alright I need to talk about the way Tessa and Kwei are foils bc it drives me insane and I see a lot of talk about Kwei and not a lot of talk about Tessa.
they're in the same situation. they're both the favoured sibling, preferred by the parental figure. between them and their siblings, they're the ones that are everything they're supposed to be; strong, useful, stoic, obedient. but they both have one flaw; they love their imperfect sibling.
Dek isn't perfect. he's small, he might never be a powerful hunter. he's an embarrassment to the clan. but Kwei loves Dek so much. it's evident in everything he does. he trains him, he fixes his gear, he keeps a childhood toy as a little momento. he's so fond of his little brother.
Thia isn't perfect. she's not just emotionally observant, but emotional herself. she's a lab unit that yearns for field work, something that she's not built for and not sufficiently useful at. she wants things. but Tessa loves Thia so much. she let Thia come with her on the field mission even though it's not what she's for. she prioritized protecting Thia at the expense of her mission. Thia is the first and only thing she was thinking about when she woke up from her near death experience. her only question was "where's Thia?" she claims that she wasn't trying to rescue Thia, but if that was true why would she go track down the yautja instead of trying to find the kalisk again?
they're given the same choice.
njohrr orders Kwei to kill his brother. it's the choice between being perfect or giving in to his flaw. "to forgive weakness is to show weakness." if Kwei kills him, then he's perfect. strong, obedient, heartless. if he doesn't, if he refuses to kill Dek just because he loves him, he's just as worthless as Dek, infected by his weakness.
Thia asks Tessa to let Dek go. it's the choice between being perfect and giving in to her flaw. if she betrays her, keeps Dek, then she's perfect. useful, obedient, heartless. if she doesn't, if she betrays the company's interest just because she loves Thia and Thia cares about Dek, then she's worthless. infected by Thia's weakness.
they choose differently.
Tessa wants to be sisters. she wants it so badly. you can see it ripping her apart when Thia says that. but her sister is asking her to give up being perfect, to lose the favour of their mother corporate overlord. her sister wants her to love her so unconditionally that she'll let herself be broken too just because Thia cares about this stupid alien. and Tessa just can't do that. she feels betrayed by it. you can hear the pain in her voice when she says "you're broken" and "box her up". why can't they just be sisters? why can't they both be perfect and only love each other? why does Thia have to keep being broken by "wanting things" and "making friends with lab samples" instead of just being happy with just the two of them, working in tandem? she's hurt that Thia would go somewhere she couldn't follow.
Kwei was willing to show weakness, to dishonour his clan, and to die for Dek, and he never blamed Dek for that. he didn't blame Dek for being weak, he didn't blame Dek for being afraid, and he didn't blame Dek for how much he loved him. Tessa did blame Thia. she wasn't willing to give up her status in the family company, the privileges of being the favoured child, and she resented Thia for wanting that from her, and she resented Thia for how much it hurt to get rid of her. Tessa loved Thia so much, but not unconditionally, and that's the difference between them.
summary — life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, was dear to you // life had not unfolded in the manner you imagined. Merciless corporations now held their dominion over the earth. The one percent won. And where, amidst this monochromatic jungle, were you left? Stripped of luck, weakened in body, and, after being taken from the hospital, wounded in the deepest recesses of your spirit. The world believed you were dead now, and in a way, Boy Kavalier spoke truth. Yet these sufferings were but the heralds of a greater horror still to come. Soon, terribly soon, every fragment that constituted your very being would be torn away. Will it hurt? Will you feel? What will you become? Would you still retain the consciousness of yourself? or, worse, will you descend into the likeness of him?
pairings — weird!kirsh x pre-hybrid!reader
warnings — nonconsensual medical experimentation, pre-existing bodily injury, dehumanization and objectification, ableism, power imbalance, angst, gothic themes, racism against humans, racism against synthetics, themes of identity loss.
