Chapter Text
Sanford took a meat hook off the wall of the storage room. The one he had been using was battered beyond repair by now; it was only a matter of time before its barbed end snapped off between some victim’s ribs. He ran his hand over the new one, feeling the smooth curve and the sharpness of the point and barb. The smooth metal felt refreshing against his hand compared to the bent and nicked surface of the old hook. He threaded a cord through the end and tied it off.
His left eye itched under the bandages. His side itched, too, but his eye was worse. Doc had bandaged it soon after the itching started. The strange black stain had already made it hard to see much of anything through that eye, so they had decided they might as well cover it. The bandages were a temporary barrier to keep him from rubbing and scratching the eye out in case it could be salvaged. He felt like a dog in a cone. Or a person in a straitjacket. Which was how he thought he was going to end up if the itching didn’t stop soon and he ended up tearing through the bandages and, inevitably, his eye and skin.
He had an intrusive thought of the new hook flying straight into his left eye. Then, the scarier possibility of it piercing his right eye instead entered his mind. He ignored the thoughts, but acknowledged their point: his aim had gotten worse. No fucking depth perception. That previous hook should’ve lasted longer than this. He shouldn’t have missed so many shots and dragged it across so many rocks.
He put the new hook on his back and left the storage room. The bathroom door was open, and he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. The familiar black lines still lay across his face, showing no signs of fading. He gave in to temptation and walked up to the mirror.
Was it his imagination, or were the stains… spreading? Weren’t they a few millimeters smaller before? Had they always had that many little branches?
The thought made him feel dirty. He imagined the stain branching not just across his skin, but deep into his flesh like roots, eventually tunneling all the way to his bones.
Even if it was spreading inside him, it wasn’t like it could exactly tunnel. That’s because it didn’t seem to really exist at all. He and Doc had spent hours in the lab, taking biopsies of the stains on him and Hank and studying the samples under microscopes and even trying to detect chemical anomalies, but it all just seemed to be skin. It was the same as the rest of their skin on every test. If it really was a foreign substance, it couldn’t even be detected by their means, never mind identified. It seemed more like an effect somehow coded, integrated, formatted into his body, and not by DNA. That was what made Sanford feel so dirty. It was a contamination that was wholly unpredictable, a curse to be worn, a stain on his self rather than his skin. And it had practically blinded him in one eye. And how was he to know it wasn’t contagious?
Of course, that wasn’t to say it was hopeless. Just like the physical, the metaphysical had rules. Laws. If it didn’t, Doc wouldn’t have had such consistent success experimenting on it, hacking it, commanding it. It was how he had brought Deimos back, after all. If he could understand the workings of the world well enough to rip a whole person back to the realm of the living, it was far from impossible for him to find the source of Sanford’s infection and cure it. He just had to be patient.
If it was spreading, though, that was bad. If it was spreading, it was that much more likely to be contagious. Its essence could have transferred to anything he touched. Its nature meant it probably couldn’t even be washed off. Deimos had reassured him so many times that he still wanted to hug, he wasn’t scared, he didn’t care about some dumb black stain since he was already only even debatably alive, and after something like that, he just wanted to feel free and not sacrifice his happiness for anything. He had held Sanford’s cheeks in his stone hands, and, upon accidentally leaving little scrapes when he took his hands away, told him that meant it would only be fair for him to catch some of the stain in return. But if it was contagious, Deimos, who had spent so much time in Sanford’s arms, against his stomach, and against his face, would be the first one to get it.
And what if it spread to his other eye? Even ignoring his fear of ceasing to be useful, he couldn’t afford to lose his vision, since Deimos’s face was half caked in stone and he couldn’t speak anymore. It would be so much harder to communicate. He would be alone.
He brushed off that fear. Even if it got to that point, Doc and Deimos would find some technological workaround. The Soldats already had cyborg eyes, didn’t they? So it really wasn’t a risk. They would figure something out even if the stain crept so deep inside him that he scratched pieces of himself off. They would figure something out, even if it was something as crude as excising all the flesh around the stain to get every last bit out, and they could just replace the pieces with parts of agent corpses. Hank had already been through worse.
But what if the stain reappeared, exactly the same, on the transplanted flesh? What if it was really hardcoded into his being? What if Doc never found a cure for the curse?
He knew this cyclical thinking was useless. It was a waste of energy. And when it got bad enough to make him start expressing it, asking people for answers, digging everywhere for scraps of information that might make it okay, it was also a nuisance to the team. He could dig for information, dump hours away in the lab, ask everyone who had any clue every question worded in every possible way, and it still wouldn’t be enough. He wouldn’t find an answer. The dig was like scratching the itch. It was futile. The itch and the fear could only fade in and out on their own, and he could only hope he wouldn’t lose too much restraint and scratch his own eye out. His curse was novel. His curse was unidentifiable. He was stranded with nothing. He stared at his face in the mirror. He didn’t touch the tendrils of infection. He didn’t want to get it on his hand, assuming it wasn’t on his hand already.
Sanford forced himself to turn away from the mirror. He walked robotically out of the bathroom, then stood there, unsure where to go next. He wanted to punch himself in the face. He was experiencing that rare bubbling over of anger. Tricky and the Auditor had fucked up all their lives. He and Hank might be slowly dying from some fucking stain that didn’t even seem to really exist. And he wasn’t on a mission. There was no one and nothing to take it out on.
He thought about his two enemies. The team never seemed to succeed at killing either of them. They were both eternal, metaphysical, like the stain. Maybe, if they could somehow kill the two of them for real, the marks would evaporate. The curse would literally lift. But that wasn’t going to happen.
He pulled the hook off his back. His hands shook with anger. He wished he had something to plunge it into. He looked into the open door of the workshop and got an idea.
Sanford gathered several new hooks from the storeroom. He carried them all into the shop and put on a mask, deciding he didn’t give a shit if the infection on his face contaminated it, since he and Hank had surely already contaminated every surface in the goddamn base between the two of them. He got out a blowtorch and heated the first hook until it glowed gold. He hammered and stretched it until its inner edge was vaguely sharp, and then he hammered it some more, and then he let it cool and ground it down sharp. He had turned the meat hook into a big, curved knife. He imagined himself as some kind of Grim Reaper, ignoring the knowledge that Hank was already a far more effective killer than some imaginary scythe-wielding skeleton.
The knife was thin, uneven, and brittle. It would probably snap to pieces if used in battle. He didn’t care. He picked up the next hook and started again. He was not going to be precise. He had had enough precision tormenting himself in the lab, adding this or that stain to his skin biopsies, being oh-so-careful about exposing them to light or letting them dry out to eliminate any possible degradation, sliding them under the microscope, and adjusting every color of light in hopes of seeing something. He would smith by instinct only. His hands would flow like water.
He made several knives of several different shapes in the end. He didn’t know if any of them would be of any use, but they looked beautiful spread there on the table. He hung up his mask and left the knives there. He didn’t know how he would explain his waste of supplies to make a glorified art exhibit, but he wasn’t even going to bother thinking about it. Anyone who cared could come bother him about it at their leisure. He was tired now. He was going to bed.