Chronic pain Ashton actually means everything to me. This punk rock literally went through more awful shit before the age of ten than most people will deal with in their entire lives. And then they turned into a FUCKING rock.
Raised in an overpacked orphanage, given the same last name as everyone else as a strange unifier. These people aren’t family, but they do share a surname and a piece of their history. In the end though, Ashton’s just one small hungry face among dozens. Alone even when in the crowd.
When he woke up one day and his whole body felt Wrong, felt hard and rough, and calcified like they had spent too much time out in the cold without water, do you think he told anyone at first? Do you think anyone with the power to help would have even cared?
I wonder if it ever stopped feeling uncomfortable to them, or if there’s always this underlying sense that one wrong move will send cracks up their whole body.
Then they’re out, and they finally found people they could rely on, a family that cared about him, not because of obligation, but because he was like them, and because he had strength and skills they needed.
His new family is united by their insignificance, and determined to stick it to everyone whose greed hurts other people like them, the ones left behind, the nobodies. Ashton learns what it really means to fight and to bleed for the people you love. He learns to take his pain and his anger and pours it into protecting his family.
And then. The heist that changed everything. Broke into the wrong house, opened the wrong box, and suddenly… a whole new level of pain, beyond anything they’ve felt before. Broken memories. Flying backwards. Crashing through a window. Falling, falling, falling, then… black. Pain. Flashes of light, of noise. Pain. “He’s dead.” Laying on a stone path. “Just leave em.” Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain.
Milo’s voice. “C’mon, please wake up please, I don’t know what else to do…” and then… ice in their veins. Fireworks going off inside their head. And then… they black out again.
They come back slowly, and it’s not their senses that come back first. The first thing that tells him he’s awake is a shooting pain all up and down his arm, branching like cracks through stone. It feels as bad as the little voice in the back of his mind always told him it would. His whole left side feels… shattered. Broken. He’s certain that when he opens his eyes, he’ll see pieces of himself lying around him.
A flash, as though someone fired a blowtorch at close range toward his head. Another, slightly to the right of the first. And now that they’re aware of it, they can’t stop feeling it. It’s like the worst cluster headache they’ve ever felt, multiplied by a dozen by the burn of each pulse of energy.
Well, if he’s feeling pain, that probably means he’s not dead. They blink open their eyes and move to stand. His arm is still there, so that’s good. They begin to use it to push themself up…
They feel the powerful release of pressure more than they hear it. It travels from their shoulder all the way down to the tips of their fingers and then back.
“Gah, FUCKING SHIT.” They collapse back down to the table they were lying on.
“Ashton? Ashton! You’re awake! Don’t move, don’t move, you’re safe, you’re okay!”
It’s only now that they look around and realize where they are. Their vision feels… off somehow, but they can see it now. Milo’s workshop. They’ve cleared their worktable, and he’s lying on top of it. He turns his head to see where their voice is coming from and… FUCK.
“Don’t… don’t move too much. You’re uhh… you’re hurt real bad.” Milo rushes over from wherever they were and hovers behind his head. “How are… how do you feel?”
“Like hot fucking garbage. What… what the fuck happened to me? Fuck, that hurts.”
“The last job it went… bad. Real bad. You took… you took a pretty big fall, all the way from the top of the mansion.”
“Alright, well. Let’s check out the fucking damage.”
“No Ashton wait, you need to rest, lay back down…”
They ignore them as they push themself up again… fuck that hurts, but at least they know to expect it this time. They cautiously put their weight on their right foot, then their left. A similar crack as before sends pain up their leg to their hip, and they buckle, grabbing their head as it sparks again.
“Ashton please wait. Please, just take a second to… to catch your breath, at least…”
“Fuck. No. I’m fine, I’m good, I can fucking do this.”
He stumbles over to a big, shiny sheet of metal that Milo’s got hung up for some project or other, and looks at his warped reflection.
“I… I… I did everything I could, but I’m not a medic, Ashton. I work with metal though, and… and with stone, sometimes, so… I melted down the gold we made on our last job and um… I sealed the cracks. In your skin, I mean. I had no clue if it would work; I didn’t even know if your skin works like normal stone, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Ashton holds up their hand to their face. Zigzagging along the cracks in his skin, he sees gold, sealing the stone of his flesh back together. He runs the fingers of his other hand up his arm. It’s… huh. They’re used to their skin feeling… alien. Wrong. Not their own. But this is… this one’s new.
Even as he’s thinking that, another flash goes off in his skull, and this time, he sees it in his reflection. “What the fuck…”
They lean close, and when another spark lights up, he can see… through his own head. What the fuck, he can see his brain. It’s distorted, though they can’t tell if that’s because of the imperfections in the metal or because of what Milo used to patch them up.
“Yeah that… that I was less sure of. There was… a hole smashed in your head, Ashton. Too big to fill in with gold. Eventually I was able to fill it in and cover it up with slag glass - I had to do the same thing with your eye.”
And as soon as they say that, Ashton can pin down what’s wrong with their vision. The depth of everything feels wrong, and he can’t see anything on his left side.
“Fuck Milo, you… you saved my life. I… wait. What the fuck happened to the others.”
Milo flinches, and Ashton prepares for the worst. “They… they all ran. Out of the city. We were seen, and…”
“And they figured I wouldn’t fucking make it anyway. Right. So why the fuck are you still here?”
“Ashton I… I wasn’t just going to leave you. Not while there was still a chance to save you.”
They don’t know what to say to that. And so, they pull their shit together, and as soon as they’re confident they won’t collapse on the way, they go back to Hexum’s. He takes on the debt that everyone else was too smart to stay for. He doesn’t tell her about Milo.
They take on easy jobs for a while. They recover, as much as they can. Eventually, it becomes pretty obvious that this… these golden cracks, the hole in their head, the fireworks inside their fucking skull… this is just how things are now.
So he does what he did before. He fucking adjusts. He’d had to get used to discomfort and pain of stone skin; now these harsh cracks become a part of that alien background sensation. The fireworks go off when he gets in a fight, so they learn to channel that sharp pain into every swing of their hammer. This new pain joins the rest in the background noise of his life.
And so, just like he always does, he keeps fucking going. They wear their scars proudly, on display for everyone. They hold their head, cracks and all, high. They say look at me. I’ve already been the collateral damage of an uncontrolled elemental ritual. I’ve been thrown backwards out of a tower and left for dead. You think you scare me? Get in line. I’ve seen shit that would scare your nightmares. You think you’re stronger than me? Two seconds in my body would have you curled up in a ball on the floor. You wanna fuck with me? Just don’t.
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