As long as they kept talking the rest of the task went off without much of a hitch; trading verbal blows, as it were, worked well to keep his mind off of other matters. Thoughts raced through W.M.’s own head as they put themselves into their work, as diligent as ever, but for the most part they didn’t get much of a chance to think about them in any sort of detail when both their hands and mind were preoccupied with other things. As they finished, as they stepped back and just looked at him, however, they couldn’t help but let their head wander back to those ever-present and torturous thoughts that had plagued them for so very long, dancing through their brain-scape. Thoughts of affection, admiration. Love, even. They could feel it, every time they so much as glanced his way, no matter how much they tried (and hell, did they try) to turn a willfully blind eye to it. They could feel it in the way his hair framed his face, the weary muscles under skin and over bone, every scar that marked his body, and everything else about him; so foreign from what he once was but no less lovable, no less deserving than anybody else —
Oh, for crying out loud. Stop it. Would you? You’re embarrassing. And gross. And stupid.
“…What are you doing?”
“Huh?”
They hadn’t even noticed the shift in their body language until Sebastian moved to call them on it, affixing them with a strange stare. For as large and physically imposing as War Machine was, they sure seemed diminutively sheepish like this, watching their claws, glancing away occasionally as their great talons fidgeted in the loose dirt, carving out ridges in the earth.
“Alright, better question. Your weird attitude shift isn’t exactly subtle. What’s it about?”
“Well,” they began, “I don’t know. It’s…” As they trailed off, for lack of words (or something else), they offered him a half-hearted shrug… or what they could manage of one, anyway.
“…It’s… what, exactly?” He looked suspicious. “What is that even supposed to mean? How bad could it possibly even be at this point that makes you clam up all tense like this — of all the things we’ve gone through? Now? Seriously? That’s not like you.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s definitely not.”
“Well, it will be nothing if you just let it go.” They scowled, stepped back, and began to turn away as if to leave. W.M.’s tails swished about angrily, like a particularly ornery mule. “Anyway, I did my job, I’m leaving. I’ll be back at camp.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not doing that.” His reply was unimpressed. “Funny you’re the one trying to tell me to let it go only when it’s about you. You put up with me, now I’m giving you the same deal. Whether you like it or not.”
W.M. snorted. “That’s different.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Okay, I asked for my problems, yeah? I got myself into this mess, I got involved with this whole Urbanshade shit, of my own volition. And I kept doing it. I didn’t even like it, ninety percent of the time! But I still stayed. I’m as guilty as any of those fools. Whatever happened because of that is my fault, and my problem, so it’s fine.” W.M. growled now, clicking their teeth together. “You didn’t ask for this. I did.”
“…I’m pretty sure you didn’t go in asking for — well, this.”
“Maybe not specifically,” was the answer, “but it’s just as well. For what I did, anyway. I could say the same about you.”
Sebastian looked thoroughly unamused at the poor attempt at sarcasm. “I thought looking out for one another was what friends did. Didn’t you say that?”
W.M. stopped in their tracks, firmly planting their front feet down on the ground — though to be fair, they hadn’t gotten far in the first place. “It is,” they stressed, “sure, yeah, that is something I said. But it’s just — like I said, it’s different. Some people just are, I just have — you know, I just need to—”
His eyes, narrowed, scanned their face; difficult as displaying emotion on such a face was it wasn’t entirely impossible, watching the way their eyes narrowed or the way the flesh at the corners of their beak creased. “Oh, okay, see, I think I’m getting it. Nobody gets to care about you because you’re the main character, aren’t you, you and your fucking complex?”
A growl. “Not… ugh, not entirely,” they muttered, rolling their eyes as they threw their head to the side. That was only the other half of the time. “Oh my God, I don’t want to talk about this.”
He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Or maybe… you think — hmm, wait. You think I’m mad at you, for some reason. Don’t you?”
A cornered growl arose in W.M.’s throat, an icy chill winding through their blood. It certainly didn’t feel any better to have the feeling given voice, especially by the object of those worries. W.M. bit back a half-formed defensive retort and merely chose instead to stare back, a bit like a raccoon caught in flagrante delicto, sifting through the trash in someone’s upscale backyard.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Sebastian’s tone, and face, were both awfully smug, plastered in the wisenheimer grin of someone who knew he’d finally hit the nail on the head.
“…” W.M.’s tongue danced with a thousand cruel possibilities. Let him have it. Let yourself have it! Burn all your bridges, again and again! Tell him something awful. It’s better if he doesn’t involve himself with you, so get it over with! Strike hard, strike true — you’re cruel! Do it again — as before, so forever!
