[ * cw i suppose for isolation, child abuse, implied child death[? they werent really alive in the first place more just child corpseish things]. also some existential stuff. sorry if i dont pick up something that needed to be tw'd here ^^' ]
[ * man fuck WD. i dont care if the whole 'you dont choose who you are in this world' was helpful storywise ya didnt have ta fuck up and like ]
[ * yk. make me sapient before discarding me. ]
[ * the same story had happened so many times. so many futures and past and whatever the sideways version of time is versions of me. ]
[ * all individual yet so the same. ]
[ * i was essentially a child. my body and its ability to function? teenager, but my knowledge was limited. ]
[ * i still remember when i first learned i could speak. i didnt even think about it, i had a deep fall after tripping on one of the corpse-trash-dusty other-time mes and yelped. i remember how it rang in my ears and felt far. far too loud. ]
[ * the discarded place was so. so so quiet. ]
[ * yk you couldn't even see the ground. it was just soulless bodies. ]
[ * nobody told me they were like me but i knew they were like me. ]
[ * also it wasn't cold or anything. or warm. but that didnt mean it was comfortable or anything, everything just felt so horribly still. ]
[ * it felt like i had to keep moving and making footstep sounds or else the quiet would eat me alive. ]
[ * i still dont like quiet now but the quiet thats in the overworlds is normally far far louder then the ones in the discarded place. ]
[ * sorry for the long post, wanted to complain about the place that i spent the majority of my time in source in. ]
[ * - The Discarded Vessel, from Deltarune. [cy/key/netty if you wish to refer to me.] [please tag as fictive!] ]
Its blank visage reflected Connie Maheswaran’s face.
The titan was inert, standing as a quiet sentinel in the corner of the ancient chamber. Coloured in a rose-gold, the design was sleek, almost like an art deco sculpture; Connie remembered a robot in an old German film that resembled it somewhat. The form was feminine in shape, likely based on a gem’s body, and despite the dusty surroundings, its metal form still shone.
The joints somewhat resembled a porcelain doll or a mannequin, yet impossibly tight. The feet tapered into what looked like wide boots of a similar shape to Peridot’s old limb enhancers, and the arms ended in a stub, the fingers laying inertly on the floor next to the machine. The torso, she thought, resembled White Diamond’s - even the patterning was about the same, except for the imprint of the Diamond Authority over the chest.
From a distance, she might have thought it was some kind of upper-class gem. But then she looked at the face, and the illusion faded away. The machine was hairless, light reflecting off the top of the scalp, and there was no sign of anything resembling a face - no indents for eyes, no facsimile of a nose, no patterns for a mouth. It was entirely blank, and reflective enough that Connie could see her face through it as if looking through a mirror.
It was almost entrancing.
It had already been a pretty mediocre day for Connie. Most days when she and Steven had to come to Homeworld tended to be. Steven couldn’t stand the place, even after all these years, and it clearly affected his mood. But they came here once a year, because the Diamonds were family now, and family visited each other (even if Steven could barely conceal his loathing for them.) The tension in the throne room (and the doting Diamonds’ inability to read Steven’s mood) had grown too much to bear, and she’d taken a moment to explore the palace. Anything to get some breathing space.
Unlike Steven, Connie could at least appreciate Homeworld, if only for the promise of its technology and the strange beauty of its architecture. She figured she’d need to know more about it, if she ever wanted to open diplomatic relations between here and Earth, after all, and trying to like the place wouldn't hurt either. But there was one place, just out the window, that still sent shivers down her spine.
The cage in the tower. It had been preserved as a ‘historic place,’ but when Connie remembered her stay there, she wished they’d just torn the thing down.
That was actually how she’d ended up in this chamber. She’d sighted the hideous thing in a hallway mirror, become lost in thought, walked into a door and tumbled down a ramp into this long-forgotten room, and this lonely titan.
There were other machines in the room, but they were dusty and inert, and mostly looked like computers. It was the robot that caught her eye, standing silently at attention, it’s head bowed to look down at her. She’d never seen anything like this on Homeworld - robonoids didn’t tend to be humanoid, after all.
Natural inquisitiveness took over.
She turned away from the titan, walking over to one of the old terminals - it must have been truly ancient, because it had a large screen like a monitor, except built into the terminal. It reminded her a bit of those old nuclear power station terminals.
Carefully, she rubbed a hand over the monitor, clearing some of the thick dust. For a moment, nothing happened - then there came a dull whirr and a dim light, and writing appeared on the screen, red and blinking.
