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He wakes up under the cool white lights of the Base, breathing in stale, filtered air and facing a cold metal wall. He’s laying on his back. Through the stacks of blankets and furs he’s stretched out on, he’s still aware of the hard metal beneath him. He glances over at his left side. She’s asleep on her stomach. Her left shoulder starts right where his arm used to be. He lets his eyes drift down the unmarked skin of her arm, then back up to her shoulder, tucked perfectly into the empty space under his own. She’s there, filling the space, but something is missing.
Showers, he learns they’re called from reviewing data on the Focus attached over his right ear. The thing on the wall that spouts clean water out at him. It makes bathing quicker, that’s certain. His face paint trickles down his chest in white rivulets before flowing down the drain at his feet and going only the Ten know where. The water is hot. He has a moment of irrational fear that his tattoos will be scrubbed clean and flow down the drain too, but of course that doesn’t happen. Tattoos are permanent. (He glances at his left side again, the abrupt and sudden end of his arm just under the shoulder, feeling the ache of his left hand even though it doesn’t exist anymore.) Except when they aren’t.
Surrounded by metal and ancient wiring still lighting ancient overhead lamps that are too bright, with air circulating and recirculating until it barely smells like air, he feels the pull of the mountain more than ever. The pull of snow, of dirt. There isn’t anything natural in this place, this metal shell he temporarily calls home as they prepare for a battle nobody is ready for. Nothing natural, nothing real, nothing except for her.
She’s a warrior far more accomplished than him, and her mission is far more important than anything he’s ever done. And yet she still carves out time to ask him what the marks on his arm and legs and chest and back mean. Her fingers trace the lines etched deep into his skin, moving lightly, as though she’s afraid to wipe them off. Slowly, amid the dust and rust and cobwebs of the ancient, abandoned Base, he tells her the stories contained in the lines and whorls and dips of his body. She listens, her head on his chest, listens to his words and the beat of his heart. He feels the weight of her on him like he feels the absence of his arm. He thinks he’ll never get used to either.
“This one,” she says, her fingers pressing into a figure etched into the skin above his hip, or between his shoulder blades, or on his sternum. “Gauntlet? Battle? Machine? Which machine? When?”
She’s full of questions, and he’s full of answers. He shares the details of his life. He runs his hand over her skin, marked only by old cuts and burns. She tells him the sources of her old injuries as he tells her the stories behind the tattoos he’s so proud of.
Her hand makes its way to the stump on his left side, eventually. Inevitably.
“What was here?” she asks him.
He doesn’t answer at first. Their little game of catch up, sharing stories and memories, usually ends here. In the darkness of her room, he can pretend he’s asleep and she may believe him. He knows she doesn’t, but at least she doesn’t press.
She asks again another night, in her room or his makeshift office, under harsh white electrical light, in the windless air of Indoors. Her hand is on his shoulder, above the space where his arm used to be. He doesn’t want to shrug her hand away, so he takes it in his hand and repositions it over his heart.
“Too soon?” she asks him.
Her eyes are soft. The way she looks at him makes him feel naked. It makes him feel pathetic. He looks at a point above her shoulder, into the depths of her hair.
“Much was lost,” he says, and his tone is final. She doesn’t press, but he knows he doesn’t have much time left to hide from her.
He wasn’t one to hide, before. Something is different. Somewhere between the Embassy and now, between the mountains and the desert, in this bunker hidden away from the world, something is missing. He feels around the stump in the shower, before he wraps it back up in bright blue cloth, and half expects to touch his arm. His hand falls through air. There’s nothing there.
Her hand touches the burn scars around the stump from the cauterization. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it still feels foreign. He feels her touch like someone’s describing it to him from another room. He takes her hand and moves it to the back of his neck.
“Not yet?” she asks him.
He buries his face in her hair. It smells like Outside, like the sun, like sweat and leather and faintly like machine oil. He must smell like the stale indoors. She doesn’t prod, even though he can feel the questions pool in her mouth like water, her lips pursing to keep them from spilling out.
His Focus pushes bright purple reams of data at him, reports of old wars fought over forgotten lands, ancient manual machines managed by humans in green camouflage. Through the holographic words that float before him, he sees her approaching and swipes the data away so he can watch her walk up to him. Her hair is like fire, so much movement contained in something inanimate. She wears Sky Clan colors this day. The sight of bright blue and pink paint on her arms tugs at something in his chest.
“You’ve been back to the Bulwark?” he asks her. The paint on her arms has long since dried but he still touches her skin gently.
“Just to check in on my way back,” she says. “They gave me a new outfit. They said the paint is part of the outfit.”
“It is. This one—” he touches her upper arm, the curve of blue and white circles set close together, “—this is the Bulwark. And this—” he touches two lone circles lower on her arm, “—this would be the stones set loose when you shot the cannon. This piece commemorates your breach of the Bulwark.”
