up.
human blue eye is bloodshot, the other clear and unmarred as he looks down at her. a strange juxtaposition, one of the many pieces they could never properly replicate. there were ways that it could be simulated but the program hardly worked as smoothly as planned. he watches her, the snarl on her lips, the baring of teeth. for a moment he can almost convince himself that this is another year. one before he’d become the thing that he is, but he doubts that she ever can forget when it stares her in the face.
teeth clamp onto his ear and he’s willing it to bruise, the skin to break and tear. it’s the marks that remind him that he’s alive despite his fragility. the marks from this day, from the battle, they will far outlast anyone else. the bodily decay is merely slowed by the additions of robotics. a dead man walking has been resurrected in this room a miracle that will go unacknowledged for he will surely die again when this is over. he always does just a little bit more than before.
❛ taz. ❜ he says her name without meaning to. it’s a growl, but it’s not meant to be her name. it’s disguising a plea buried deep beneath it. want me. make me alive. don’t let me be this thing forever. kill me. kill the parts of me never meant to be there. i was never meant to live like this. kill me. kill me. kill me. idle thoughts of death haven’t ceased to occur since qu’onos. not a man, not a machine, she brings out his humanity but that doesn’t mean it belongs to him anymore. all rights to it had been released when the halves of his mangled body had been left in the metal gear, a part of him left to rot alongside his soul.
instinct demands that he kiss her. cut off the train of thought, force it away with another all consuming wave of passion— but he doesn’t. he can’t. he just heaves his breaths as he stares down at her pinned form beneath him. so full of life. true flesh and blood and a heart that pumps without aid of machines housed in her chest. not fragile, but strong. carved from something stronger than diamonds. he wants to say her name. say anything at all, but the words won’t come.
she had known the commander BEFORE his fall from grace, and she had known him after. one of the few that had watched the changes of the man she used to know so well mar themselves and demonize themselves into something different and startling from what they once were. a shadow of the leader that he once was -- and, taz had been helpless to stop his downfall. for the first time since she was a child, she stood useless in the aftermath and debris of it all as she watched her friend crumble down into nothingness. into shattered pieces and debris that yearned and ached for who he once was. taz wasn’t naive enough to think that up could ever be who he was before -- the warrior had not been naive in any sense for a very long time. albeit, that did not soften or sate the rage that harbored in her chest; the need to rip and tug out every piece of up until she could see it arranged on her floor in bright, shimmering crimson. to use her bare hands to shove those pieces back together in a menagerie that resembled the man she used to know. she wanted to plunge hands in place of claws into his chest and rip out whatever human was left of it to shove into his face and distill salt upon said wounds until he burned with nothing but human pain ; if only to prove that that was indeed what he still was. perhaps the ANGER was a byproduct of a guilt she had buried so far south that it merely harbored itself as an illness that wrapped around her bones and tattooed and splintered itself there. “up-” she spits back -- despite the growl of her name from his lips being unintentional, perhaps, hers was not. dripping and seething with venom and poison from every ounce of toxicity that her body could manage. as if her mere atoms were made of something less than human, something more dangerous and toxic than arsenic. her body a WAR MACHINE, her blood poisoning the water supplies and her lungs full of noxious gas. she felt, some days, she could merely breathe and planets would crumble -- albeit, it had never been quite as STRONG as when up had been WHOLE and stood at her side as more of an equal than a commanding officer. she felt a fire of it now ; when him hovering over her like a predator who did not truly realize he was the prey. but just a spark of a fire that could not flare to full fruition. and this too angered her. “YOU AREN’T TRYING HARD ENOUGH,” it was an accusation and a demand all in one. a challenge.
