Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Marty knows he can’t be seen, but his heart is in his throat.

He hears Rust without him having to raise his voice, like a thought, sometimes he can’t stop hearing him.

‘Ask yourself why you’ve managed to come this far, Marty.’

~

He believed he was thirty-one years old and through a system of biochemical equations he had ended up with the shortest possible straw; his wife had left him and his only daughter was dead. He worked undercover with cartels and biker gangs, flawlessly, for  four years, until he was shot three times and pulled from his job to recuperate in a facility.

His mind was going.

It manifested as sensory malfunctions; hallucinations, scent and sound reminders, lights in the sky from pressure pressing on his eyeballs. He told Marty it was the drugs.

Placed back on the force at his own request, tabula rasa, Rust was taken under the belligerent wing of one Martin Hart, Senior Detective, and he subsequently made a new reputation for himself. The men in the unit had been lacking a certain rapport with the androids they were supposed to protect, serve and retire if it was called for. If a replicant had valuable information, if they were the property of someone important, Rust would let them talk. He’d let them talk if they were some filthy, tweaking, sputtering nothing.

‘That’s all they ever want to do, talk up the lives they think they’ve lived, and if not their own, their masters’.’

Marty didn’t understand Rust’s intensive methods, how he changed himself to suit the character of each person—he thought of the synthetics as people, that was it. He was casual about it while it was inherently wrong, calling a pleasure unit a woman, an industrial  drone a man. Rust was the last Marty would have thought to be so sympathetic, and he seemed entirely aware of it, how different it was to his usual misanthropic self.

He never ran away from anything but himself.

This isn’t to say Rust didn’t fully accept his lot. As a man, he was broken and in pain, hiding the autopsy scar of his past under a respectable suit. As a replicant, he was just broken.

None of his memories were real, he hadn’t even been in rehab, he had been reprogrammed. If he looked into his own eyes, turned his head just so into the light, his pupils would gleam yellow, inhuman as everyone else would see. He’d believed in this lie of a life for seven years. A replicant would cease to function at ten.

Rust no longer had to accept.

Chapter Text

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti vobis fratres,

quia peccavi nimis cogitatione,

verbo, opere et omissione,

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

~

On the nape of his neck, beneath his high collar, a pale powder disintegrating his black clothes into the sunlight, the preacher stepped a foot into the empty road and looked back to where he’d come from. There was a dot, making noise, at the convergence. Despite the wide brim of the hat perched on the back of his head, he had to bring up a hand to shield his eyes, but he gained no focus on the oncoming possibility. It took a few more minutes of patience for the vehicle to roll up alongside him.

Funny to see a man of the cloth as a lone traveller, as if the missionary should travel in secret. Marty reached across to roll the window down and peer through at this monochrome spectre, thoughts of dust devils made him smirk.

‘How far you headed?’

The preacher carefully removed his hat and covered his breast with it, as he leaned to meet Marty’s gaze, ’however far you’ll take me.’

It struck Marty, the dryness of the man’s voice and the weathering to his young face; he’s been on the road some time.

He didn’t start the car right away, once the preacher folded his gangly limbs into the passenger side. These parts of him didn’t add up, like there was barbed wire wrapped around him. Marty drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, ‘what if that’s different to where you want to end up? What if it’s mere miles?’

There was almost no response, as if the preacher hadn’t been the only one around to hear Marty speak. ‘If that’s it, that’s it and nothin’ more.’

‘Where are you going?’

And the preacher didn’t turn to Marty, didn’t answer him at all, just rested back in his seat and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t even asleep. Or praying.

Marty could have thrown him out, he supposed, if the man wasn’t a preacher.

~

I confess to almighty god, 

and to you my brothers, 

that I have sinned exceedingly 

in thought, word, act and omission,

through my fault, through my fault,

through my most grievous fault.

Chapter Text

Waking up with gloved fingers in his mouth, tasting plastic and metallic and flesh underneath.

Reflex is to bite down.


Reflex is a mistake.


