Horror prompt: It's Asexual Awareness Week, so let's see a piece where intimacy or relationships, or the lack thereof, are the focus of the horror.
Ooooh thank you!! Haven't written something for Terra in a hot minute, so here's this!
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Be Right Back
Word Count: 1.4k
Tags: horror, uncanny valley, mentions of grief, swearing, spoilers for Arcane season 2
Crossposted on AO3
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She remembered the battle.
She remembered the way Vi had caught her, face between both callused hands, and stared her dead in the eyes.
"I know one of those things used to be him," she'd said, "But it's not him anymore. It's not. It's a fucking hivemind, and Pluto is gone. Don't do anything stupid."
And then she'd run off to her next role in the battle, and left Terra standing shell-shocked in the corner. No matter how true they were, no matter how they'd probably saved her life, the words had shaken her. Continued to shake her.
Maybe leaving would help. Abandoning Zaun and Piltover entirely, putting aside all those sights and sounds that still reminded her of him - the alleyway where they'd met, the little cot still shoved under her worktable in the tailor's shop, even the uneven curbs and sidewalk cracks that she'd think to warn him of once he started losing his sight. Some of those little impulses would never leave, she thought, he'd been too much a fixture in her life to leave so soon. But maybe being rid of the rest would make it hurt a little less.
The only things she hated to leave behind were her hands. They'd been too damaged after the battle, and she'd had to leave Pluto's handiwork behind with the rest of the wreckage. Ekko had done his best with the replacements, and they were faithful tributes to what they'd been, but... they weren't Pluto's. Save for the ring finger on the right hand - Vi had surprised her with the salvage after the battle, in an act that seemed both apology and a strange sort of proposal - those machines he'd spent so long perfecting were gone for good.
In a way, that made it more permanent. They were the part of her that belonged to him- or the part of him that belonged to her. The lines had blurred over time, but the meaning was all the same.
Terra stared as those new hands, bolder and more colorful than the original models, as she lifted yet another moving box and carried it down to the cargo hold. New beginnings. She'd never been on an airship before.
She managed the steps down, peering carefully around the hefty box in her arms, before she noticed a looming, angular shadow cast across the dim room. It was far too tall, far too thin, a haunting caricature that chilled her with just a glance. Just a trick of the light, she thought, haphazard arrays of items or even just her own shadow warped by the shape of the room, but the wounds were still fresh enough to send a bolt of fear down her spine.
Irrational though she knew it was, she couldn't pull her eyes from the shadow as she set the box down and shoved it to the corner with the rest. Her instincts had always been a little overclocked, after the life she'd lived, but somehow she couldn't shake this one.
And then it moved.
A single lurch, a step, that grotesque silhouette passing over her in a chilling wave- Terra flinched into the box behind her and nearly toppled straight over it before she caught herself.
Just Cait it's just Cait moving boxes it's just the light catching funny and your nerves are still frayed from the fight just go upstairs and catch your breath-
Something emerged from the darkness, a figure just as tall and just as thin as the shadow it had cast, moving with a terrible inhuman grace between the cluttered cargo. The light was dim and diffused, enough to mask the finer details, but she recognized it all the same.
It was one of... them. Made of nearly the same material as her original prosthetics, all white porcelain and segmented metal plates, with golden filigree creeping like ivy across its body. It cut a lithe and beautiful figure, like the dancer atop a music box, though one thing marred its elegant silhouette.
The top of its head, and creeping halfway down its face, looked... off. As if it was crowned in molten gold and using that to mask some deeper imperfections, it was bulging and pitted and strange.
And yet, in that half-darkness of the cargo, it almost seemed familiar.
She'd seen this thing before. It was the one that had come for her, heading the swarm, ignoring the other targets in its path, seeking only her. Even then, she'd thought that asymmetrical mass of gold obscuring its face seemed devastatingly familiar. And she'd seen it crumpled in a pile with the rest in the aftermath, and had found herself grateful it had found something like death.