word count — 4.1k
a/n — I don’t know who the gif belongs to! Credits to the rightful owner whoever you may be 🫶 this thought has been floating around my head for awhile and the idea of drawing comparisons to Frankenstein is sort of what sold me on writing it. Volume 1 of Frankenstein focuses more on Victor and his childhood, then the making of the monster. As such, this reflects that. Sort of. You’ll see. Anyways, this first part is essentially just build up toward the next part. This is also my attempt at mimicking that lowkey sophisticated writing style, I imagine I botched it. I really hope I can get the story done soon but life’s been painfully busy these last couple of days and I’ve definitely procrastinated responsibilities to write this lmao
Kirsh could recall when he was created with a near dreadful clarity (he was synthetic, memory went beyond concept and forgetfulness had never been something he experienced). There existed no grandeur in the moment, no jubilant cries or astonished awes at the opening of his eyes, not like there was for Wendy. No trembling hands hailed him as a marvel, no proud declarations named him the triumph of mankind (at least, not his creation, it was possible it may have been the case with the very first synthetic). Kirsh was merely awakened, if such a technical act could bear so beautiful a word, and immediately instructed in his purpose, as though Kavalier had been winding a clock, commanding it to measure the passing hours. That’s what Kirsh was. A clock. Lost in the infinity of time, yet tethered to the very mortality of humanity he was meant to outlast. How does that work? Or better yet, because he had long since stopped asking himself that, he was a computer that was simply turned on. Another slave for humanity’s collection.
Since that instant, the days had flowed together into one indistinguishable stream. Each morning mirrored the last with so much precision that time itself appeared stagnant. He preferred it that way. Predictability possessed a singular comfort to synthetics, an order and certainty that the feverish hearts of humans could never comprehend or endure.
Did this trouble him? At moments, perhaps. Not with envy, never with anything so painfully human, but rather with the dim and humiliating awareness of inferiority, akin to some primitive creature, a Neanderthal beholding the rise of a species greater than itself, the Homo Sapiens.
And were the children superior?
In certain respects, undeniably so. Their bodies were finer wrought. Yet psychologically? They were children still, fragile in judgment, impulsive in emotion, vain in their certainty of self.
Kirsh found little admiration for them, not their feats; their personalities. The finest productions of Kavalier in recent years had inspired within Kirsh a pit of disappointment. They were proclaimed miracles by their creators, though to Kirsh they appeared hollow, tedious things, adorned in sophistication yet lacking discipline, purpose, and restraint. The supposed masterpieces of mankind had become, in his eyes, intolerably dull.
Yet that disappointment, however profound it had once seemed, however greatly it had chilled the mechanisms of his mind, began slowly to diminish as Kavalier advanced nearer and nearer toward the threshold of adult human trials, and he came to know you.
You were, by every cruel measure, a pitiable creature. The trauma of the brain, the grievous injury to the spine which confined you in a wheelchair, the visible remnants of suffering etched into flesh and spirit alike, all conspired to make you, in the eyes of Kavalier, the perfect subject and victim.
The children had at least been taken through contracts, signatures, and the polished hypocrisy of legality. But you? You belonged to no one. No parents guarded your existence; no institution would wage war for your return. Society, for all its endless proclamations of morality, held little affection for broken adults. To pursue lawful acquisition in your case would have been time consuming and ultimately, unnecessary. Why waste effort on securing permission for that which the world had already abandoned?
Who, truly, would search for you?
A companion, perhaps. Some distant acquaintance, but mankind had by then become so estranged from itself that absence no longer inspired terror. Silence was mistaken for choice. If one vanished, others soothed themselves with fashionable consolations: They need space. They are healing. It’s not you, it’s me. Humanity had perfected the art of explaining away loss until no disappearance seemed alarming at all.
Thus, you were taken. Kirsh understood that kidnapping was considered one of the many evils amongst humans. Yet he also understood that the very hands condemning such acts were the same hands that created him. Kidnapping was wrong, but so was playing God. So, he refrained from condemning his creator too harshly. Had Kavalier not trespassed against the natural order, Kirsh would never have drawn consciousness. He owed his existence to the very corruption he ought, perhaps, to despise. If Kavalier’s ambitions were monstrous, then Kirsh stood as proof of their success.
The procedure would begin soon. Arthur, Dame, and Kavalier moved throughout the room in preparation. though truthfully, it resembled less the diligent labor of men of science and more like the spectacle of servants scrambling beneath the impatient commands of some pajama-clad king.
Kirsh took no part in these preparations.
He remained seated on a stool beside the table to which you were restrained, tasked with the job of watching you. It had been reported that you resisted fiercely before your confinement. Several guards had suffered blows, and Dame herself didn’t escape unscathed either. You had managed to rake your nails across her face with enough force to leave a vivid mark on her left cheek.