Tears, hot, pushing out of his eyes, pain-- he’s been shot, he knows that pain, spreading up into his synapses. All he’s seeing is red and white, blue and white, white, fucking—white.


Limbs aren’t moving the way he wants, there’s no chance he’s lifting himself up.


Realises he’s being spoken to but doesn’t understand what is being said.


Passes out.

Let each one examine his own actions. (Galatians 6:4)

An unfamiliar pull to the set of his mouth. New teeth, two and a half incisors. 

Before they left him to die, they made a point of leaving him looking real fucking dead.

Sometimes he can’t feel, there’s another layer of skin over him, like he’s dipped his hand into cold fat.

His fingers don't close when he wants them to, don't open when he wants them to, he's lost all communication. Can't even speak.

Hell is not a place of torment but mankind’s common grave. (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10)

Asked to draw himself, he’s too realistic. Drawing skin damage and the not-so-new downward slant to his mouth, wrinkles.

Asked to draw himself, he gives up and follows the line of violence.

His face isn't there. 

Justice, justice you should pursue. (Deuteronomy, 16:20)

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Reggie Ledoux’s body isn’t even cool and already Marty is waving his gun around as if it isn’t empty.

A woman is clawing at his eyes and throat and screaming, catlike, in another language.

Too close for Marty to defend himself from scratches all over his arms, some of them in patterns.

‘You will not take my children, you will not!’

A wedding dress, spiderweb lace, torn and grubby.

Rust grabs her by the wrists and crosses her arms in front of her, pulling her away, stepping back from her kicking, struggling. Pulls her arms up, behind her tiny body. She’s heaving and snarling with rage. There’s rings of red around her eyes and she smells like blood left in the sun, exactly like Reggie on the ground beside them.

Formaldehyde. Motor oil.

A knife.

Marty turns away and dabs at his face, nearly doubled over, his back and shoulders heaving, terrified. The woman hasn’t let up but Rust puts his knee into her back and eases her down. Facing Reggie she begins to cry and screams again, unintelligible with half her face in the dirt.

The damage is superficial enough for Marty to stumble back to the storage container.

Children?

Chapter Text

Stumble up the stairs from the Promenade and fall into the bookshop, against the display of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, don’t look at them twice, but notice the bedrolls under the shelves.

He could work here, maybe, earn his keep. No, that wouldn’t be a routine he’d like. That interaction.

Steps past the section on ‘Foreign Wars’.

There’s a library upstairs, and sustained notes coming from a piano, so he seats himself in an armchair in the Arts section and tries to find the names of the paintings he saw, in a gallery beneath an orchard. In a gallery next to a park. In a gallery that used to be a train station, with a clock that was meant to count time backwards but didn’t work at all.

Someone lets the piano lid shut with a thump, and Rust gets to his feet.

There’s louder sounds in his head that haven’t stopped with the music.

He walks over the bridge in a complete daze, onto sandier ground, and nothing will get the smell of blood out of his senses, except a drink.

Two towers of the church and a bar named similarly. He can sit there as long as he likes. Maybe he should have bought that book. That’d be an excuse, but it’s not like he needs one.

He enjoys walking from the bar to the bodega, or whatever the word is, on the corner, picking up a bottle of wine and a bottle of whiskey. Really, he just enjoys the whiskey, drinking wine with the bottle still in a brown bag, until he becomes unaware of the mild winter weather, the long line of people winding into the darkened church.

There's couples under the bridge, along the river, and all of them look some kind of happy. 

With nowhere to sit, Rust joins the back of the line, so he won't be moved along by the nearest gendarme. It moves forth a lot quicker than he anticipated and it's to his dulled horror that he finds himself inside, hit directly by the enriched smell of incense.

He wants to remember that as her, the unnamed he's never yet found-- but all he sees is it costs two Francs for a tealight prayer candle and five Francs for a whole votive, donation at your discretion, of course.

The place has a gift shop. Get your sermons on CD. 

Rust stands in front of the Pieta and gulps the last of his wine. 

Consecration.