Adeni is a humanoid plant. Her overall appearance is mysterious yet slightly twisted, which goes well with her personality. Her origin, race, and age is unknown. It's advised not to get on her bad side.
Mort and Adeni are nothing more than dance partners, however it is often mistaken for something else by a few.
this is one of my favourite scenes i've written in this project, i even based a poem off it (lol). i call this scene "blade runner 2049 style" because anima fucks his mech who's taken over his best friend's body. not really accurate but it makes me laugh. there is minor gore and emotionally weird sex. have fun!
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Sumi exhales deeply, eyes closing. Her inhale shudders, expression flickering back and forth like tuning, entire body tensing, relaxing, clicking into place somewhere between. A soft whine escapes her lips, a dream-sound. Her eyelids flutter open, and she looks him over with a cool expression.
Adeni looks at him
“Not so little now,” he says. He’s grinning, his chest fizzing bright, but he’s also nervous—which is an unfamiliar feeling these days. Yes, he has desperately dreamed of an Adeni he can hold and kiss, but that’s a fantasy. In reality he’s a speck drowning in the cosmic ocean of his mech. Adeni as a small and soft and relatively warm thing is strange to comprehend. There’s a dissonance in the way it holds its lips, the lean of its body.
“ah, i remember now, the importance of soap.” Adeni wrinkles its nose at him. It lifts its arms, stretching high and arching its back. The sweep of its body burns into Anima’s brain, the sensation ghosted along his own spine. His fingers twitch for Adeni. “oooh, it feels good to stretch.”
He’s looking at a celestial body, its orbit curving through his own back. Adeni doesn’t glow but it radiates, burning away everything in the world except its beautiful form: shimmering hair haloing a blinding, bright hole seared through reality. Overexposure. His mind can’t comprehend the divine beauty standing before him.
He drops to his knees at Adeni’s feet, hands hovering over its thighs, afraid a single touch will shatter the illusion.
“You already know how much I want this.” Adeni is here; Adeni is still rooted in his mind.
“you’re behaving so well because this is sumi’s body.” It combs its fingers through his hair, slow and lingering as his head rolls with its touch. “then there will be no argument today, my little anima. you are mine.”
The urge to argue back is suffocated by the intense need hot in the pit of his stomach; not a simmer, but a full blaze. Yes, he’s willing to give up control in the name of gnawing desperation. He needs Adeni to do whatever it wants to him. He’ll do anything.
“touch me.”
He sketches a line along its thigh to open Adeni’s suit, inhaling sharply as a tickle travels up his own thigh. Another line on the other side, and the tickle again, as if he were touching himself. In a way, he is.
“we’re still connected.” Adeni takes Sumi’s voice and slices it into something sharper, deeper, more mechanical. “there will be a feedback loop for stronger sensations. touch me.”
Fingers spread, he draws reverence across its inner thighs, pressing his lips against soft skin. Adeni shivers with a stronger reaction than he expects, as his mouth echoes between his own legs.
“Weird,” he says against its thigh.
“anima.” Annoyance as he gets distracted, though it should know better.
“I’m sorry.” He nips skin. “This is weird. I’m adjusting.”
It wraps its fingers around his throat and hauls him to his feet, holding his face close. After a moment, it chuckles, alien—Sumi’s voice, not Sumi’s laugh. “you’re anxious. little anima, this isn’t the first time we’ve—”
“I know!” He’s still too aware of Sumi’s presence in the back of Adeni’s head. “That was different.”
“i don’t know about that,” Adeni purrs, caressing between his legs, and gasping with him. He wants Adeni in so many different ways he’s getting stuck in his own head. “kiss me.”
The cockpit shifts as he meets Adeni’s mouth, and it kisses with a sudden ferocity he’s unprepared for, growling against him, tongue down his throat, taking every part of him that it can. One hand tight around his throat, the other exploring between its own legs, bouncing the warm pleasure back to Anima. He presses their bodies together, breath hitching, moaning around Adeni’s tongue at doubled sensations he’s never experienced before.
