leorugiet:
Settling into Insomnia never came quickly enough. Cor knew he’d be back out there at some point, and he loathed it. He lived off base, there were several nice houses that a Major General could own, after so much dedication to serving the country, it was the least they could offer, but still he preferred the off base housing, something about being around civilians made him feel different, and he slept better in the apartment than anywhere else.
Eventually orders come, he has to assign boring tedious tasks of checking the armory and all the ammunition to make sure everything is stored correctly. There’s meetings about money management, time management, practice training. These things drive him insane every time. It’s simply a part of the experience, he imagined. Ever since he was finally appointed the position of General, it felt like a lot of fighting had stopped, he only ever went with special ops teams like the one rescuing Camden.
The first day he cut his lunchtime visit to NH short. It was only five minutes, and they filled him in about the scientist control over the boy. His face looked flushed, eyes still that bright red, although one of them was still damaged from whatever the doctor pulled off his eye. For some reason he found himself just petting back NH’s hair. He asked if he was getting his nutrition, and NH nodded. Cor asked how, and he never responded.
That first day he came to see Camden personally, finally awake after what he had endured. Cor didn’t ask him to reiterate what happened to him. For the first time in a while, Cor came to a younger soldier more as a friend, more as a personal guide. He told Camden where to go if he felt the nightmares coming on strongly. He said he didn’t have to talk about it, but getting medicated would at least help. Cor spoke the truth, he felt no reason to see another Crownsguard fall victim to their mind, until it consumed them. He also understood not wanting to talk about it.
After all this coaxing, Cor went against his own remarks, and then pressed Camden for instead, strange, unrelated questions. Why was he in a facility that house only robots? Why was the facility full of clones? Why was he in such close proximity to them? After quiet, private coaxing, Camden sobbed a strange confession, that being physically abused was not all, they violated him, in order to extract ‘DNA’ as they put it, all very clinically, and would do the same to women through surgery to extract eggs. They already had a method for cloning, but they wanted variety in the gene pool, too little variety and the clones came out distorted and useless. Camden was ‘a strong healthy pick’ and he imagined it was why he was alive.
Cor gave him time to recover from the confession. He didn’t push any more. Cor understood how much it took to talk about it, and he’s sure this is not the first time Camden had been pressed about it, but Camden did reveal that. ‘Nobody asked me about that…’ and it made Cor want to push it more.
The soldier told him over time, all the things he had seen, and been forced to participate in. Cor sat with him in the hospital room while he was on a ‘all-liquid diet’ something that still made Cor’s stomach twist. He went far past his lunch break that second day. Camden had said, he was close to outliving his usefulness, and they had a plan of injecting something into him. He listed several things, one standing out. Strain 2F-37. Cor asked him what it did. The soldier didn’t know. He said it sounded like they were joking, taunting, saying it would hurt a lot. That was the day before they found him.
Cor only asked one more thing, if he ever saw what they did to the clones, and he said only when they got rid of them, they would incinerate them, and he could still smell it. Cor was careful about thanking him, carefully putting a hand on his shoulder, shaking his weak hand, and telling him to call if he needed to talk. Cor even gave a phone number. Part of being a general was learning how to make contacts in the city, instead of making enemies in the battlefield.
Cor came in quite early that morning, with paperwork under his arm, and was greeted by the now somewhat familiar doctor. He listened through her stuttering, teeth grit, and looked inside the cell. NH was so still, and so thin, he lay lifeless on the bed, the only indication he was alive was a slow slight movement of his stomach and chest.
“About that.” Cor replied to her. Without asking, he opened the door, and let himself into the cell. The place was starting to stink from the black vomit, even when it was cleaned up some foul acrid smell lingered. “I realize I did indeed make a mistake about my judgement.” Cor pulled a two way radio from his belt. “10-15, be prepared upstairs.” He said, waiting for a ‘10-4′ to come back, and he tucked it away. “I was wrong about what I thought. I classified NH as a biological weapon, and that fell under your hands, the hands of esteemed doctors and scientists.”
