Work Text:
It starts with something wriggling and wet.
This thing, living, comes to you in chunks — process your data in strips of code, start with your fingers and work to your elbows and touch your chest shakily. A copper-tang in your mouth (which is familiar) and a red river spilling out between your teeth (familiar, still, but more distantly so — the phantom sensation of something you had forgotten. Knees on pavement. Bright band-aid patterns.) You feel circuitry melting into nerve-endings inside of you like a hot spring unwinding tight muscle, feel all your bolts and bobs into a cardiovascular system, synthetic material into endocrine, your whole body an epicenter for an organic rebirth.
It starts with something wriggling — your fingers, remembering how they work, flexing on a timer as if reaching for something, something — and wet — the blood inside you, between your teeth, the slippery heartbeat spiking beneath your chest. Your brother’s tears, hot on your cheeks. (Temperature is another new thing; familiar but stiff, like finding old clothes that don’t fit you right anymore.)
“Ugh,” you rasp. Your throat hurts. You wonder if it’s too late to ask for a refund.
“Claus? Claus!” Hands on your shoulders, poking and insistent. Lucas flitters above you anxiously, haloed by the glowing cavern walls, his hair like buttercup petals on his forehead. You should say something, maybe, a jab or a jape or something similar. For now, though, you’re incapable of doing anything but slipping your eyes slowly shut.
Around you, the world fumbles and goes dark. You think there is some nice sense of symmetry here: the world that was supposed to end but didn’t and the boy who was supposed to die but lived.
(+)
The world around you is – new.
Well not completely new – you were somewhat aware during your time as the commander, and there’s still bits and pieces of the old Tazmily kicking around -- but at the same time, there’s stuff you never got to see, thoughts you never got to have while seeing them. As if you just got swapped from a point-and-click game to a free-roam, sandbox ordeal.
But to an extent, the other residents are struggling with much of the same – shedding the brainwashing of the Happy Boxes like coming out of a bout of daydreaming --, and now there’s all this fuss over how much of the technology from before is salvageable and what the ethical ramifications of using it would be.
After all, it’s an adapted way of life. There’s a part of them that thinks they might not fit back into the guileless and naïve face of the old Tazmily, not with the years spent industrializing, programming, tinkering.
Yeah. You know what that’s like.
Because that’s what you did, right? Adapted. There was a part of you in that machine, and it turned as cold as steel, landlocked in a cage of screws and bolts – obey without question. That part of you is still with you. It’s a block of ice in your stomach.
(There are days where you feel robbed, just a bit; part of you doesn’t belong in this revolutionized era, your brother and his king’s red cloak – the face of the Renaissance – and you with all your faulty code, skin that still feels too synthetic some nights – the face of the Past. Some mornings Lucas will tug at your blankets and whine, “Get up, Claus!” and you will, immediately, without question, everything forgotten for just a second in the confusion of just waking up.
And Lucas doesn’t notice, and you wouldn’t dare let him; he’d adopt a guilty expression, quivering his lip and fluttering wet eyelashes at you – or worse, he wouldn’t, and you would have to remember that’s another thing that moved on without you.)
(+)
You go swimming.
There’s a part of you that’s – not afraid or anything, obviously! But cautious. Duh. You were a machine for years, and it’s not too far-fetched that a part of you still is.
But you go swimming anyway, because it’s one of your favorites and because Lucas asked, and as the older twin you have a responsibility to shoulder the emotional burden of things like… caution. Heavy caution. No matter how mature Lucas likes to think he is (and, admittedly, has proven to be).
Still, instead of a bounding cannonball or something similar, you toe the shoreline carefully, slowly working your way to the ankle before reaching down and testing each finger. Methodical.
But then you glance up, and Lucas is giving you this strange look, a weird mix of emotions that’s hard to recognize, and you realize he’s already splashed his way into the surf –
for a second, the world flickers, and you are eight again, a new pair of bright orange swim trunks emblazoned on your legs proudly, already thrashing your way through the waves while Lucas nervously teeters at calf-deep, afraid of the cold or of the water or something, so you call him a “chicken” and laugh at him because that’s who you are, Claus, the brave and determined twin, the one that isn’t afraid of anything, the one who is the opposite of Lucas in every way—
like the sand pulled out from under you, shifting without your notice – a mirror that inverts the past into a truth more palatable in the present; you, caught shame-faced and water-shy, and Lucas, wading and waiting like a fishing bobber.
In a second, you brace your shoulders and splash into the ocean, saltwater arcing away from the impact of your body – one that’s all flesh-and-blood, apparently, with how you manage to survive the impact –, and you even punch Lucas on the shoulder a little, for good measure.
“Just messing with you, stupid,” you laugh, and he rubs his arm absently and pouts, and maybe things aren’t so different -- in this moment and in the Future of it all.
Because, yes, you used to be opposites, but if Lucas is growing, you will too; this won’t be another thing you let pass you by, and if Lucas wants to be the courageous and reckless twin – well.
He’ll have to fight you for it.
(+)
Here’s how it starts: with something wriggling and wet -- an aliveness in a cavern sparked into the heart of a boy who should have died three-years-past, his eyes opening like boulders in front of a tomb, flush on his cheeks like a miracle.
Here’s how it ends: it doesn’t – two boys play in the sea-tide until their stomachs hurt, until they go home smelling like the ocean-spray and the hot bake of the sun, and there is nothing inorganic about the way their limbs ache or how they collapse into bed. In the walls of their bedroom, there is nothing dead – but there is something miraculous.