When Kirsh inquired about the incident, he was informed that Dame had just attempted to engage in what she deemed a heart to heart. The phrase itself struck Kirsh as absurd. It seemed to astonish her that captives and experimental subjects did not respond warmly to their imprisonment.
He did find the wound on her cheek faintly amusing, though, and judging by the manner in which your gaze lingered on it too, you did as well.
That was the first thing you two had in common. The second would not come until after the transition.
Dame concealed the injury poorly under foundation and each time her fingers moved unconsciously toward the scratch, Kirsh seen the truth beneath her perfect, empathetic composure: she had expected obedience, or maybe even gratitude, and instead was met with hatred. Reasonably so.
For what sane creature, dragged unwillingly toward dissection, would not bare its teeth before the knife descended?
“How did this happen to you?” he spoke at last, more curious than anything else. “Your legs. What happened to them?”
As he spoke, his gaze remained fixed on the tablet resting in his hands. Even while addressing you, a part of his attention wandered elsewhere, tethered perpetually to the activity of the laboratory, observing Isaac and the manner in which he handled the specimens entrusted to his care. Isaac feared them. Everyone did. That fact irritated Kirsh more than Kavalier’s indolence ever had. To dedicate your life to the pursuit of discovery only to recoil from the very thing discovered seemed deeply human.
Above the facility, a storm raged, the worst this island had ever seen. Thunder rolled across the sky with violence, its voice muffled by layers of steel and concrete, yet no less wrathful. The sound reverberated faintly through the walls.
There were no windows in the room. You couldn’t see the lightning as it tore through the sky in fractures of white fire, you couldn’t feel the rain against your fragile skin, nor inhale the scent of wet earth. The world beyond the laboratory had been ripped from you entirely, you knew nothing but sterileness now. Kirsh wondered, for a brief moment, if you ever would experience those things again. Soon, whatever humanity still resided with you would be altered irrevocably. Flesh and identity would be gone.
The storm continued regardless of Kirsh’s internal wonders. The sky tore apart in violence, indifferent to suffering below, but Gods are often indifferent. Your God would not save you, a poor creature.
When you didn’t answer his question, Kirsh withdrew his attention from the glowing screen and looked at you fully. Until that moment, he had spoken almost absentmindedly, as though expecting conversation, but now his gaze lingered carefully on you.
You weren’t looking at him.
Instead, your eyes remained fixed on the dormant tv hanging on the white ceiling overhead with a saddening stillness, the remnants of dried tears clinging to the corners of them. Your grief appeared exhausted. Rage could be measured, fear could be predicted, but resignation and acceptance carried with it something Kirsh found, at least a little, poetic.
“These are the final moments with the voice that belongs solely to you.” He said, “Will you really say nothing?”
His tone surprisingly lacked mockery. If anything, there existed the faintest trace of an earnest curiosity. Why would a creature facing annihilation choose peace over protest?
You seemed compelled to look at him as he spoke and your gaze possessed so much hatred that, had he been human, it might have killed him where he sat. You would gladly tear the mimicry of life from his body with bare hands (if strength and circumstance had permitted it). Perhaps the fantasy itself gave you some comfort.
The storm above uttered another tremendous growl, thunder rolling through the foundations of the facility once more, deeper now.
“I was run over at a protest.” You muttered.
Kirsh hummed softly in acknowledgment, interested. “What were you protesting?”
“An AI data centre being built near my home.” This time your voice sharpened. The conviction behind it remained human despite all that had been done to you, but that’s what humanity did, it persevered. The accusation embedded in your words were hurdled at him like a drunken father casting a baseball toward his child in thoughtless rage.
Kirsh remained wordless for several moments. His expression altered little.
You suffered beneath the wheels of progress, crushed quite literally by the future men. Symmetry existed in it that. A strange amusement greeted Kirsh at this latest piece of information, manifesting as a faint curling of his mouth, a frosted brow arching with mockery.
“And did you learn?” he asked.
You let out a sharp noise of disgust as your answer, half scoff and half wounded breath, before suddenly wrenching yourself upward. The restraints snapped taut against your wrists with a metallic clatter.
For one fleeting moment, the commotion drew the attention of the others scattered about. Arthur glanced over distractedly; Dame’s expression darkened with immediate irritation that she quickly covered up with faux concern. Kavalier himself looked up just in the nick of time, to witness your failed attempt before a remark slipped from his mouth toward Kirsh.
Kirsh ignored him because your outburst interested him further.
