Work Text:
The average, untrained human can hold their breath anywhere from thirty to ninety seconds.
Your record, so far, is forty-six.
You gasp, a sound that seems much too loud in the quiet room, and silently fume at the way your (stupid, human, fragile, weak) lungs burn, at how long you have to spend just thinking about breathing, having to feel the air rushing cold into your lungs and hot and wet and disgusting out of your mouth. Even the feeling of your chest rising and falling is intolerable, the physical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. You wish you could just make it stop.
You don’t want to die, of course. That would be a massive waste of your intellect and talents. But at the same time, living, like this, is a constant assault on your senses; fingers digging into your brain, mashing it up and swirling it around until you can’t think straight.
You can’t stop your other physical processes (you’ve tried). But you can stop your breathing for a time, so you don’t have to feel it whooshing out of your mouth, tickling your chin or upper lip, or hear the hollow noise of its movement inside your head. It doesn’t really end up helping, but for a few seconds at a time, you can pretend you truly don’t need it.
At least now, you know it will not be forever.
You reach out your left hand until you feel cool metal, and it hurts, knowing you are so close to home and yet so infinitely far away from it, but it also makes you giddy in a way you wish didn’t turn your stomach so much. You’re not sure when you’d wound up here, lying on the table next to your half-finished body, staring up at the single flickering light on the ceiling and turning your head so your glasses catch it at different angles.
Wagstaff had stayed late, and so you had too. The sounds of the factory had long since faded, leaving a constant low ringing in its place. You liked the sounds, of machinery working, of pieces fitting together. They were even, logical sounds. You never took lunch outside, with the grass and the stone and the bugs and the birds. You always did it where you could hear the factory floor.
You had, of course, spent the overtime working on your body, in the converted office room full of blueprints and boxes, metal scraps and tools. It had become your sanctuary as the rest of the world pressed in on you more and more and more and more. You could always go here, see the plans on the whiteboard on the wall, see the body lying on the table, chest cavity opened and filled with lovely gears and wires, and know that there’s still hope. You will live there one day. You have to.
(You have the helmet; you’d made it a while ago out of leftover metal and kept its purpose to yourself. It does nothing, of course, as it’s just a hollow shell without any systems in place. But you like to wear it sometimes, when you’re alone, and imagine that day you know is coming.)
Your frail human hands had gone shaky and the world had started spinning as you’d worked, so you’d been forced to lie down, painfully aware of your heart racing against your ribs and the inside of your mouth feeling like sandpaper and your guts twisting and turning inside you. Maybe you could fix these problems—sleep, get a drink, eat something—but you fail to understand what the point is when your body will simply fall out from under you again in a matter of hours and you’ll have to repeat the whole time-wasting process, over and over and over. Why do you have to keep doing so much maintenance just to function? How do people do this for their whole lives, knowing they can never actually move on to anything more productive?
Your chest has calmed itself, now, and so you take another deep breath and hold it. You close your eyes and imagine you are exactly one foot to the left, inside your real body, the one that makes sense without the fallible, uncomfortable organs and the racing irrationality your meat brain has been making worse and worse in the last few months.
Ten seconds. Twenty. You need to go longer, but you can feel the strain in your current body starting to build as it is unable to bend to your wishes.
“Woodrow?”
You hate the sound that comes out of your throat, somewhere between a gasp and a squeak. You sit up (the discs of your spine rub against each other, cracking and popping and loud in your ears), turning your head to see him in the doorway. You have never understood expressions, and thankfully he doesn’t seem to expect you to, what with the massive goggles he’s always wearing and the facial hair (are you going to get that if you linger in this body too long? You can already feel it poking out of your pores, scratching horribly against your face).
“What?” You hate talking, you hate having to pick words, you hate your voice because it doesn’t sound like you, but you know if you put a little more force behind your words, make them a little sharper, people will usually grasp that you’re annoyed.
Wagstaff scratches the back of his head, and you can tell he’s studying you like he so often does. “I’m finished for today. You ready to go?”
You don’t like Wagstaff. You’re fairly positive he doesn’t like you, given the way he stares at you and casually tries to get you to talk, answer endless, uncomfortable, pointless questions in the name of “science”. But you unfortunately have to trust him for now, or this project is never going to get done. You haven’t told him your real plans, and you’re terrified that you’ve left a hint somewhere, that he might figure it out too early, early enough to tear apart all of your work. You swear he’s always one step away from ruining everything, from destroying your only shred of hope.
You do stay at his house most nights, because you don’t really have anywhere else to go. But right then, the thought of leaving your true body behind here overnight makes your clammy skin crawl.
“I’ll stay here for tonight, thank you,” you say in that sharp way that makes most people who aren’t Wagstaff leave you the hell alone. The ‘thank you’ you’ve heard as both a way to make others more amenable to requests, and as a socially-acceptable indicator of irritation.
“Are you sure? I’ve got late dinner waiting.”
“Not hungry.”
You’re pretty sure you’re lying and that’s why your stomach is upset at you this time, but you don’t really care. He’s not a very good cook, anyway, and most food textures make you want to turn your face inside out.
“I won’t be back until morning.”
“Good.” You don’t feel like doing the dance anymore.
“...If that’s what you want. At least try to get some sleep, all right?”
You don’t answer. You shouldn’t have to answer. You just lie back down on the table and turn your head very slightly to see Wagstaff slowly backing out of the doorway, hesitating a moment to peer at you before pulling the door all the way shut.
The click rings out. You hear his footsteps. You hear the jingle of keys.
And then there’s nothing left but the ringing in your ears.
It feels like a weight’s fallen off your chest, like breathing is a little less horrible, knowing that nothing can stop you from spending the night with your real body. Maybe, once the feelings pass, you’ll even be able to stand up and get some more work in—work on the systems you haven’t told Wagstaff about. If you get far enough, he won’t be able to stop you. You already have plans on parroting his ramblings about ‘scientific discovery’ and ‘the amount of effort put in’. Humans aren’t logical, but you’ve gotten fairly certain over your weeks of rehearsing that he’ll see things your way as long as you phrase them with his own words.
But that’s still some time away. For now, you suck in another deep breath, and hold it.