…Instead, however, they just sighed in defeat. “Yeah, fine. Fine. You got me.”
“How has that ever stopped you before? Why now?”
“I don’t know!” They exclaimed. “That’s the problem!” Their tone was stressed, full of genuine fret and despair. “It’s just me — I don’t know why! It was different before because we were down there, not up here! I only thought about that some of the time, not all the time, there were other things to worry about! Otherwise I don’t know why now, I guess I — I guess I just figured you should be! Still?!”
“What, did you do something else you conveniently forgot to tell me about?”
“Not new, no! But — I don’t know, you should be mad! Hell, you should hate me! Because yes, I actually did do something! For crying out loud! You know that, that was the whole entire thing! I worked at Urbanshade! Oh my God!”
“No way, that’s the first time I’m hearing of this.” He scoffed. “What do you think we’ve been doing for the past nine years? Prancing through fields?”
“I-I know what — I know it all, I — ugh!” They reared up dramatically on their hindlegs, frantically scratching at their head and hissing all the while, before throwing themselves on the ground dramatically, monstrous hands still covering their eyes. This conversation is going absolutely nowhere, they thought. This is all wrong. You sound like a child and you’re acting like one too.
“This is stupid,” he offered. No shit.
Yes, it was objective fact that he was mad at them before, for good reason to boot, and yes, it was objective fact that they had spent the last however-the-hell-long trying to make up for those good reasons they’d given him. A lot of awful feelings came with that, but it was also true that down in the Blacksite those feelings could quite easily be pushed aside in favour of their unified goal, which was escape, something to work towards, something productive; and the concept of actually being on the other side of that something felt wrong, especially with what was going through their head every time they looked at him, what had been going through their head for ages. It was all messy and all too difficult to try to lay out, even to themselves, in any rational sense; they’d fallen for him at least a lifetime ago, before all this, but at least then they’d had the benefit of some supposed end goal in the ending of their life. Forfeiting deeper human relations became easy when you didn’t plan on sticking around long enough for them to be much of a problem. But now that was come and gone, as with so many other best-laid plans, and they were still here, still living and breathing and feeling, and each time it only got more difficult to think about, let alone to explain.
At least before, far below, they had the benefit of mostly being able to avoid each other unless they really had to interact, at least until they started getting closer again; now, they were cloistered on an island together and W.M.’s terrible drive to help people — borne of some hungering compassion or empathy — was conflicting with all those tasteless personal feelings that so desperately kept bubbling up to the surface no matter how hard they tried to push them down, like air-hungry drowning victims. Feelings that were all stupid, all embarrassing, and most importantly all wholly inappropriate especially coming from them. They were here to help and to be useful, to prove their penitence and make up for all their shortcomings, to play ever-faithful friend and rock; they could take anything from anyone and grin and bear it, as that they had made their purpose. They were not here to be helped, not here to do the same unloading unto others (they certainly didn’t deserve it), and they would much prefer to solve their own problems on their own. They had done enough damage in the getting-here, had made their life up to this point an entire string of complacent fuckups that they would spend the rest of their mortal life working to undo or at the very least remedy as best they could, and through what could only be described as karma been shuffled into some monstrous body. A body that had once felt unsuitably alien, but which over time they’d slowly began to carve out into a home, perhaps even one that they could be satisfied with even despite the loss of their apparent humanity… though in truth, that too felt wrong; this was a punishment, a burden, it was wrong to take pleasure in any part of it. It was to be accepted, but not accepted.
…But to put all that aside, there was one other crucial part of this whole ordeal. They were also not here to fall in love. It was the perfect shitstorm of epic proportions, the slimy ethics of the entire thing overcoating every vaguely more-than-platonic thought they ever carried for either Sebastian or Painter; sure, they’d become like them, but they didn’t start out that way, and there was a hell of a lot of baggage involved in that becoming anyway. And sure, they hadn’t been part of the teams assigned to either of them, hadn’t even been around for the whole shebang with the former, but it didn’t really matter; even after they’d reconnected with Sebastian they’d kept working there, they’d continued to work on Basilisk, they’d continued to keep things from him, and they weren’t even sure why anymore — why did you do that? Poor you, always so pathetic, clamoring your whole sad life for attention and love. So, you were finally good for something. Finally needed. Apparently, that was just such a good deal for you that you were willing to throw away all your convictions, tell yourself that this was just the way the game was played. Excuse your own responsibility because everyone does it? Pathetic.