“you’re salivating.” He wipes his mouth.
“Do you have to say it like that?”
“yes.” It backs onto the seat, and he can do nothing but follow, spreading its legs in a perfect curve. “kneel.”
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he says as he falls before Adeni. His hands caress its thighs, its hips, its ass, as he kisses beneath its ribcage, trailing down. The body is familiar, yet completely alien. The way it moves, the way his touch reflects back, the tenor of Adeni’s sharp little sounds.
Adeni forces his head down, and he grins, unseen.
“you’ve been wanting to taste her. now’s your chance. maybe you’ll be careful when you can feel it too.”
He laughs, and buries his face between its thighs with enthusiasm that makes Adeni arch and yank on his hair, dragging him and his tongue away, his chest heaving. He waves Adeni off, grinning wildly.
“Hang on, hang on, I got it.”
Adeni’s fingers curl in his hair, needing something to hold onto as his tongue explores. He experiments with his mouth, his own rough fingers, finding what, upon refraction, makes him moan, and so makes Adeni throw its head back, grip threatening to rip his hair out.
He sits back, gulping air, adoring Adeni’s flushed face. “See? No teeth.” He rises, leaning forward to push Adeni back, cupping a small breast and kissing it. “I can be gentle.”
“when have i ever wanted gentle from you?”
Anima kisses Adeni, pushing his tongue—and Adeni’s own taste—into its mouth. Sharp, metallic pain bursts in both their mouths as Adeni bites his tongue, blood mixing between them. He grabs Adeni’s throat, careful to only crushing a little. Deep in the kiss, he doesn’t notice Adeni digging out the gun hidden beneath the chair until the tip of the barrel presses against his sternum, cold enough to make him gasp. He takes in the sight and flashes his teeth, tingling heat spreading through him.
Sliding his hands beneath Adeni’s ass, he lifts it and spins, switching their places as he falls back onto the chair, the mech on top of him.
“lazy,” Adeni hisses with a smirk.
“Practical,” he says, brushing mercury hair from its shoulders. “If you shoot me while I’m on top, I’m going to fall onto you, and right now you’re the little one in the relationship. Physically.”
Adeni traces Anima’s jaw with the barrel, nudging his face up so it can bite his neck. He shudders, visceral memories of his father’s torn throat flashing through him. Hot blood down his throat, the texture of the viscera, his father’s drowning gurgles in his mouth—suddenly it’s hard to breathe. He pushes at Adeni’s face, panicked.
“Fuck, fuck, Adeni—” Adeni covers his mouth and he gasps into its palm as it delineates the hole he tore in Nova’s chest with the gun. The air cracks between them, the sharp hiss of a vector followed through. At first there’s no pain at all, then all at once the nerves in Anima’s shoulder light up like an explosion. His body reacts, jerking against the pain, hands clenching, his cries muffled by Aden’s tight hand. As sharp as the shot, an image: a round piercing Nova’s shoulder in the same place, red spurting out as the round punched through skin and everything between.
“i like how you feel when you’re in severe emotional distress,” Adeni explains into his gasping quietness. “it is, as you would say, delicious.” All he can do is whimper when it shifts its hips against him. It peels its hand away from his mouth and he looks up at the thing inhabiting his best friend’s body. Beautiful and monstrous and so very for him. All he wants is to dig into its skin and drag his Adeni out, to hold the truth of Adeni against his skin so tight they melt into one.
The taste of his own blood is the taste of his father’s, and he’s still covered in that blood—or his suit is, at least. The dirt and gore under his fingernails must smell of Oesta. He hasn’t washed himself of what happened, of the wet crunch beneath his boot, and—fuck, didn’t that feel good? He wants it again. Justified suffering. Annihilation without guilt. And isn’t that the arc of Adeni’s spine when it breathes his name? The perfect shape of destruction, overlaying his best friend’s body. And when they find each other with rough, aggressive movement and sharp gasps, the sharp/warm pleasure rippling between their shared minds like an earthquake-shaken lake—the craving is the same as when he threw himself at his father. The devouring hunger to fill the void within with enough pain and pleasure to feel his skin again.
