Raven sat up, clutching his neck, but the forest had faded into a night-dampened room he didn’t recognize, softly lit with orange candlelight and purple holoscreens.
A bead of sweat rolled off his chin, hitting thin blankets with a faint patter barely heard over his labored breathing.
He was… alive. A dream? His hand touched his chest, the arm, his gut… found only whole, if scarred, skin. The mattress under him had the characteristic firmness found only in a cheap inn. When did they get to an inn? He last remembered… (getting cut down)
“Oh, finally awake?” Raven froze at the voice, the arm already tensing at a perceived threat. (put down a rabid dog said that voice through bared teeth before a phantom disc sought his carotid arteries)
Gloved fingertips touched his forehead and he lashed back instinctively.
“Calm down,” Add said, and Raven blinked at him, disoriented, half-sick with lingering nightmare. Add was serene despite the violent reaction, leaning back in a chair by the bedside to dismiss the holoscreens beside him, plunging the room into a sweet orange dusk.
Once Raven realized Add wasn’t trying to murder him, he scrubbed his face with his hand to wipe the clinging remnants of the dream away. “S-sorry… I … sorry.” Raven swallowed hard, throat dry. “What happened…?”
Add hummed. “I made a miscalculation.”
Raven stared at him over the top of his fingers at the nonchalant tone, brain fuzzy as he tried to parse what Add meant. “You made a mistake?”
Clucking his tongue, Add scowled. “Not a mistake. A miscalculation.” Pouring Raven some water from a pitcher by the bedside, he offered the paper cup to the hybrid in an uncharacteristic display of consideration. “This is something new I’m dealing with, so it was bound to happen.”
Taking the cup with murmured gratitude, Raven downed the contents in one gulp; Add poured him another.
“I addressed the issue, however,” Add continued, watching him drink, “so it shouldn’t happen again.”
“What issue.” Raven’s words were flat. Add wasn’t even attempting an ambiguous explanation so much as just flat out avoiding explaining it altogether.
Add inhaled deeply, mentally shifting through explanations and discarding them. It had been two weeks since Raven agreed to Add’s little bargain; two long weeks of suffering Add’s company and boarding with him every night since he had installed that limiter. Two long weeks of getting to know the devil Raven dealt with, of realizing that for all his supposed genius, Add was terrible at hiding a lot of his intentions.
(it was curious why he was so bad at it, as if he had little experience in the art of deception, of the little every day lies used to conceal or deflect)
Two long weeks of recognizing when Add was trying to hide something, like now.
“No bullshit, Add,” Raven said, trying to be patient, trying not to worry. “Is it about the limiter?”
“Hm, yes…” Add reached out to pry free the cup Raven was unconsciously crumpling in his fist. “But as I said, I have addressed the issue.”
“Which is?” Raven ground out, grabbing a thin wrist.
Unblinking eyes stared at Raven’s hold on him before raising to meet a burning golden gaze; and it hung there, the unspoken challenge between them, of who held the power and who didn’t. Add wanted data from the arm and Raven wanted him to fix the damn thing: a mutually beneficial but ultimately selfish business deal where neither of them respected the other as a business partner.
Just a means to an end.
Add clicked his tongue again, breaking their staredown and shaking his wrist free. “I did not take into account that your body would outright reject the new limiter I placed in your arm.” He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers in his lap. “You’ve been ill for the past four days. This is not an uncommon phenomenon according to my mother’s notes; transplant rejection was one of her biggest obstacles in perfecting Nasod and organic integration.”
While Raven only understood about half of that, he definitely understood one thing. “What... do you mean I’ve been ill for four days...?”
Add’s expression clearly exposed what he thought about the other’s intelligence. “It means exactly that. Your immune system was treating the limiter like a foreign agent.” He shrugged. “I adjusted the parameters of the limiter. You should be fine now.”
Raven raked his hand through unruly hair. “Four days…” he breathed, dragging his hand over his head and covered his eyes briefly. He couldn’t remember... Something terrible twisted in his heart, anxiety clutching it tight. (had the nightmare been real) “Where are the others?”
“They’re here.” Add’s smile was sardonic as he tilted his head. “Did you think they’d abandon you?”
No, they wouldn’t. That’s why Raven made a deal with the devil after all. (to keep that nightmare from becoming real)
“A few of them were just here in fact, checking up on you. But it’s late so I ushered them out since they were in the way.” Add pursed his lips. “That elf and the brat were particularly stubborn, but,” and his left eye glinted, “I’m the only one that can help you, after all.”
Damn if Raven didn’t hate that fact.
Exhausted, he sank back into his pillow, lifting the arm to stare hard at it. That nightmare felt more like a premonition than dream; waking up didn’t dispel the images of the broken bodies of his friends, of Rena’s betrayed, tear-stained face (an echo of hers). The arm felt back onto the bed with muffled thump.
“I’m relying on you, Add,” he said, looking at him. Raven didn’t bother to suppress the pitiful desperation in his voice.
Add didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He just looked back, and for once, Raven had trouble reading his thoughts.