“It says… that’s Gem, I can’t read that,” she muttered to herself.
She looked down at the buttons below but did not touch them - she was curious, not stupid. They didn’t resemble any keyboard she’d ever seen; instead there were a series of levers, switches and buttons, scattered haphazardly across the surface. At the bottom was an imprint of two diamonds - Connie wiped some more dust away and found that they were white and black.
“...black?” she whispered.
She pondered. Perhaps, deep in the past, there had been some kind of… no, that sounded too much like an edgy fanfiction theory.
She did another circuit of the room, but there was nothing else she could see of note; there were no murals, no sculptures, no other machines of note. It seemed it had been nothing more than a sterile lab, researching or developing the titan; but what for? What was it meant to be?
There were no more answers here, she thought. She’d make her way back to the throne room, and maybe there she could question Yellow about it, not that she really expected any answers. Was it an old soldier bot? A suit of armour? Part of her thought she’d never know.
She was just walking to the door when she heard a creak under her foot. Her gaze shot down, just in time to see her foot pressing down on a pressure plate.
“A pressure plate?” she asked herself. “Really? What kind of Montana Jones stuff is-”
With a thunderous crash, a door slid down over the exit, and red lights began to flash around her. She spun around, and her eyes fell on the titan.
Or rather, where the titan had been.
The statuesque figure had gone, and the corner was empty. Connie’s eyes darted around, but she could see it nowhere else; but she could have sworn she felt a dim hum in the air.
The air…
She looked up.
There was a blur - something shot across the roof with inhuman speed, and she spun left to follow it. With a thud, the titan landed, standing between her and the closed door, towering over her. Instinctively she went for her sword, and cursed as she realised she’d left it at home for ‘diplomatic reasons.’
The titan hummed again, slightly louder this time, and seams that had not been there formed on the chest and head - the metal slid aside, revealing a mostly hollow interior.
Hollow, that was, save for the dozens of strange disks, the two long cables starting to extend from the stomach area, and the giant needle just at the base of the spine.
Connie glanced at the spike for about two seconds.
“No,” she said. “No, I know where this is going, nope, nope, nope…”
Sweating, she glanced around for an exit, any exit - her eyes fell on a small opening just below the ceiling - a vent, surely! It was dark, but she couldn’t see any bars or grates - this might be her best chance.
With the practiced agility of a swordfighter (and tennis player besides), Connie turned and leapt upwards, reaching the vent with her fingers. Grunting, she tugged herself upwards, and barely, just barely, fit in the opening.
She did it, she thought! She was home free! She-
She extended her hand and hit a grate, obscured by the darkness.
No. No, no, no, no, no! She wasn’t going to be stopped by a grate! She shoved her hands forward, pressing against the cool metal surface as hard as she could, but it held stubborn. She tried again, and again, and again - bash! Bash! Bash!
A cold metal snake, like a shower cord, began to wrap around her ankle, and her blood ran cold.
“No!” she exclaimed. “Come on!”
She smashed against the vent again, but it didn’t even budge. Then there was a sharp tug, and she was flying backwards - her hands flailed for the edge of the vent but missed it by inches. Gravity took hold, and she fell roughly onto the hard metal floor - her shoulder throbbed, and she let out a cry.
The machine didn’t care. It continued to drag her across the floor, and now the second coil had wrapped around her free arm. She was being dragged back, back towards the titan, into it’s waiting maw - and towards the giant needle.
“Don’t… don’t do this!” she exclaimed. “I-I-I know the Diamonds!”
She cringed, imagining those being her last words. She tugged harder, ignoring the searing pain in her shoulder, pulling for dear life as her neck and spine came closer and closer to the needle. If she just pulled a little harder…
The process seemed agonisingly slow.
She felt the cold metal tip on the base of her spine first, and the adrenaline stretched her perception of time long enough to know exactly what it meant.
Then in it went.
Connie screamed. She could feel it as the needle broke into her spinal cord, and she could have sworn she heard bone crush. Then it was into the nerve, and suddenly the feeling of it entering bone was downright pleasant in comparison. Her arms and legs twitched violently, her heart pounded, all her muscles strained.
When everything below her head fell limp, it was almost a mercy.