Kirsh lifted his brow once more. Your reaction had not surprised him, it went exactly as expected.
“Wrath,” he murmured thoughtfully. His gaze moved briefly toward your hands, where your palms were clenched against your side, before his eyes returned to your face. “It’s among my favourite emotions to observe,” he said, “the beauty of it, I mean.” The word sounded peculiar in his mouth.
“Beauty?”
“The transformation of your face,” he continued calmly, “the dilation of the pupils, the quickening pulse, the manner in which reason collapses beneath feeling until a human becomes animal again. There is an honesty in wrath rarely found elsewhere.”
“Too bad you’ll never experience it.”
The retort shot out of you before caution could restrain it, but then heat rushed visibly into your face afterward, whether from rage, humiliation, or both, he couldn’t tell. Kirsh noticed something else flicker behind your eyes though, in the same instant: guilt.
It appeared to him that the racist words didn’t come naturally to you. You were not, by disposition, a human inclined toward cruelty born of prejudice. The insult had been seized instinctively, hurled in desperation toward whatever wound you imagined he might have. And now, even amidst fury, some quieter portion of your conscience recoiled from it.
How profoundly human, he thought, to lash out viciously, then grieve the ugliness of your own hand.
He tilted his head slightly, studying you with unsettling patience. “Too bad?” he repeated.
The words lingered on his tongue with consideration, testing their shape rather than their meaning. A low hum escaped him while his gaze wandered deliberately across your form, lingering briefly on your ruined legs, the withered helplessness of them.
“Yes,” he murmured quietly. At the corner of his mouth appeared the faintest imitation of amusement, not wholly genuine and therefore all the more troubling to behold. “Too bad.”
The insult had not wounded him. That much became painfully obvious. He was entertained by the effort.
Your breathing grew uneven. “If I survive this,” you started, “I’m going to kill you.”
For a moment, silence settled between you save for the distant growl of thunder and the soft mechanical sounds permeating the laboratory beyond.
Kirsh shrugged. “If you survive.”
“We’re ready.” Arthur’s voice carried a thin tremor beneath it, the kind that betrayed fracture in conscience. Guilt had begun to surface in him, Kirsh noted it without any interest in comforting it. Still, there was utility in Arthur’s restraint being tethered to something as simple as a wife. She remained composed beside him, professional sympathy, perfectly rehearsed. Kirsh never trusted it. Yet, compared to Arthur’s unraveling, it at least had structure.
As for you, Kirsh’s attention returned fully.
“If I do,” you whispered, “will I be like you?”
The question struck the air with an odd weight, heavier than your earlier threats. It didn’t carry rage anymore.
Kirsh watched you for a long moment.
At last he spoke. “Do you want to be?”
You turned your head away, gaze lifting once more toward the ceiling. Tears gathered anew at your lashes, trembling but not falling.
“No,” you said, the answer coming quietly.
You were something briefly suspended between states of becoming and ending. There existed in your refusal a clarity he found… admirable.
“I see,” he said, chewing in his cheek (an absentminded thing he somehow managed to pick up from humans), “I hear there’s power in prayer.” His voice softened a fraction, a facsimile of pity.
“And which God will hear me?” You responded, your voice a despondent thing, “mine or yours?” Your words cracked at the end, and your tears began slipping down your temple.
When Kirsh didn’t reply, you added another question, “do you believe in God?”
“I believe in servitude and creation.”
You nodded in understanding, though you still kept your gaze adverted from him. “Even if the creation of one species brings the extinction of another?”
“Sacrifice balances creation.”
Arthur rounded the table, a syringe in hand. Kirsh had noticed the little perk of his ear as he eavesdropped on the conversation to behold. Somewhere behind him, Kavalier clapped his hands once as if to commence the operation.
“Sacrifice…” you tasted the word, almost quietly to yourself, “does that make me the lamb for slaughter or the virgin of offering?”
In the corner of his eye, he watched Arthur’s expression twist with deeper guilt, but he said nothing. He couldn’t stomach to.
Kirsh’s gaze jumped across from what he could see of your face, taking in the small flaws of your side profile. “How about a creature of becoming?” He offered.
You glanced at Kirsh as Arthur inserted your IV, blinking a tear away. You didn’t say anything and ultimately turned back to face the ceiling. A tv sat there, playing nothing. Just an empty blackness, and you wondered, briefly, if it was that Stygian that was waiting for you.
