Work Text:
you always liked them tall tales, jackal boy.
you got more hometowns than bones in your body, trickster child, cherry-cheeked changeling, spit them out for anyone who asks just to see what price they'll pay you for a downhome lie. you tell folks you cut your teeth in the stomping ground of the real gods, plutonium painted on the roof of your mouth like fluoride, tell them you were climbing redwoods before you could walk and they think they can see it in your ice floe eyes, tell them you have catfish skin and a banjo heart that thrums to an ozark tune and they taste the moonshine on your breath and believe you, snakeskin boy, and now you have all the power here.
it's all you ever wanted, really. don't lie now, not here, not under the light of this fairweather star, don’t say that power don’t sit in your mouth like honey or curl around the back of your neck like a hand, doesn’t go down smooth or feel just right like that whiskey you love so much. don't say you’re not greedy for it, not when it comes to you so easy, all slowtalk syllables and pistolgrip palms, how you let them get real close before they see how many teeth you really have. you've got a craw deep enough to swallow down the whole wide world and lick your lips after because you are so tired of being best in show, top of the class—it ain't hard when you ain't like them other folk, like people, ain't soft like them or sweet like them or gooey on the inside like they are. you're a different breed, a darling abomination, a beautiful wretched thing, didn't they know? you're made of much sterner stuff, bless your still-beating monster heart.
that's how he finds you, after all.
an offer bright and piercing as a lighthouse beacon, a warning of sharp rocks and shipwrecks and an invitation to cut yourself open on them just the same, prometheus, hold your hands up to the flame you stole for yourself, make a home of the rock you chain yourself to. your sharktooth siren wears a bespoke suit and he skips your liver to go straight for your throat, all eelslick smile and saltsharp words and you ask him where you from? just to hear him lie, just to hear your language spoken by a tongue that knows the tune maybe even better than yours does. you know his sort, know the deep dark hole he crawled out of in the belly of the sea, the way he don't quite sit right on land, the way his name fills your mouth like a handful of thumbtacks, fits right against the corners of your smile like a straight razor—cutter, and you taste iron already.
they pin a rank to your lapel like an excuse, line you up like the final domino; it's your job to swallow puzzle pieces and spit out the perfect picture and you do it so well. what a menagerie you've sold yourself to, rattlesnake boy with your tick-tock tail—pryce and her clockwork army that lives in the walls like cockroaches, like bees; rachel young and her honeysweet acid mouth, how she hates you so open and clean and honest it's a relief, crowbeak nails ready to pick down to the meat of you and see what she can stand to spare, to polish up all pretty because you are a rising star, meteor boy, going up like a house on fire, climbing a ladder of your betters’ bones. littlewood looks so startlingly human beside them all in this nest of beasts, you think.
cutter thinks so too, after a while, and suddenly you’re his favorite tool, you major, you military sidestep, a foxtrot heartbeat away from the top, from the altar you’ve decided to lay your loyalty across. you are the right hand man of wrath himself, and it’s time you found some weapons to suit you. it ain’t easy to find them flintboned folk, the ones that can be something more, nothing but a dozen uninteresting faces escorted down a stairwell that leads exactly nowhere and don’t you need a drink, you steelspined darling? something that slides down smooth and slick and catches a spark in the back of your throat? there’s a bar in san francisco with your name on it, a trail of blood and ash and char marks that leads right to a chair and a face you’re going to come to know like it’ll come to know the back of your hand.
he is so ugly, your dynamite boy, your wind-up knock-down bombmaker, so weak and sweat-streaked and broken and heartbreak-pretty that oh god, it hurts you to look at him twice. but it's not like you to leave a thing alone when you could pry it apart down to its innards, not like him to say no to the hand he's cherry-picked for his own ruin. how he looks at you, like you'll string the goddamn stars between his ribs, like you'll fit a sun into his chest to burn the heart right out of him and he'll let you.
