A shrekified version of Steel and @echoise ‘s Keith >:’) Also, Chen in some leather-pants and other medieval-fantasy-romance-literature attire (like chest hair).
The only bad part of writing a part two to anything (part one is right here), is that if your title was bad the first time around, it must now be even worse.
But that is ok!! @echoise‘s Keith is finally getting some cool new hands (this was so cathartic for me to write, you have no idea), and it’s even more abstract than last time, somehow ;u;
To keep with the themes of part one, there are quite a few mentions of God (Catholic ones) in here, and implied nerve damage talk - the rest is soft and vague.
m!Sidestep, Steel, ~1,655 words.
You’re folded into the script this time, given lines and words and ideas - your name snug behind the colon, tucked behind half-truths and vague honesties. God drafts you into fear and pain - paints it across the letters and then over Wei’s face - tells you he’s wracked with pity and regret. Unable to understand why he is trying to help you - you also paint that over his face and say it’s suddenly his. Say you’re not writing his lines for him, running in rages and squabbles in your mind - you tell him the script is God’s, and you are not God.
He takes you through a hall of prototypes - each new material in your hands begging for opinion and appraisal and approval. Steel, Chen, Wei - looking for that approval. But you hold the synthetic skin and feel only static, hold the smooth metal and feel a pen scribbling black marks around and across and inside. Helpless, you realise, and almost throw hundreds of dollars on the floor just to watch them scatter into smithereens. Fragments. Pieces of you falling and careening as you close your eyes. Inhale. Break through and mutter, “Not this one.”
In mercy, in absolution, he takes it from you, forces a polite smile, and gives you another metal. You think it’s a metal. You look at it and it shines and it blinds you - it’s a metal. He puts it beneath your hands, asks you to feel, and you bask in the instant regret on his face. The balk and blanche of guilt - you let your anger wrap itself around and around, choking, constricting, then you let go. Wei’s mind softens and you let go, realising he’d have let you keep going. You let go, and the guilt is your own.
Wei puts a replica of his own hands in yours - offers you salvation through the dead, useless nerves. You flinch, mind turning blank, and stare. You see your hands around the metal - around the steel - recognise them as your own but feel nothing. The weight pulls at your forearms but leaves your fingertips numb. “Definitely not,” you speak to the scars over your thumbs and knuckles. I want to look like me. Not you.
Another, this time against your arm, perhaps in some vain hope of feedback. Co-operation - because you thrash and bite and growl, but your face stays pleasant and still. Just still.
You know it should be beneath your hands - you know you should connect with your hands. Everyone does. Everyone’s connection to the world is through their hands. Yet, while yours are right in front of you, there is no connection. No Feeling. Nothing.
You try not to remember what you’d once had - instead lavishing that attention on the hands of others: wonderful beneath your mouth, hateful beneath your fingers. Drink the poison from the fingernail and fingertip - you wrap yourself in what you loathe to call jealousy.
You give Wei a defeated look, trying not to turn angry - trying not to let the resentment, frustration, fury behind your hands, behind your face, behind the words that were written down for you explode.
He notices, because of course he does. He knows you too well - you panic, draw away, then back into his orbit because you cannot let go. Refuse to let go. He knows the meaning behind every little twitch in your face and you hate that too. The anger becomes solid in your chest - it becomes your sternum and it goes through your ribs to trap your chest and make the breaths short and sharp. Like your words - when you speak, you ask, “Why?”
“Why?” he echoes, and you feel your mind skitter away from his.
“Why are you doing this?”
He decides not to play stupid, and you try to push down the gratefulness. You owe him nothing. “You agreed to let me help,” and you know. But that wasn’t what you meant.
“Why does it matter to you?” you hear the words buzz in his mind before he can say them. He doesn’t - grateful again, and you shoot it down. “Really?” because you may as well take what is given to your face, lie or otherwise.
Wei nods and you let it be enough, knowing you’ll rage and burn all over again if you press. If you press and aren’t given what you are looking for - rejection, an admittance that he’s lying to you, using you. So you let it be enough.
