deliverance.
@neosungki , phase 3
when gun comes by, when he tells her the augmentations are down, the lot of them, there are those who would have expected yani to scheme and scramble. to go straight to someone who could help her get the upper hand on the man who’s put a bomb in her brain set to detonate. there are plenty in her place who would have fought back against the forced silence with resentment and fury. there are those who might expect her to set up some kind of fail safe to keep herself guarded for the future.
but yani think’s of one thing - a boy with soft eyes and a metal skeleton, with the weight of the world on his shoulders already. a boy who is lacking, now, in the strength to keep himself upright. so when gun leaves, she gets to work. how she comes by the wheelchair is neither strictly legal nor strictly necessary to share about.
she’s at his place in no time, lets herself in. she wouldn’t, normally. she’d at least call ahead. and maybe she’s wrong and maybe he’s not here and she can slip away again, but if she’s right and all of this is hitting him as hard as it must be, she’s sure she’ll find him here. in the end she does. he’s slumped on the balcony, leaning back against the window, head hanging low. he looks impossibly small, here, no sign of the man that brings down goliaths in the ring, no vision of the herculean gladiator that entertains the masses. just pinocchio, the shadow of a real boy. she’s sure he can hear the exhalation of her breath, a whoosh that comes from deep in the pit of her heart and out of her lungs as she drops to her knees beside him, gentle when she takes his hands in hers. they’re ever so slightly too cool too the touch, blood and tissue stretched over lifeless titanium. “hey,” she murmurs, sweeps hair from his eyes and ducks her head to seek out his gaze. “sungki, hey, can you hear me?”
she wonders, without the modifications, how much of him is gone? how much remains?
it’s the first time divide between man and machine has been so stark and unavoidable, and she finds it frightens her.