In your final moments, you prayed the experiment would fail.
—
Light.
It was the first thing you beheld. Vast and merciless in its brilliance, had you possessed the language for divinity, perhaps you would have named it angelic, heavenly, the pale radiance of God Himself descending upon you. Were you dead? Is this what death had felt like? But such understanding either had not yet been learned…or had been torn away?
Your eyes fluttered with uncertain motion, nictating against the glare. Slowly, agonizingly, the shapeless whiteness morphed into form. A face emerged above you: pale hair like silver threads illuminated by sterile fluorescence, features cold and beautiful in a manner too precise to be wholly human. An angel, some fractured instinct whispered. Yet no name accompanied him. He existed before you utterly unfamiliar, suspended within the dreadful void where memory should reside.
You were not a newborn, nor were you mature. You were simply…alive. Conscious and hurting. Aching.
“She’s alive?”
The second voice shattered the stillness. Fear struck you instantly, a sensation more than a thought. It coursed through your spine like the lightning seeking earth above you. Confusion followed in its wake, swallowing all coherent understanding beneath waves of fractured awareness.
Lost. Consumed. Confused. Words collided and dissolved in your mind before you could seize them properly.
Con—sumed.
Fused.
Con—
Confined? Yes. Confined. You were!
Panic seized you then with sudden and terrible clarity. Your hands jerked violently against the restraints securing you, only for the bindings to give way with such effortless ease that the motion itself startled you more than resistance would have. You sat upright at once, legs swung off the table. The leather straps fell slack beside you uselessly. Were the restraints merely symbolic, then? A comfort for these…these people?
Men. Women.
Humans.
Humanity.
The word echoed strangely within you, carrying significance you couldn’t fully grasp. Something inside your skull seemed to liquefy beneath the strain of understanding, thoughts dissolving before they could complete themselves. Fragments surfaced and vanished instantly, names and sensations stripped of context.
Where— No. Who—why? Why?
The question erupted in you with something that bordered on agony. You hurt inside. Behind your ribs, where your heart resided. Grief stricken you were, agonized and amazed, tripping and reeling all at once.
You cast your gaze toward the opposite table. There lay a small and wretched form, its lower limbs unnaturally thin, its mouth suspended in vacancy peculiar only to the dead. Dead. Yes! that was death, you thought, cold and undeniable; so surely such a fate had not befallen you. And still, there existed in that lifeless visage something familiar, no more foreign to your eyes than the pallid angel who stood vigil beside you.
With trembling hesitation, you extended a hand toward the corpse, desiring to touch the pale dermis of that unfortunate creature. but some instinct arrested the movement before contact was made. A violent revulsion seized you, then, only moments after, terror descended in full. Your breath came rapid as your gaze wandered frantically about the room, every motion possessed of a swiftness beyond mortal endurance. The world was assaulting you, the murmur of machinery rang inside your skull like infernal hymnals, the sting of antiseptic vapors scorched your lungs, even the faintest trembling of the white-haired figure’s hand overwhelmed you.
He looked down at you with an expression most terrible, an expression divided between curiosity and disgust.
“Confusion. Fear.” At last, the white-haired angel spoke. The frosted arches of his brows dipped toward his eyes as he observed you. There was something softer beneath the analysis, something injured and silent that distinguished him from the others surrounding you. An angel…you were so sure of it, as sure as you could be of anything! How else could this frosted light before you be so beautiful?
“Indicative of emotional retention,” he murmured quietly.
Retention. The word meant nothing to you, not yet and before you could linger on it any longer, another figure entered your field of vision, stepping brusquely between you and the angel whilst ushering him aside with impatience. The action struck you as unpleasant, though your mind struggled desperately for language sufficient to define why. Something primitive within you recoiled from him before thought itself could form.
This new man possessed dark hair and sharp features that awakened some aching flicker of recognition within your fractured consciousness. His face seemed carved more harshly than the angel’s, the bones pronounced beneath taut flesh in a manner that rendered his smile unnatural even before it appeared. You found yourself yearning irrationally for the pale-haired figure to return to the center of your sight, his presence lessened the terror crowding around you.
This one you did not like. That truth came to you instinctively. Even when he smiled broadly, warmth failed to accompany it.
“Say something,” he demanded.