Every time you pick up another prototype, you don’t. Not really. You know you’re holding it - you see your hand holding it up, but the hand is not yours. It is joined at the wrist, but it lies to you in feeling and weight. Wei takes the synthetic monstrosity from you before you can drop it.
God cuts you from the wrists down and tells you you’re fine.
He wrestles another metal into your hands - it’s failure, this time. You can feel it - taste it - taste the iron in the blood. You hate it again, wracked with hate - wracked with disgust at the things given to you. In this sterile room - clinical samples which you turn in your hands before asking - no, pleading, “Why?”
He dares, this time, “Because I c-“
“No,” and your self-worth plummets to the ground. “Why are you really doing this? Any of this?”
He says nothing, of course he does, and you push again, knowing he’s hiding something. Has to be. Trying to make you rely, kneel, obey-
“Is it that hard for you to believe I care?” that anyone cares?
Static sits behind your fingers, sits behind your skin - not bone deep, not quite - fluttering somewhere within your veins, arteries, treating them to shockwaves of static in grey, white, black noise. And you can’t feel anything through that.
You feel - you laugh, God laughs - the enormity of Christ laughs behind you, behind the throat you have, behind the arms you were given and then had taken away. Your body ends at the wrist because there is nothing after that. The blank space of your hands laughs - you laugh.
Of course it’s hard to believe - you expect me to trust you just like that? But he sighs, endlessly patient and just when had you earned that.
“I’d take you for a liar,” but Steel understands before you say it - you can feel the truth ringing in his mind. It almost makes you angrier, but you sober - bring yourself to heel, if only for a moment. “But I can’t do this.” He wasn’t expecting that one - opens his mouth to object but you cut him off, “Not like this.”
A light, and you see Wei holding back a quiet smirk, “Not like this?”
You shake your head, wrestling with the blistering, lying hope you feel crawling up your chest. Can you trust him not to fold you into his script? Can you trust him not to trap you in the same way he has been bound? Can you force yourself to rely on him for something as painful as this?
“Then we’ll find another way,” but he already knows. You look, and it’s hope. And you hide it behind yet another line, another script, another piece of code that tells you to keep your face blank and cold. But Steel catches you with a smile - echoed in turn - and you let something deep in your mind loosen, relax, and rely.
———————————————————————————————————
You can’t feel the cast around your hand, not properly, but Wei holds your free one in his to squeeze and reassure, lets you know patience is all he needs from you. He lets you talk him through the design, sketches it when you cannot, makes sure to smooth the scars and rough skin from the casts once they dry. “You’ll feel more than you do now,” never as much as you once could, but so much more all the same. “You’ll articulate better too - no more shaking.” None at all, not even the natural, human quivers you would get when cold.
But you look at your hands, criss-crossed with scars and blemishes and burns - look back at Steel as the static thrums beneath your skin.
And you dive in headfirst.
You spend too many nights up drinking what you shouldn’t, looking at what you shouldn’t, doing what you shouldn’t. Breaking laws you don’t know the names to, making the government’s brow crease into a frown, and the Farm’s deeper still. A forgery - but better, he tells you - designed entirely on your own terms. Yours alone. His hands move in your stead, but he ensures that the mind is always yours - orders, always yours. Together, you break the Farm’s fingers into pieces, the government’s hands into fragments, and in active defiance, you move closer to daybreak. He plays God, and you act in kind beside him. You both play God. And when those hands are made and formed, you know they came from the maw of God.
———————————————————————————————————
You unfurl the script this time, scrape away the old lines with hands that move and feel and stand firm. The words, with their accompanying ideas - you wipe the slate clean until their imprints fade, tucking your name, Wei’s too, behind colons. Leaving the following space blank - no draft, no fear, no pain. You catch Wei’s fond smile from across the table and return it with an edge of ease - not as hard as before, but not simpler either. When he speaks, it’s warm - it burns, but you hold, hold - and wrap it around your shoulders.
The coffee cup sits warm and full between your palms.
And you smile.
@rimetin ‘s Keith Kwon who is such a beautiful soul >:’O He deserves a good life. A nice life.
(Also, check out @tinta--writes for some brilliant fics about Keith, so good, “Of Hands and Holding”)
