, noting some of the accommodations before she allowed her blue eyes to fall upon the steelish azure of his gaze still suspended in the grit of sleep.
“From the noises, I take it you’re unable to sleep well, either.”
Gil shuffled, carefully moving his cast leg to make space for Amma’s lithe frame.
“Bad dreams. Night terrors. Can’t…can’t seem to shake the trial. The doctors say it’s to be expected. Doesn’t make it any easier.” He explained in clipped bites, guarding himself. Amma had arrived at PRCU, joined the team, already burdened by her own demons; he doubted the Trial had been any kinder to her than it had to him, and he couldn’t foresee sharing those troubles to be fruitful.
“Solitary and handcuffs…?” He asked, though near-immediately regretted it; it didn’t paint a good picture of her circumstances, which in turn lead to unconscious speculation. The Foundation environment in the simulation felt too obvious - but the what if lingered all the same. And the names whispered to her down dark corridors…
Gil shook his head a fraction.
“Never mind.” He said, wilfully dismissing conspiratorial thoughts. “How are you faring?”
“How do you think?” Came her equally clipped reply, biting words that hissed over the pout of her lip with a dismissal flick of her bandaged wrist. Amma could not contain the bristling of her intonations that rejoined to his equally sharp vowels, a consequence of what he too endured during the aforementioned Trials. She imagined he was not keen to confess what exactly lay hidden within his own terrors, but witnessing this version Gil, unbound and yet guarded, willed a crawling smile to punctuate her cheeks.
“I’d ask the same,” she muttered and made a pointed glance down his entire physique, landing upon his cast leg before her lashes swept back up to meet his glare. “But, frankly, you look like you went through Hell and back.”
“So, I’d imagine not any better than I.”
He watched Amma sweep her eyes up and down his bruised body with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. He felt vulnerable again, like he had when Harper had surveyed him, but this felt more…knife’s-edge. The smile creeping across her face did little to assuage his fears or his temptations.
”That…splinter group, that orchestrated the whole damn thing. Either the university needs to reconsider how much access those implants get…or someone had one hell of a line on the worst corners of my head.”
He sighed, dancing around the subject as he had for the last several days and last several visitors. Why? After everything, after his very foundations had been rooted out and torn asunder - why carry on, and with Amma, of all people? She, who perhaps had the least use for - the least interest in- any of the Gils he had pretended to be, of anyone he’d ever known?
Give it up.
“They showed me something I think I always knew and always was running from. And now…I don’t know who I am. I’m not sure I know what I am. So I just lie here, self-pitying, figuring out if I ever had a face behind all my masks.”
He smiled thinly, nonchalant, a weight lifted. His tone was genial, blasé almost, understating the gravity of his words. Gil sat up, shifting in the bed to swing his legs carefully over the edge and sit at Amma’s side, facing the other way, left shoulder to left shoulder.
“So I have bad dreams.” He said with a shrug, summarizing.
“No one here to feed you the lines,” comes her soft reply, words pulling around her full mouth, a sort of harmonizing hum of acknowledgment, head tilted upon the breath of her words and lashes panned low, studying his adjacent profile. “The part cast for you fell apart, so now you’re left without a role.”
Amma knows, as she knows many things, the weight of doubt of what one was and who they were meant to be, a chasm of eternity yielded itself to her heart, the decrepit look within bound in scarlet twine and shadows of death, her many names slithering through the gloom on feral undertones.
“Picking up pieces of a mask, one by one. Seems we all wear one, in the end, from birth, and unto the end.” Delicate gestures carve through her mane of black hair, shaking out the heavy curls, her twitching fingers compounded by the anxiety that fuels her fidgeting as silence stretches between them, feathered by her soft sighs.
“But- aren’t you tired of running?” A wistful smile there with a small breath of a laugh that punctuated her inquiry. “The world is dark and it is afraid. Does not mean we have to be.” Amma smooths her arms back, leaning her weight into her scarred palms, her stare fixated upon the shadows wreathed in the silver moonlight along the ceiling, a glare of defiance and seeded rage piercing up through the dark.
“I know.” A simple confession, no more, no less, the understanding and similarities lain bare from her whispers.
“You do, don’t you?” Gil mused, the realization of true empathy lain before him an epiphany in the dark. “The Foundation have their own marker for you, even in…” he trailed off. ‘Even in the simulation’, though he needn’t finish the words, and suspected Amma wouldn’t want him to regardless. He held her ferocious gaze for a long while, tightrope-walking along the tension in the air, enjoying the potential of the moment. “I am tired, but you’re right. I don’t have to be afraid. I’ve a year left. Enough time to get my head right. Enough time to figure out which me I want to be.”
He looked at the empty spot where the mirror had hung, yet to be replaced. There were still coffee-stains on the wall, just above the skirting board, where the mop had missed. In the corner was a tiny fragment of ceramic, the white reflecting just enough light to be faintly visible.
“But until then…I need to be the only me. I can’t face myself. Not for a while.” He said quietly, admitting a cowardice that had taken root deep in his bones.
He shook himself free of his wallowing fear, and looked to Amma again.
“And you? Still set to wreak your vengeance for the selves you wished not to be? Or defining yourself for yourself after revelation, like me?”
“Of course.” Amma breathes, finality laced through her whisper, conviction burdened there for the revenge she sought after. Even if she acknowledged that she did not belong here, it did not deter her from the path she had chosen, the trail of blood, and the willing solitary with it. “I may not know who or what I am either, but I’ll face myself until that day, all for the role I’m meant for.”