Her eyes darted down - she tried to say anything, but her voice simply would not work. Her body hung below her like a ragdoll, her legs limply hanging out of the machine. An outside observer might have thought she was sitting. One of the cords unwrapped themselves from her arm, grabbing her free leg - almost tenderly, they were tucked into the legs of the titan. It was like she was being suited in armour, except unfathomably worse.
As the arms followed, Connie felt a distinct heat - there was something warming up in the suit, not around her head, but close enough for her to feel it. Of course, her arms and legs were totally numb - they could be being hard boiled, and she wouldn’t have felt it.
Was this it? Was she going to die here? Even if she lived, she’d be a paraplegic…
There was a sharp, stabbing feeling in the back of her head, and she screamed again. Her head pounded, and she could hear a strange, cool voice in her mind.
“...EMOVING EXCESS MASS.”
Her eyes darted down - just out of the corner of her vision, she could see a glowing around her shoulders and waist. What was happening? Did she want to know? There was a feeling returning in her legs, but it was cold, inorganic, artificial.
What was happening to her?
The feeling returned in her arms, but this too was alien - her fingers felt strange and floaty, and there was a sense of numbness from the tips of her fingers to her shoulders. She couldn’t move anything. She cried to cry out again, to call for the Diamonds, for Steven, for anyone, but her voice again refused to respond.
“ENCLOSING.”
Her eyes darted down again - the chest of the titan was closing, trapping her own in the suit. She could hear loud clamping and grinding noises - there was a sickening sizzle, and she could have sworn she smelt some kind of cooking meat.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
She was done, absolutely done. She thrashed her head forward, trying to shake her body free of the metal beast. It did not even sway, and she felt bile building up in her throat - the very concept of what might be happening made her feel sick, and for all the horrors her imagination produced, she feared the reality was worse.
In the corner of her eye, she saw the sides of the head beginning to retract. She struggled frantically as the curtain was drawn over her vision - she had to get out, she had to get out…
Darkness.
She was keenly aware of the tightness of her situation - her nose almost brushed the back of the titan’s blank mask, and she could smell her warm breath.
She felt… something slithering into her ear canals, something cold and slimy. She opened her mouth to try to scream, only for more to slide in there, forcing her jaw open. It was like a half-dozen worms were forcing their way into her body, crawling their way into her head.
There was a sensation in her brain stem - or at least, she thought so. There really wasn’t a point of comparison. More worms, smaller this time, crawled into her eyes, forcing her eyelids to remain open, slithering behind her eyeballs and—
It was as if a switch attached to her brain had been switched off.
The feeling was bizarre - Connie still knew that something was happening; that strange machines were interfacing with her mind - but it was as though her ability to care had been deactivated. With a sudden, total dispassion, she noticed the worms harden into cables, holding her head in place.
She knew her mind was being and read and mapped, in the same way one might know of the billions of microbes crawling through their body at any one time, but her capacity to fear the matter had been deactivated. She waited, quietly and patiently, as the strange machine surveyed her very soul, and in doing so began to activate new subroutines.
Millions of tiny nanites were now crawling over the skin of the titan, reforming the rose-golden facade. From the back of the scalp formed lumps that eventually became a fine sculpture of hair, like one might see on a marble statue; an exact replica of Connie’s hairdo. More nanites ran across the ground, gathering matter from the floor, weaving it like Arachnia on her web until dusty marble had been churned into a long, golden sword. This lifted into one of the titan’s hands, the fingers closing gingerly around the hilt.
Her consciousness seemed almost to move, and her human body numbed into irrelevance. She felt floating fingers and powerful feet, and a hard skin made from an alloy unlike anything on Earth. She felt no eyes, but her vision returned; no ears, but sound; no nose, but scent; no mouth, but the taste of dust in the air.
There was no longer distinction between the entrapped human and her pitiless jailor. The iron titan was Connie, and Connie was the iron titan. She was the suit and the woman.
She was the sarcophagus and the body.
All these things she considered dispassionately, like a machine herself, as the voice in her head spoke once more.
“CONTACTING ADMIN FOR CONTROL PERMISSIONS. ERROR. ADMIN NOT FOUND. FACTORY SETTINGS WILL BE APPLIED IN FIVE SECONDS… APPLYING…”
The switch turned back on.
It was like she was a puppet with her strings cut - she fell to her - no, its knees with a loud metallic crash, dropping the sword. She tried to breathe, she needed to breathe, but nothing happened; her chest remained still. She gazed at fingers that hovered above featureless wrists, at shining metal skin that remained still, unburdened by the motion of pulse, heart and lungs. Yet her brain screamed - she needed to breathe, she needed to get out, she needed to get out…
She leapt up with power she didn’t realise she had, and crashed through the roof with a sickening crunch. Upwards she went, through layers and layers of masonry, until she burst into light.