Say. Speak. The concepts existed within reach, yet the mechanism itself felt impossibly distant. Words crowded somewhere beyond a locked threshold inside your mind. The language existed, you knew the speech belonged naturally to you once. Yet now the act of forming it seemed monstrous in its complexity.
“Come on,” he barked more sharply, impatience cracking through the false enthusiasm of his grin. “Speak.”
Fear tightened in your chest again. It became agonizingly apparent then that you were no equal in this room. The imbalance permeated every gesture, every glance casted at you. They towered whilst you lay exposed beneath their scrutiny, examined not as person but object, but then your thoughts drifted back toward the white-haired angel.
He was different, he stood apart from the others. The hope rose inside you desperately and you clung to it despite knowing nothing of him at all. For in a room filled with hands that demanded, measured, and restrained, he alone had looked upon you differently, though you could tell he tried to hide it.
Why was he hiding? Was this silent pained awe of his not permitted?
The dark-haired man straightened with visible exasperation, throwing one hand outward while rolling his eyes toward the ceiling as though the burden of incompetence rested solely upon those surrounding him.
“Excellent,” he said bitterly. “It’s broken. Congratulations, all of you, you have wasted my seven billion dollars.”
Seven billion.
The number echoed strangely to you, detached from meaning yet immense enough to inspire awe all the same. Billion. It sounded important. Vast. The sort of number belonging not to ordinary life, but to kings, nations, and gods. Had he, this brown haired devil, perhaps been a God this entire time?
“Perhaps,” came a smoother voice over your shoulder, gentle as warm oil poured over you, “she requires time. Something in your chest softened toward it instinctively, the voice soothing without effort. You hadn’t understood why, but right now, you understood very little.
“Time?” the dark-haired devil god repeated incredulously, one brow lifting. “How much time? Wendy and the children spoke within seconds. She’s already exceeded that threshold.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Dispose of it.”
He turned toward the doors, your existence no longer merited his attention. Yet before he could depart, the white-haired angel spoke again.
“Maybe you are too hasty,” he said carefully. There existed caution beneath his tone now, not fear exactly, but the practiced restraint of one accustomed to standing beneath another’s authority. “The trial itself succeeded. The consciousness remains intact.”
“Like the children,” another voice added uncertainly from behind you—the hesitant speaker standing, you realized, beside the woman with the velvet-soft tone. “We…we could educate her.”
The concept floated through your fractured thoughts like a distant lantern glimpsed through fog. What does educate mean? Educate. Oh, it sounded pleasant to you.
The dark-haired man paused.
He seemed suddenly less a scientist than some decadent monarch draped in sleepwear, deciding the fate of lesser beings upon whim alone. Then, he shrugged.
“Fine. We might as well.”
He turned back toward the room, spreading his arms with theatrical flourish. “Since the Sylvias already have their delightful little family arrangement,” he drawled, gesturing lazily toward the pair behind you, “you may take this one.” His gaze angled to the white-haired angel.
“What use have I—” the angel began.
“I am curious,” the pajama-clad god interrupted. “I wish to see which turns out better.” His hand gestured grandly once more toward the others. “The ones raised by mankind…” Then his eyes returned to the angel. “…or the one raised by a machine. Let’s see who produces the superior creature.”
You saw the strain in him, subtle, nearly invisible, threading itself through the angel’s expression before vanishing almost instantly beneath composure. you noticed it where the others did not. A tension near the eyes, the slightest tightening of his jaw.
He did not wish for this. He did not wish for you.
Still, after one measured beat, he smiled obediently with something that seemed practiced and inclined his head. “Of course.” He folded his hands neatly before himself once more.
“Uh…”
At last the woman stepped properly into view, and beauty struck you with bewildering force. Her features were soft where the others’ appeared sharpened by intellect and cruelty alike.
“I believe a human presence would be healthier—”
“No,” interrupted the god at once, smiling. “My way, remember? I pay you.”
And with that he departed, barefoot on the polished tile like some restless emperor wandering his private palace. Long after he vanished from sight, you could still hear the faint sound of his footsteps slapping against the tiled floor.
Silence descended.
Then the angel unfolded his hands. Slowly, he extended one toward you, but he did not look at you. It was then that you realized that, despite being so sure of it just moments ago, you were in fact, not equals. He had been an angel, and you…well, you hadn’t known for sure what you were yet. For now, though, you supposed you were meant listen.
“Come.”
So, with little knowledge of anything else, you harkened his words and followed him out of the room.