Amma holds his stare, the weight of his confessions reflecting her own woes, those fears she refused to acknowledge, the shadows that whispered to her even now that pulled a deep, shuddering breath from her chest, her scar aching and prompting her to smooth her fingers against it in what was now becoming a habit. The intensity of his glare lanced through her, a subtle tension fluttering betwixt her ribs, her next whispers quieted and firm.
“They took everything from me, I will get it all back. My name. My body. Soul. Everything.”
“Hm.” Gil sounded, an impartial acknowledgement. He watched Amma run her hand across her chest, drawing soft gestures over marred ink, and had a sudden yearning to trace his own fingers over the same wax-paper skin. He considered, for a moment, how he might have approached this before - which Gil he might have slipped into, what silver-tongued remarks he might have made. He could feel them on the fringes, waiting to be stepped into; instead, he made a conscious choice. He chose to be honest.
“Maybe some masks fit too well to ever be taken off. But I wonder if, in being the Foundation’s destruction, you’re playing into their hands. I know about the nature of your abilities; I know that what they did to you - the ghastly, abyssal things they must have done to you, to bring forth what you are now - deserve a reckoning; I know that you feel alone, and wrathful, and you’re uninterested in companionship or belonging. But maybe - despite what you are - you could create something else.”
Carefully, gingerly, he moved his hand closer to where hers rested on the bedsheets. He did not put it on her, nor proffer it; but where both hands were now, fingertips brushed against each other, threatening to interlock but for a few scant millimeters.
“Mend, instead of sunder.”
His words, every enunciation, every punctuating challenge, every sliver of acknowledgment of what she has always known- it all compiles to a singular construct of something sharp and intentional and punctures through her denials of fate and want of vengeance. It pierces deep and bleeds out some of the red and the fury, a singular wisp of scarlet unbound to loop around her throat just as her trembling hand comes to rest there, her pulse meeting her scars.
He knows. He knows. Heknowsheknows.
Awareness threads down her opposite gesture, the brush of his fingers there where hers arched, splayed, unbidden by her thoughts and reacting to something unnamed as she brushed the pads of her fingers against his own. Such simplicity with a wealth of unwanted emotions inspired her touch until she suddenly stills- these were the hands of destruction, the hands of a monster, hands that had done and taken so many.
You. Destroy. Everything.
“I don’t know how.” Laughter falls from her full mouth drawn into a simper, unable to be silenced or quelled as she acknowledges the truth of his observations, to give up the hate and the pain, to allow her soul and heart to mend- they are concepts foreign to the beast that howls and bays within, longing to spool through her entire frame in a slight tremble. Did she actually mend her friendship with Katja earlier that day? Did she really mend the chasm between her and Haven? Aurora? The void betwixt her and Lorcán- whatever that was? The boundary she violated then when she had clawed at Rory.
Amma’s stare snaps down to their hands laid upon the bedsheets, unable to withdraw her fingers, now wary and aware of his gaze she suddenly feels exposed to for all that she is and for all that she could be. For all that she was meant to do. If only it were easy to cast aside all that she had endured, but she was a creature of pain, the advocate for the depraved, and somewhere deep within, Amma knew a part of her always would be.
“Maybe I don’t even want to. It’s all I know. All that I deserve.” Amma confesses.
“The things they did, I wanted it. I said yes. I just didn’t know the actual price.” Her nails inch and brush against his fingers once more. “The role... I have to play.”
Gil breathes unsteadily and swallows Amma’s perfume in the process. He takes a leap - minute and yet monumental - and pushes his hand forward, enmeshing his fingers with hers entirely.
“An uninformed decision is no decision at all.” Gil says. “You accepted the script before you even read it. The only part you need play is the one you write for yourself.”
Something heavy renders her speechless where a familiar spindling of hunger sluices through her body, the kernel beneath her heart sprouting- more like breaking and split down the seams as Amma’s chest rose and fell on a sharp gasp. Quiet and perhaps unheeded, but nonetheless given as from her opposite shoulder electric coils of scarlet twine and mesh over her skin, looping through the night in tempting wreathes of power bidden by her emotions. Silver edges bleed out into black as her power slides down, and down, and before they can latch onto Gil in the same manner their fingers were intertwined, Amma pulled back.
“I should- go. Yes.” Nervous flutters of her lashes follow her words as she slides off from the bed, uncertainty once more falling into her steps as she grants him a final glance before making her way to leave.
Gil’s hand lingers as Amma’s slips from it, just as she slips from the edge of the bed and steps towards the door. The moment is electric but it is fleeting, and as Gil remembers cutting a conversation over two twinned cloves short from the same sense of trepidation and unspooling, everything left in him goes towards this:
“Don’t. It’s been hard to sleep alone. I think you’ve been the same. Maybe a shared nightmare will be easier to bear.”
At the mention of sleep, exhaustion pulls away at her motions, Amma slowly pausing to consider, hand poised to exit his room in a similar fashion from when she entered. She does not know what bids her to turn and regard him entirely, but whatever she witnesses there coaxes a small, quiet sigh that droops her shoulders and lids, finding the strength to return to his side, neither a nod nor a whisper of acceptance to be spared. Amma easily slides back onto his bed and lies back down, carefully studying him still before she slowly closes her eyes and adjusts her body to lie on her side, facing the dark without a word.
Gil dares not whisper gratitude or indeed anything at all, as if to speak would break the spell - but he is grateful, as Amma’s lithe frame returns to lie beside him and pushes out a long, low breath that carries with it all the fatigue of the last few days, and perhaps further beyond; and with no further word, the two slip into a deep slumber, and Gil does not dream.
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