Anima feel his skin in fractal layers. Adeni feels his skin, and he feels the skin it inhabits, inside and out. Adeni’s teeth against the gunshot burn, its tongue tasting the messy, seared edges, teasing muscle, and he too tastes seared flesh. The gun against his chest burns cold like Sunder’s fire, like the knowledge that one day there will be a final death. Breath catching, he realizes how much he doesn’t want to die, to really die. To become nothing, to be lost to the loneliness for eternity. His fingernails scratch Adeni’s back as he claws for an infinite anchor tethered to this singular life. A physical binding, tangible and wanting, too.
Adeni flexes beneath his nails. It licks deep into his burned viscera. He moans, and it wiggles its hips, tightening thighs around him in a way that splits his voice into a whimper, its hand reaching down agonisingly lower, stroking sensitive, velvet-soft skin and coarse hair and he feels every echo all at once, layered above and shattering over him like shimmering, slicing rain. He feels everything of them both, all at once. Adeni is already all around him, everything he can see, and he is within Adeni in more ways than one; its forehead against his, its name on his tongue, him hard and deep within in—and, fuck, he can feel that within himself as a feedback loop that might fucking kill him.
He would live in this moment forever, as Adeni kisses him, blood smeared across its lips, fingering his wound, its other hand tracing the sensitive skin that makes his breath shake and hitch. As his mind burns, Adeni increases the intensity, flowing into him, against him, with him, every thrust and arch and touch reflecting until Anima’s not sure who’s doing what anymore. He’s unfolded beneath her, origami ordnance, an Anima blueprint and she’s tracing his precise, radiating lines. All he knows is that Adeni has become his entire world, and that he needs—he needs—
Oh. The wider connection burns open behind his eyes. A smouldering circle he can dive into, through to the other side. His heart beats like a gunshot, and his physical self clutches his chest, still entangled in Adeni. His mental self reaches out, stretching his fingers to brush Adeni’s titanic mind, and connection sparks across his irreal skin. It’s touching the surface of an ocean, looking up into its infinite depths. It’s vertiginous. He could be lost in Adeni’s mind forever.
Adeni drives its fingers into his shoulder and Anima screams as he’s split and refracted between his physical self, its borrowed body, its mind vast and beautiful, and Nova’s fresh blood spattering his face. His mind is being exploded into its component parts—too much for a human, inputs overflowing. Adeni pulling the strings of his trauma, laughing with delight.
He plunges into Adeni’s ocean, and it’s the burst of a head, the explosion of white and red, the snap of a brainstem, the crunch of a boot, the slice of a blade through his throat—
Anima clutches Adeni tight, convinced one of them is dying, his horror and Adeni’s rapture looping between their minds until the two are tangled into blinding static and he’s got nothing left to give.
Anima’s shoulders shake as he flops back against the seat. Laughter spills out of him, an uncontrollable stream because, well, “Fuck.”
Adeni pushes him down as it rises. Its body curves with a stretch, purring as its muscles burn with the movement. A crimson ratio, perfect death. Dipping two fingers into the healing hole in Anima’s shoulder, it drags them across Anima’s lips. “you love this taste. freak.”
Grinning, he wraps his arms around Adeni and forces it down into an exhausted kiss, all teeth and tongue and it’s the best Adeni’s ever had. Not that it’s had many.
I love you, he thinks.
horny idiot. So enthralled in Adeni, he almost misses that the ever-present background static concept in his mind of you are mine has been overlaid faintly with something new: and i am yours.
okay here's something horny. this is a whole-ass scene actually. post anima's first real mech fight, which goes real bad for him (he gets crushed). when they get back, he refuses to leave adeni. body horror + sex for this one, lol.