Was the ego boost just that important? What, you needed the validation of your stupid co-workers? I thought you were smart.
Or even worse — don’t tell me — you needed the validation of torturers, and soldiers, and moral-less capitalists? You needed them to tell you you were finally being a good dog, didn’t you? That you were finally living right? Or was it that they needed you?
He needed you too. You still did nothing.
Then you failed your one shot to do something.
All the somethings now couldn’t make up for that.
You’ve always been destined for failure. This will fail, too. You can’t keep them safe forever. You can’t even keep yourself safe. You’ll all get caught and it’ll be your fault. You’ll all get killed.
And it will be your fault.
It always is.
No response at all, that was fine, that was better than — “Jesus Christ,” came Sebastian’s voice. For what it was worth, he did sound genuinely concerned; not that that helped W.M. much. “Are you good?”
“…No,” whined W.M., as if the answer were obvious — which, to their credit, it very much was.
W.M. was mostly aware of him dragging himself over to rest in the dirt beside them, half-laying awkwardly, propping himself up with his elbows.
“You’re going to hurt your back,” they mumbled into their claws.
“I am in pain every single day of my life,” he retorted. “Besides, that’s not really the point right now.
They only huffed.
“So can you give me a good reason why you think I’m mad at you right now?” he asked. “Because I’m not.”
“I don’t know.”
“…Is it that you think I don’t like you or something?”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
“You never call me by my name,” they said.
“You don’t even like that name. The new one, anyway.”
“…But it’s my name.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“But I’m dead,” they growled. “And a fuckup. So I have to have this one.”
“I’m dead, too,” he answered. “And a fuckup. I don’t think it matters.”
“…”
“So, this is some sort of strange penance thing you’re doing then. Like everything else.”
“…It’s not all penance stuff,” they offered. “When I care about people, I mean, that’s mostly not a penance thing, I just like helping people. I don’t feel obligated to do that in like, a bad way, I just care.”
“Alright, well, that’s good,” was his reply. “You had me worried there. …But the name thing absolutely is.”
“…Mhm.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
“It feels like I do.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s the whole thing — I feel like… I don’t know myself, or I don’t deserve to know myself. Or be me. I dunno, it’s weird.”
“It happens,” he said. “Is that all you were worried about?”
W.M. sighed, talons falling away from their face to rest in the dirt where they dug them in, watching the particulate matter fall away. “I still think you should hate me.”
“But why?”
“I can tell you this a thousand times, until I’m blue in the face, and you’d still ask me why. And you know why, you're just pretending you don't. Because I worked for Urbanshade, yeah? Because I’m one of them. I’m still not one of you. Not really.”
“You sure walk, talk and act like one of us.”
“How much of that is true, though? How can I be sure I’m not just — faking?”
“You telling me that is just kind of proof that you’re not.”
A growl escaped their throat, a loud and weary sound, as they forced their claws into the earth. “You don’t know that.”
“Sure, but I trust you.”
W.M.’s mind was, as it always was, racing, but that gave them pause. “…You trust me.” Their tone was incredulous.
“I thought that was pretty self-evident,” he replied. “You know? I wouldn’t have humored any of this if I didn’t.”
“…In my right mind, I know that,” they said, voice pained, “but it still doesn’t feel right. I still can’t make myself believe it’s right.”
“I can believe it for the both of us.”
“Hm,” they replied. Something gave them pause. “…How did you feel about me?”
“What, down there?”
“Did you hate me?”
“Hate is…” he paused, moving to scratch the back of his head, “…well, it’s a strong word. Sure, I hated most — well, okay, basically everyone down there, but… well, when it came to you, I was angry, sure. You can attest to that much.”
They nodded.
“I didn’t trust you at all — so yeah, maybe I came close to really hating you, but in the end I didn’t, and I don’t. I’ve been pissed at you for a lot of reasons, and I think you’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes, and I’m not gonna go so far as to call you ‘one of the good ones‘ because that kind of shit doesn’t mean anything… but I dunno, I don’t think you’re evil. If you were, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to make up for the dumb stuff you did. And to your credit, you were the one who was willing to listen to me, to actually talk to me, to still see me as a person — and help plan something with me, even if it didn’t work out then. Hell, you got caught because you finally decided to take a stand and do something right.”
“I guess.”
“And either way — any way you spin it, who’s the one who got us out in the end?”
They narrowed their eyes, looking off to the side. Away from him. “I guess I did.”