you never thought you'd meet someone who likes the sound of his bones breaking as much as you did.
he looks up at you and sees god but she, she looks through you, really, all the way to your binary heartbeat and deep down that's why you like her just a bit better in the end, see in her that side-step shuffle just left of normal folk that makes her one of you the way that he will never be—he is grit-streaked and bloody and beautiful, but his back arches like a violin bow and his guts are C-4 soft. rachel finds her for you in some lab, filing down her teeth and claws and playing pretend, like she's a real girl after all, just like them. you get her the way cutter got you, all those years ago, with a taste of what it is to be more, better, but she's too smart for you, lion man with your crocodile smile. you can taste it in the way she frowns as she stomps up that driveway, see the kindness she smothers in her eyes and wonder how easily she could take you apart. she deals in human-almost and people-nearly and what are you if not a preposition to personhood by now?
they are your lightning and thunder, the heralds of your coming storm—he would follow you into the heart of the furthest flung star and she would put it out for you if only you asked and they are your terrible twosome, your perfect team. there is no thing they cannot do for you, no matter how much they must rend themselves apart or how little you tell them, how little they need to know. but you still see it sometimes, don't you, that curve of flesh under the iron you have forged into them and you understand, you remember what it was like; it is a process after all, making monsters—
it’s a taste of your own handiwork you didn't expect when they stumble in ash-faced from that module that hugged them like a steel overcoat, a cast-iron casket, and you think you'd know your own folk by now, that you can spot imposter, find the fake so easy. after all, it’s just like looking in a mirror, just a smile too wide and eyes too bright and words too smooth like skin, like that goddamn whiskey—this isn't your first go-round with something just like you, something not quite human—
in that deep, dank hole in the ground with cutter watching you choke down the smell of old paper and dusty tapes and terrible secrets, you wonder what they would have made of you, so many years back on a ship that bore the weight of being first—contact, catastrophe, catalyst—what sort of thing they would find in the hollows of you, what they would make of it and call your copy. you are already imposter, you see, clever pantomime, there's already something not quite right about that warren boy, with that way he looks at you, with them eyes and that smile that don’t quite reach them—would they have made a you all soft and sweet and gooey inside like you ain't ever been, and would he have been more human for it? you watch every godforsaken star out of the corner of your magpie eye and you wait for them to try and tell you what you're made of.
but now—
but this—
this, child, this here is what we really call imposter, mortal-never, people-barely, and you have spent so long killing all the human in you, stowing its bones gut-deep like if only you could consume yourself, make yourself into your own image, ouroboros, homunculus boy, you could be so much better than what you really are. she is—they are—a clever ruse, a matchstick in this cradle of papier mache people, and she will burn the beast right out of you, make you stumble, make you weak, peel back your skin and show you what you're really made of—
and—
and are you surprised? does it scare you, silvertongue child, backhanded sweetheart, how soft you are inside? how much humanity you could not salt and burn yourself free of, wildfire boy, choking on your own ashes?
they're scared of her now, the poor thing, of what she is, of what she can do, of what she isn't anymore and she's so new to this. you're playing the game against someone who is everything you have clawed and killed and bled to be just by design and she's, what, scared? she’s built for it better but she ain’t quite got the guts for it yet, hasn’t had the time you did to scrub herself clean of all that rot-soft sympathy—she still wants so much to have what you have spent a lifetime tearing out of you, that weakness, that pause before the hammer strikes, the breath before the crescendo, all that uncertainty—
it is a process, after all, making monsters, and you have been laying down bricks for as long as you can remember, a citadel to her city street, and even now you only need one of them so long as it's the upper hand. you know where this story goes, the curve of your spine so domino-straight, all lined up in the perfect row; keep your puzzle-piece grin all to yourself and keep your head down, play the long game because—
because she is alien, clever ruse and copy and clone but you, sweet gunpowder, liquor-slick, bullhearted child—you are a monster.
you'll have time yet to show your claws.