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A river of light spills over Anima’s curled form as a slice of Adeni’s cockpit folds open. It must be Sunder that steps through, based on the weight of the footsteps and the gentle, unsurprised, but sad exhale at the sight of Anima. Curled in his seat, face obscured by blue hair, he doesn’t look up. He’s not shaking with tears. It’s pain. Anger. Fear. He won’t leave Adeni; he needs to escape Adeni.
The only way out of being a pilot is death, which means that really, there’s no way out. He’s trapped. He’s trapped. The rise and fall of his form is rapid and juddering with the shallow breaths of an injured creature, each breath too short, too empty. Dark liquid drips from arms scratched raw, pooling around the base of the seat. The red splashes over Sunder’s boots as he crosses the cramped space to Anima and crouches, pulling his hair back to find Anima’s face hidden against his thighs.
“Anima,” he says, all kind concern. He grabs Anima’s wrist with enough force to stop his compulsive scratching because his arms are like raw meat, a self-destructive war between Anima and his mech’s healing. A moment of stillness as muscle and skin begin to heal, then like a storm Anima crashes into Sunder, all hair and blood and bright blue eyes. His desperate mouth finds Sunder’s with a hand clamped to the back of his head. Anima’s heart is fractured glass, slicing his soft insides with each glacial hammer of a heartbeat, forcing the blood from his wounds with every powerful thud. The visceral, icy slick of his life dripping out is better than the whole-body bone-deep ache currently being drowned out, but Sunder is even better than that.
Anima falls back against the chair and drags the other pilot back with him, lip between his teeth.
Sunder’s touch is a neon raindrop heartbeat—the flighty human kind. It’s agony rippling out, bouncing across Anima’s frame; arm to hip, jaw to thigh, refracting in a blinding pattern that’s only his. He never wants the pain to end, even if it obliterates him. He kisses hard and with teeth, driving his tongue into Sunder’s mouth like it’s all he’s got left to take.
But the loneliness clings to him, swallows him, the black puddle at his feet yawning wide. He squashes the imagined freefall drop of his gut—the pool is shallow with blood, not deep with loneliness, though in the end, both spill from his veins.
He’s trapped. Beneath Sunder, even if he wants this; within Adeni, always within him; on the station, no way to get home to Oesta; in himself, panicked and hurting and he can feel his mind breaking under the pressure. He wants this, with Sunder’s palm hot against his stomach; he has to get the fuck out of here, because he’s starting to see another scene overlap with the cockpit. Only one way out. No more fear.
He presses Sunder’s hand to his glacial heart. His grip is too tight; he doesn’t care. Wild-eyed, messy-haired, radiating heat and pain, Anima levels his gaze at Sunder. The hurt is etched into his face with every line.
“Sunder,” he says, voice fraying apart. “Kill me.”
“Are you—”
“I want it,” Anima says, and he means it. He kisses Sunder, digs his fingers in, crushing Sunder’s hand harder against his chest. Whispers, because he can’t bear to hear the words loud, “I want to feel my heart in your hand. Kill me.”
“You know it’s going to hurt.” A soft warning, pressure before the storm. The body hides the heart for a reason. Anima almost relents for Sunder’s sake.
Almost.
If he wants to survive Sunder’s world, he can't remain as he is, this terrified mess of a creature. He needs to destroy the part of himself scared of dying, to erase fear entirely. No more fear, no more pain. He needs to know what’s beyond the event horizon.
The pain will hurt in a new way when given by Sunder, like a gift. He's hoping it’ll be enough to drown out the agony in his bones and the crush of his skin. His body is healed from the fight but it lingers in his mind, cryptogenic. Adeni can't heal mental trauma; all he can do is push through, or break.
A change is coming. He refuses to be scared of it. Even if changing proves him a worse person, he can't stay still anymore. And he really does want to feel Sunder’s hand in his chest.