“I know you did things for a bad cause. Obviously that’s shitty. But you’re trying to be better. And you’re not the one who did this to me, you didn’t personally torment me, if that’s what you’re worried about. You weren’t even there. If I was mad about the thing you represented that’s in the past now; you were an agent for something bad, at some point, but you’re a lot more than that now. You haven’t been that person for a long time.”
“I really believed it for a little while, though,” they replied. “When I first arrived I really believed I would be doing something good, that what I was working on could really be used to help people. I’m not sure how; maybe it was that I thought that this could find some use in an altruistic context, like… maybe delivering aid to war-torn countries, or saving the children, something brave and stupidly optimistic like that. Some platonic ideal of heroism. Obviously that was never going to be the case.” A miserable laugh. “I learned the truth pretty quickly, even when they tried to keep it from me to ensure I played along, but I still voluntarily went along with the whole thing. I just resigned myself to go where the wind took me, and… feeling wanted, being needed, maybe loved, by someone in authority, it was like… the kind of thing I had only ever pretended I had, at least most of my life.”
A heavy sigh. “Every day was just… the same. Everything. And every bit of cruelty in the world I got to see around me every day, people talked about it like it was nothing. People are cruel and I just had to deal with it because I came to the conclusion that the end lesson of all my formative years was that that’s what the world had to be like. The way my mom talked, and my dad talked, and the way people treated each other, and even, well, the whole thing with you.” They glanced over at him.
Not just meeting him again.
Not just the sight of him, so thoroughly transformed from what he once was, who they’d once called friend, who was recognizable still as a person but was not called one, covered in scars and old stitches and all made of impossible anatomy, all trapped and subdued and beaten.
Not even just the way he acted, like a cornered animal.
It was everything before that, too; the arrest, the case, the apparent execution, and the exoneration, even if for them it was all through the lens of the indirect. Media circus. At first it had been the very idea that someone they had known — and known fairly closely, had like before held as decently close, about as close as they'd been willing to let anybody get, if they’d had the guts could have even once called love as fleeting and foolish as it was but ultimately which they were always going to be too afraid to admit — could prove capable of an act like that (it couldn’t have been true, it couldn’t have, could it?); but more than that, did that ever matter? in research peeling back the layers to look long at the system… the less the question of whether he was really guilty or not even mattered. It was the horror of gazing upon the death engines of barbarism that powered their world. Horror that maybe other people could come back from, horror that could maybe invigorate others, but which only crushed them and their resolve. An enemy too big to fight. Too powerful to resist and to defeat. To acquiesce was to retain sanity.
“…In the end I guess I felt like I had to be cruel, too, or at least complicit to other peoples’ cruelty, but it never felt right. But I still did it. I could have not done it, I could have been better; to everyone, and to you. Like, think about it. When I knew you were in jail I could have written, when I knew you were in the Blacksite I could have... well, something.”
No one accomplishes anything truly great alone. If only that felt true.
He didn’t reply, not at first. The distant sound of sea birds and the ocean from the shore was all that punctuated the air in the stillness.
“I don’t have all the answers,” he said finally. “I don’t have any of them, really. I don’t know what to tell you to make you feel better, or at least make you feel like you could feel better. I wish I did, but I’m not like you.” A sigh. “I told you a long while ago that I didn’t forgive you, but I could at least understand you. The truth is… I do forgive you. Now, at least. I think you understand now; you’ve changed, too. You’re not the person you were back then, not any of the people you were. And I… I guess I’m sorry, too.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” they said.
“That you know of, maybe,” was the reply, “but it’s only fair I get to say it at least once. You can’t have all the sorries, you know.”
W.M. let out a tired laugh.
“…I don’t know if I believe in fate, or destiny, or any of that shit,” Sebastian continued, his voice raw. “But I do know this. I’m glad you found me, I’m glad we met again. I’m glad you’re here. I’m grateful for your help and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. You’ve saved my life in more ways than one.” He paused. “We’re free now. I’ll… I’ll try to remember that, if you will.”
“…Okay.”
═══
“…I had another thing to tell you.”
“And that was…?”
A sheepish side-eye. “I can’t say it yet.”
Sebastian regaled them with an unamused, expectant look as he pushed himself up onto his palms. “All that progress, and —"
“— But I promise,” they added, cutting him off, “I promise I won’t keep it from you, not when I’m ready to tell you. It’ll be worth it. And it’s not — that kind of life-altering.” Mostly.
“…That’s a start.”