This thing's entire existence felt like dragging along the corpse of a man she'd loved more deeply than she could describe. There was in fact a thing worse than death. She'd witnessed it then.
She witnessed it now.
Somehow, somehow this thing had made it out when the others shut down. It was the last remaining shred of Pluto's resourcefulness, his street-rat will to live against all odds, his belief that he could overcome any problem placed in his hands.
He should have stayed dead.
It stopped a few feet from her, not quite blocking the door but within range to grab her if she tried for it, and remained statue-still there as she surveyed it. Terra felt just as frozen - first in her fear, then in her grief, then out of the worry that any motion might set it off.
Then, in a single crisp motion, it offered its hands palm-up to her.
I'll fix this.
She could hear his voice, and could feel his hands delicately cupping the bulbs of her bandages after she thought she'd lost everything. Those three words had given her the reason to keep going. Without those, without him, she'd have given up on that day.
Those three words were the same she'd heard from the herald when she'd finally dared to meet him, and he'd taken her hands at the elbows the same way. That was when she should have known it was wrong. That was when she should have known Pluto was gone, even before he'd become this... thing.
"It's not you." Her voice shook, and it seemed far too loud in the room. The thing tilted its head, with the same too-perfect sort of grace.
"This isn't right." Terra whimpered, "You're... gone, you've been gone, you can't-"
Another sudden lurch, and it took everything within her to bite back a scream. Now it crouched on one knee, hardly out of arm's reach - pleading, or trying to make itself less of a threat? She wasn't sure of the intent- if there even was intent, if it acted on anything more that some mindless robotic impulse.
"What... are you? Who's... piloting you?" she blurted, desperate for an explanation, "Who wants to- to hurt me that badly?"
It recoiled at that, a motion so reflexive it almost looked human. Again it offered her its hands. Now it was close enough that she could have placed hers into its open palms.
"Stop that!" she yelped, stumbling backwards but only finding a wall of boxes at her back, "You're not him! Just- just let him be dead!"
This was just an echo. It was one moment of him, replaying over and over until it lost meaning entirely. He'd always been the one to reach for her, the one to pull her up and away from her misery. He pushed her upwards even when it meant his own life remained below.
"You're not-"
Again it moved, this time to lean ahead and grasp its slender fingers around her wrist.
That time she couldn't suppress her scream, and it rang out high and shrill. Her other hand drew back and then snapped forwards, straight into the gnarled mass where its eyes should have been.
Ekko had remembered the spurs.
The thing that had once been Pluto suddenly crumpled, the puppet's strings finally and truly cut, and its mass toppled backwards. With its fingers still around her arm and her wrist-spur still lodged in its skull, Terra was dragged along with it until she fell over its unmoving body. There was no blood, no gore, none of the usual carnage she'd grown desensitized to among the streets of Zaun, yet still it seemed like she was touching a corpse.
Vi and Caitlyn found her there, shell-shocked and draped over a fallen body in the darkness, still weeping for Pluto.
Doodles of one of my dnd characters, Kian! He's a bard/rogue tiefling, host of a goddess, and dealing with the aftermath of a war while trying to find more poly people in a country of barely any lmao
Rough sketch of Pluto’s origin story, narration below, best read in a 1950’s newscaster voice:
“1955-1975. The Space Race. In humanity’s fervour to land amongst the stars, many unethical experiments were conducted. Some of these are a matter of public record.
Some are not.
This is the story of Pluto, a penguin who was sent into the stratosphere. Though he survived the trip, he underwent a cosmic mutation, granting him powers such as atmospheric adaptability and human-level intelligence!
Now he wanders the cosmos in search of adventure. He is… Pluto Penguin!”
*Bert, an alien, rips away the bottom of the final panel, revealing himself and cheerfully chiming in with one last piece of information*
“And I’m Bert!”
**I slightly edited the transcript to flow a little better, but it’s all the same gist.