He shivers against Sunder, anticipating the unknown. You know it’s going to hurt. Of course it is. Everything does. His teeth flash in the dark.
“Then hurt me.”
Sunder kisses him, clutching him close like he’s scared of losing something vital.
“Slow or aggressive?” When Anima scoffs in response, Sunder chuckles. “Rough it is. Maybe we can save slow for another day.”
“Sunder.” He arches his back, baring his chest with a grin far more confident than he feels right now. Breathless, almost teasing, he says, “Kill me.”
He doesn't have time to prepare. Pilots are stronger than they look. inhumanly so. Sunder’s hand snaps between them, piercing his chest and shattering ribs, tearing a scream from his lips. Sunder quiets him with another kiss, forearm-deep in his chest.
Anima convulses at the first awful sensation of fingers cradling his heart but the sickening pressure of Sunder’s caress does feel good. Delayed pain explodes from the epicentre of Sunder’s heat, burning through his body. Every breath is agony, like glass—or just bone—shredding his lungs. His front is wet and warm with his blood, staining Sunder too, and the air is thick with that metallic scent and he's suddenly back on Oesta, heartless and useless and drowning in red.
Sunder squeezes his heart and pulls him back, breath hitching. His body knows what is happening is wrong, but he moans with the euphoria of the sensation, the horror of it, the wanting-to-die of it. The upsetting intrusion into his own body is what he’s been wanting his whole life and now he’s found it, he wants Sunder deeper. Holding more of him.
“You like that,” Sunder says. Not a question; Anima’s body is being pretty clear about the fact.
“Fuck,” Anima chokes, “yes.”
Sunder kisses the foamy blood from his lips, cradling the back of Anima’s head with enough gentle care to make his slow heart pound. Anima feels Sunder tense for a human heartbeat and knows what's coming next. No fear, he tells himself. No fear. Easier said than done.
Sunder exhales sharply against his mouth and rips his heart from his chest. He rises from their embrace, just enough to lift Anima’s heart to his lips for a loving kiss, then holds the failing organ between their bodies. The sudden absence in Anima’s chest is immense. An internal silence. His body feels the loss immediately. Like a blackout rippling from the core of a city, all his little lights go out.
He's been here before and turns out it's no more fun the second time around, but this time he's got Sunder’s hips against his, and Sunder cradling his head, and Sunder’s tongue between his lips. He wants to kiss back but he's got nothing left to give. His body’s nothing more than a useless weight draped between a beautiful man and the blood-soaked pilot’s seat.
Adeni’s healing can only keep him alive for so long. The thread tying him to life shivers. Snaps.
Fuck, dying hurts.
Coming back isn't much better. Anima gasps, pain lancing through his chest with every immense beat of his reconnected heart. Sunder’s face fills his world, the ocean of his eyes such a vivid hue that they hurt to look at.
“Welcome back.” There’s blood on his lips. “How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure.” He scowls at the weakness in his voice. His body trembles as he straightens, forcing his muscles to support himself again, at least enough to relieve Sunder of the burden. Sunder’s hand slides to his chest and his breath catches at the visceral memory of that hand driven through his ribcage. How does he feel? Like he’s caught the sweet taste of relief for the first time in his life. The lingering sensation of being crushed died with him. “Hungry.”
“Fascinating,” Sunder says. “Usually we don’t actually feel—” Anima’s mouth shuts him up and he seems to realise what kind of hunger Anima means.
“Fuck, man,” Anima says, exploring Sunder’s body with clumsy hands and fresh fervour. “You messing around in there shouldn’t feel so good. I want—" He exhales his shame, refusing to feel it ever again, now that Sunder's basically seen all of him. “I want your hand in me as I fuck you.”
look at you, Adeni says, a kind of pride bursting like golden stars behind his eyes. so bold.
“Then get on the seat.” Sunder’s eyes flash. “I would prefer you not collapse on me.”