He picked NH up into his arms, and wrapped a blanket around the small child to protect his body from any stray rays of light. “He was always a regular weapon, counter-military mechanical weaponry.” Cor remarked. “That, along with MA-X, Magitek, and any other technological based weapons, such as a robot like this, belongs under my jurisdiction, and the jurisdiction of mechanics. Not doctors, and not Clarus.”
He walked right past her, folding the blanket over NH’s face. “I’m afraid there’s a convoy arriving –”
“10-14, sir.” came a static output of the radio.
“Has arrived.” Cor corrected. “The weapon will be at the military medical facility under my command, at the Camp Solcara, north-west of the Citadel.” Cor slipped the paper under his arm out, and offered her a copy of a document he’d had signed. “Here. Clarus signed this yesterday.” Of course, he signed it in a stack of several dozen things he signed almost every single day, but what Clarus didn’t know didn’t hurt him. “I’m afraid your request will be nullified. You’ve had several days to give us an answer, and no response, so it’s my turn.”
NH didn’t understand why he was being picked up. He’d thought he was done for the day. He didn’t want to open his eyes to see who was carrying him this time. All the people in white scared him anyway; it was safer not to look. But then Cor’s voice came, so very close now, right there. Cor was carrying him.
NH blinked slowly, all the more confused. Red eyes went to Al, watched as she openly frowned at whatever Cor was saying. He couldn’t think of a reason Cor would be carrying him, or why he would be so comfortably wrapped up. He was too tired to give it any thought. He only understood the word ‘magitek’ before Cor covered his face with the cloth. It was such a common word that it didn’t help give him any context about the situation.
Cor hadn’t hurt him like the people in white did. Cor was a little scary and brought him to scary places, but that was different. That was okay. NH could survive that. Without NH realizing it, he’d given his trust to Cor. It was that trust, and his lack of ability to fight back even if he wanted to, that had NH closing his eyes under the blanket. Wherever he was going, he hoped it was less painful than being with Al and the people in white.
When he opened his eyes, he was somewhere new again. He felt fuzzy, but it was a different kind of fuzziness than the way he felt after a malfunction. He was in new clothes, his hair didn’t feel grimy anymore, and a second look at himself brought fresh bandages around his upgrades to his attention. The inflamed, sore skin around the upgrades (thanks to Al and her team) didn’t hurt so much anymore. There was tape across the back of his hand and something connected to a clear tube hidden under the tape. A needle? He couldn’t feel it but just the thought of it being there was unpleasant.
Someone had done all this. Someone had... helped him. It was against the rules. Who would do that? Why would anyone break a rule for the sake of an incomplete MT?
NH twitched, trying to wake himself up and drag his mind out of the fuzz.
A knock came gently at the door before it opened. The young man who entered reminded NH of Soft Lady. He felt badly that he didn’t remember her name, or maybe it had never been given; he couldn’t recall.
“Oh.” The man started a little when he looked up from the papers in his hands. He wasn’t in white; he wore all black instead, with designs in silver and grey along the clothes. He tapped the front of a small rectangle in his hand and his next words were repeated by the device in Gralean, stiff and awkward but Gralean nonetheless. “You’re awake. The medicine we gave you should have kept you asleep for a while longer.”
NH’s wide eyes blinked. <<Cor? Where is Cor?>>
“Ah, sorry. This is kind of a one-way thing. I don’t understand what you’re saying.” The young man shrugged. “But I can at least understand that name. He only stepped out a moment ago. He’s on the phone with someone. Between you and me, kid, whoever’s yelling on the other end of the line is pretty loud. Sounds like someone pulled a fast one for your sake.”
NH barely understood what was said even though the words came in Gralean from the device. <<W-why am I still operational?>>
“N-no. Don’t do that. Don’t cry. Hey-- C’mon-- Okay, I’ll go get him!”