She hovered over the centre of the throne room, the Diamonds towering over her with wide eyes. Below her was Steven, who had toppled onto his back and was staring at the interloper with shock - she could hear the shouts of Amethysts and Jaspers around her, and the sounds of feet rushing back and forth in alarm.
“What is that?!” exclaimed Steven. “You- you told me you got rid of the superweapons!”
“The Titan?” White tilted her head. “That can’t be active! It needs an organic host!”
Connie crashed to the ground in front of Steven, the suit kicking up plumes of dust and fragments of the floor. She clutched the machine’s head, pulling as hard as she could, desperate to remove the mask. Steven immediately jumped to his feet, drawing his shield.
“Is it malfunctioning?” Blue exclaimed.
“We’ll have to deactivate it,” sighed Yellow. “I knew we should have spaced the wretched thing…”
Connie felt their voices slip away as she gazed into Steven’s shield, seeing herself reflected.
There stood a giant, pitiless machine, rose-gold in colour, sleek and beautiful and utterly inhuman. From a distance, it might be confused for a gem…
...save for the blank face, reflecting Steven’s grimace, a snarl of annoyance on his lips.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice tired, “and how do we get rid of it?”
Once more, Connie fell to her knees, processing the faceless visage reflected in the mirror. It couldn’t be her, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be…
There came a flat, mechanical voice.
“Steven.”
Steven’s eyebrows rose.
“It knows my name?” he asked. “And why does it sound like…”
White’s eyes widened, her irises shrinking.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh no.”
Steven glanced from Connie to White and back again, his eyes tracing the shape of the Titan’s hair; his expression slowly darkened into what could only be described as a very dangerous calm.
“Steven,” Connie said, her voice flat and emotionless. “Please. Get me out.”
Steven’s fist clenched.
“White,” he whispered. “What did you do?”
A sense of mental exhaustion washed over Connie; perhaps it was imagined, but she could not reconcile the reflection in the shield as her, and yet she knew it was, and the paradox wracked her already overtaxed brain to the limit. Her vision darkened, and merciful numbness took over.
The world went black, but she did not fall. With the last of her consciousness, she could feel the titan standing straight, like a soldier at attention, waiting for orders.
Then, at long last, she drifted away, and the body in the sarcophagus slumbered.
I did briefly consider having her time travel to the beginning of the series and be frozen in place outside the temple, but that was a bit too on the nose.
This was inspired by reading @universallywriting‘s ‘Moon’s Haunted,’ so if you haven’t read that, please do, it’s much better than that. Basically made me want to do a scary Connie-related story.
I remember a couple things about my parents. This is pretty bad stuff, just as a warning.
They mostly ignored me, for starters. I think the tutors they hired to teach me and the staff did more parenting than they ever really did. My mother was too busy shmoozing other nobles, and my dad was too busy doing business stuff all the time. I was supposed to stay out of his offices. I think my mother forgot my name sometimes. She'd say something close, or she'd blink a few times like she was cycling through information before arriving at the correct name. It was lonely.
The tutors would get annoyed with me for not really being able to follow along with their lessons. I'm like. Pretty sure I was neurodivergent in some way. And it made studying really hard for me. They'd tell my mother I was slacking off, and she would slap me over it. At least one time, she locked me in a room for a couple hours with a stack of books and nothing else. Normally, when the tutors were there, I'd doodle while I worked or while the tutors talked, and they would snatch my paper away and make me fully restart (if it was work) or sit on my hands (if it was lecture).
I liked to draw quite a bit. In the anime, I showed one of my drawings to my father and he ripped it up in front of me and told me to go study. In my memory, this was a multiple-time thing. Eventually, I stopped showing him. Somehow, my mother kept finding them and throwing them away. I started hiding the ones I was proud of because I was scared of losing them. I hid my colors, too.
I think I took a notepad of paper with me when I ran away. To draw on. I don't know if I ever showed Ace or Luffy. I think I would've been too afraid of them ripping it up like my parents did.
Pro tip don't make fanfiction based off your source If you're not prepared for crazy new memories. Guy who I touched one fanfiction and now I'm remembering that I WASN'T ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE. Henry fuckin Miller everyone, give a big hand for the worst guy ever.