“Yeah, yeah.” With Sunder’s help, Anima swings onto the seat. He sighs Adeni reclines the seat back for him; he hadn’t realized how heavy his body felt. Sunder’s suit drips away and he climbs onto Anima, leaning down to meet his wet mouth. Hands linger across his body, pulling his suit away to find bare skin. Even hungry, Sunder’s touch is gentle at the core. The kindness burns across Anima’s skin. “You’re too good for me,” he says, and grabs Sunder’s dick.
Sunder shivers, laughing with a kind of amazed joy Anima doesn’t understand, but he thinks it's a good thing. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re kind.”
“I just killed you.”
“I asked you to.”
“Anima—” The rest of Sunder’s words are smothered by a quick, intense kiss. Anima’s breath heavy on his lips.
“Save my name for when I’m fucking you.” Anima shifts, rising. “Wait. Do we...use blood as lube or something?”
“Oh.” Sunder makes an unhappy face that Anima thinks is born from experience. “No, blood does not work well at all. You’ve seen how quickly blood congeals and dries, haven’t you?”
Anima looks around, at his own blood drying all over his mech’s cockpit. “Damn. Seems like it would be fun.”
“You die one time—”
A black tendril unwinds from beneath the seat and curls around Anima’s dick, cool and slick. He inhales sharply, shivering at the touch and grasping at Sunder as the tendril coils along his length, then uncoils, slipping wetly away.
Adeni, he thinks, breathless even in his mind. The mech doesn’t reply, but there’s a new, self-satisfied warmth in the background radiation of their connection. He doesn’t want to think about how powerfully his body reacted to Adeni’s touch. Or his heart.
Sunder looks down at him, face glowing with not-quite-awe but something close enough to set Anima’s face ablaze. Nobody's ever looked at him that way before. Damn. Damn. He needs Sunder; he needs Sunder to need him.
A wide hand sprawled across his chest. Stability. Preparation. Anima’s unprepared for the joining of movement, the intertwined pain-pleasure duet of driving into Sunder and Sunder smashing through his sternum. The two intimately, deeply, painfully within. His scream dissolves into one hell of a laugh as he thrusts into Sunder who, with a gasp, flinches and drops a chunk of sternal bone between their legs. The whole world is made of stars, though at a certain point it becomes an overlay of static, his body so filled with pain it’s overflowing into his eyes. He can’t stop crying, sometimes sobbing to keep the nausea at bay as Sunder holds his face and rocks his hips and there is warmth and sparks and new stars in his eyes, better stars.
Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, he thinks to himself like a mantra because despite everything else, he doesn’t want to embarrass himself during his first time with Sunder by barfing all over him.
do it. maybe he likes it. Adeni, less than helpful. He’s getting the impression Adeni likes watching him fuck up.
If he does, he can keep it to himself.
ooh, you’re not into that?
“I can’t believe you’re talking to Adeni now,” Sunder says, drawing him back with light, fluttering strokes down Anima’s lungs. Like an inexplicable tickle. Anima stares at Sunder, lips parted as his body decides whether it wants to cough or not, and then he realises why his lungs are so easy to access. Sunder’s pulled out his blade and spread Anima’s ribcage wide like wings and it’s almost beautiful work, if not for his mess of a heart.
“Shit, that’s impressive.” Anima shifts to take Sunder in his hand again and they both moan at the jostling, which sets them both off laughing, and then Sunder’s kissing him deep and hard, body rolling like the sea of his eyes, from the trough of his thighs to the crest of his spine to the crash of his hands buried in the organs of Anima’s chest, catching their lips in the whitewater and the kiss does taste like salt. Anima’s caught in Sunder’s current, still exhausted from dying, letting Sunder fuck him and finger his viscera and stroke his heart while Anima squirms beneath, helplessly screaming with the obliterating pain, begging Sunder, don’t stop, never stop, please please please, and Sunder ducks his head and licks Anima’s heart, opens his mouth and sucks even as a thunderclap beat makes Anima shudder against him and it feels so fucking weird and he loves it.
He wants to focus on Sunder’s body, to make Sunder moan and scream and cry in return, but he’s drowning in the wash of sensations, and a little breathless besides because Sunder’s squeezing the air from his lungs so that when Sunder wriggles tight against Anima and his hips roll and he waits, teasingly, Anima can’t say shit, can’t even make a pathetic sound. Dizzy, the animal of him panicking somewhere deep, he gazes up at Sunder through the bursting stars and thinks, in a daze, He can’t be real. It’s too much. It’s just enough. It’s the shock of pain and death and fingers tickling his lungs and Sunder searing through his veins like a circuit, the cockpit lights flaring phosphorescent bright as he clings to Sunder, his mind whiting out.
“You’re fucking hot when you’re dying,” Sunder purrs. The pressure lifts from his lungs and he gasps, gulping down big breaths as the static dissolves and Sunder’s beautiful face fills his vision. Sunder’s hand closes over his trembling fingers as he kisses him, breath catching as he uses Anima, fast and rough and gasping, until he shudders into the kiss and warmth spills onto Anima’s stomach. The two grin at each other, sweaty and splattered with red, and then Anima puts two and two together and—
Shoving Sunder away, he looks down at himself, at the massive hole of his chest. Sunder sits back, barely concealing his stupid smirk as he smears white across Anima’s stomach.
“Pretty sure I didn’t get any inside you. Unless you’d like that?” Anima stares at him, too dizzy to speak, his brain aflame with an overload of sensations. He’s got no idea how to answer that question. Sunder wiggles his fingers at Anima and licks them, lingeringly. “We can revisit that, then.”
“We’re going to do this again?” Excited at the thought, Anima sits up with far too much enthusiasm and his alien heart falls out of his chest, flopping wetly onto the floor. “Ah, shit.”
His overtaxed body slumps forward and the sound of rushing wind almost drowns out Sunder, who he’s barely aware has caught him before he slips from the seat.
“Glad you’re feeling better, kid.” Sunder’s kindness almost makes the dazzling pain of a cracked-chest death hurt a little less. Almost.
Adeni, with fascination glistening like threads across his mind; you’re going to say something stupid before you die, aren’t you?
“You’re the only person who’s ever wanted me,” is what escapes his lips, unintended.
oh. no. that’s even worse, Adeni says, and now he really wants to die.
feels appropriate for the first thing i post to be anima's first death and initial connection to adeni. not sexy...? but pretty brutal for anima.
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Here, at the end, everything he’s ever done comes to nothing. Convulsing in a dark puddle of his own blood, gasping desperately between the choking but there’s nothing to push the breath through his draining veins anymore. Everything hurts, especially the place his heart should be. How can an absence hurt so acutely? He can’t breathe but he can feel pain, so intense and all-consuming he can’t do anything except shudder and wish he’d died quick like his father.
He waits for the flash of vital memories as his vision fizzles out, but maybe he’s got nothing worth remembering because at first there’s only black, and then, well, whatever comes after that.
Anima gasps his last, useless breath and dies.
It’s a shimmering ripple in the dark. Phosphorescence sparking along nerves. A searing hole through the back of his mind. He’s pretty sure a sun’s exploding in his chest. He’s also pretty sure he should be dead.
Anima shudders. His first breath is all blood and he chokes, smashing his face against the rubble as he convulses. Hot agony floods his body as it fights the inevitable. The ground shakes as something massive moves nearby. The Other coming to finish him off. He screams, “Fuck!” but it comes out as a choking gurgle because his lungs are still fucked from all the blood and the Other tearing through him. One failed word is too much. The dark stretches out and swallows him.
A ripple in the dark. A thunderclap within his ribs. Fire pulsed through his veins. A circle of light opening his skull. Cloudless pink through his fluttering eyelashes. His body feels like it’s already decomposing, solidity melting away. There’s a compulsion stuck in his throat that’s got him clawing himself to his hands and knees. Too much. It’s too much. His elbows give and his nose breaks against something not quite metal, not quite wood. Stars. Black. Death again.
A ripple. A hole. A thunderclap. Pain, pain pain. Black tendrils around his throat, dragging him across what seems to be thousands of roots bound together. He scratches at the tendrils but his fingernails slide uselessly away. Tendrils—vines, whatever they are—snatch his wrists, hauling him up and slamming him down hard enough that he—
A bloody gasp. A sharp ripple slicing through his skin. A crash in his chest. An eclipsed sun searing through the back of his skull. Black around his throat, ink in his mouth, blood in his mouth, a scream in his mouth—let me die, let me die, let me die. He doesn’t believe in any higher power but he’s begging anyway.
Something responds in his mind; a superimposed voice like an ocean flooding everything that makes Anima what he is: no.
Mind swallowed by that something, Anima becomes the ocean, all salt and power and strangling tendrils. Black vines wind around his arms, crushing his hands with a pressure that cracks delicate bones. He can’t scream, can’t struggle, the being in his mind has swallowed his agency entirely. The thing inside him tightens its grip around his body, seemingly annoyed. His neck cracks. The lights go out.
His body jerks with a sudden, massive thud in his chest. A single pulse. A ripple through him, out of him, and his brain lights up with a sense of the expansive, complex systems he’s touching through the tendrils. The fire splits his head open. Tendrils in his mouth, across his chest, holding his hips tight against the chair.
stop dying.
A long holographic panel opens up, showing the town and the Other from a high vantage point. The room sways as the view moves—Anima realises there’s only one place he could be: the mech. His father’s mech. His dead father’s mech. Its grip on his mind is titanic, the mech barely has to expend energy to control his body, which still only has a tenuous grip on life.
Anima fades in and out of death. Life occurs in flashes of pain. The Other on the screen. The Other through the hole it tore to rip his father out. Bittersweet liquid from the tendrils down his throat. Pressure exerted, fingers snapping, pain as the mech puppets him to move itself. The mech fights, movements sharp and angry. Anima’s held down by the vines but the momentum is agony. He can’t escape and he thinks his mind might shatter entirely from the fear. Oh, fuck, he needs to escape.
His breath hitches. The fire in his mind flickers. The mech stumbles into the Other, knocking it backwards and falling with it. A mech has a long way to fall, and Anima takes the brunt of the impact as an explosion of pain so intense he thinks his body’s finally breaking apart.
He lives. The mech drags the Other beneath it and the resonance of a scream echoes through the hole in his mind. Intense, thick hatred slides through his veins. His stomach heaves. He’s crying and he doesn’t know why. The mech shoots point-blank into the white. Again. Again. Each blast shakes the cockpit. Anima watches in horrified, strangled silence as the mech tosses aside the empty gun and tears into the lifeless remains of the Other with its bare hands.
“Adeni, stop.” A new voice in the cockpit, human and transmitted from far away. He wants to scream for help, or at least whimper for it, but he’s still choked by the mech in more ways than one. “Damn it, why can't we pull you? Come home.” When nobody replies, the voice swears under its breath and the connection cuts.
you are mine now. the mech, lighting his mind up like phosphorus with its fury. you are not your father. i hope that’s a good thing.
Please, is all he can think. What he’s begging for he’s not even sure. Just, Please.
this next bit is going to suck for you.
He can’t imagine what could suck more than what’s already happened, until his no-longer-absent heart seems to invert, tearing his chest wide open. His skull splits asunder, mind and cerebral fluid spilling between his ribs—or so it feels. The mech releases his mind and body; he slumps forward to find his chest back in one piece, somehow.
Unfortunately, his new heart seems to have stopped. With an exhausted sigh, he slides off the seat. He’s dead again before he hits the curving floor.