She reaches over and touches the paint. Small dried paint flakes come off her arm and float gently down to the hard metal floor.
“I’ll have to get this touched up next time I’m in the area,” she says.
“It won't survive a shower. You’ll need something more permanent if you want to hold on to your stories.”
Her eyes, always steadily watching his face, flicker for just a moment to his missing arm. He pretends he doesn’t catch that, but he does. He does.
Some nights, he finds himself outside, the frozen metal door to the entrance of the Base at his back. He looks toward the west, toward trees and snow and air that burns when breathed in too deep. His body’s memory is so much longer than his mind’s. The tattoos on his skin remember the gauntlets, the shallow outcroppings of the cliffs he’s scaled, the machines he’s killed and the scars they’ve left as they fell, every girl he’s ever kissed, every story they’ve ever told of him. But some stories are gone now, burnt to ash and buried somewhere in No Man’s Land. And he’s just a man missing an arm, feeling homesick but not for a place.
She trails her hand over his chest, stopping to trace an incomplete circle etched on his skin. “This one,” she says.
“A friend fell into a frozen lake. I helped him out.”
“This one.” A square with zigzagging edges, and lines within that are placed seemingly at random.
“Scaling the walls of Barren Light. During the Raids.”
Her hand touches the burnt skin peeking over the edge of the blue cloth. He feels himself tense up but can’t relax.
“Do you remember the tattoos that used to be here?” she asks.
If he closes his eyes, he can see them. The missing stories. “Studying the work of the Old Ones is… it makes me feel…” he trails, but she pulls some meaning from his stuttering thoughts somehow.
“They’ve documented their stories, in the data. But you haven’t. You can’t.”
He nods, staring at the dark ceiling, feeling her hands still on his chest for once instead of feeling around. She’s watching his face closely, studying him like he studies the stories the Focus shows him.
“Tenakth preserve their histories on their bodies. The stories I chose to preserve on my arm are… gone now. Forever.”
She inches closer to him, fitting perfectly under his missing arm. Filling in the space. “Tell me the stories. I’ll help preserve them for you. With you.”
He feels it again, the tug in his chest, the pull west to the mountains. To home. To a time when he was whole, a place where he was a story and not just an excerpt. Back when there was empty skin still on his arms and legs and back, ready to be filled in with grand tales and adventure and bravery. He didn’t know what his future held, when he was busy being extraordinary. Things are so different now.
He reaches with his one remaining arm to pull her even closer. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she says. She props herself up on his chest with her arm. Her hair falls over both her shoulders to tickle his face. It smells like grass. “Tell me.”
He starts at the highest point on her left shoulder and traces the shapes of his history. His knuckle drags across her upper arm to draw invisible lines and curves and figures. With his nails, he lightly scratches above her elbow to indicate shading. On her forearm, he taps a pattern with the pads of his fingers. He draws shapes on the soft skin of the inside of her wrist with his thumb. On her knuckles, he traces slowly, his eyes closed, trying to remember the details. “Here is where I put the names of my brothers who fell during the Raids,” and “This was the first climb I ever did on my own,” and “This is where I put my father’s name,” and “Here is my jump into the arena, at the Kulrut,” and she absorbs every word, her eyes fixed on the patterns he draws on her arm.
When he’s finally finished, he feels drained. His arm falls down to his side.
“Thanks for sharing this with me,” she says. “I won’t forget.”
“I know,” he says. He nudges her with his incomplete shoulder. She nudges him back. “Thank you for listening.”
She leaves in the morning, on another mission to another settlement or rebel camp or ancient ruin. He sees her off at the western entrance with his back to the heavy metal doors. He feels the frozen dirt under his feet and the mountain spreading up into the sky above him. Something in his heart sinks as he watches her glide down the mountain. He goes back into the bunker to surround himself with holograms and old battle formations and blueprints for war machines long since lost to the ages.
The deluge of old world data keeps him occupied but before long, his mind drifts back to her. Her searching hands, her unmarked skin, the deeds so loud and bold that they can’t be contained to ink. There isn’t enough skin on her whole body to document all her stories. And yet she holds onto them somehow, without the help of tattoos. He calls her on her Focus and listens to her breathing as she rides her machine around the wilderness. They don’t speak but he feels the connection between them as if she’s laying next to him in his bed.
She comes back, eventually. Inevitably. In the middle of the night, with her left arm wrapped in bright blue cloth. He recognizes the precise coloring, Sky Clan coloring. He gives her a curious look but she just shrugs and says, “It’s healing.”
He doesn’t prod. Injuries are sources of shame among his people, and while Aloy has never hidden her injuries from him before, he doesn’t want to push her. He settles back into the covers. She settles into his side.
He wakes up, and feels her laying on her stomach on his left. Her left shoulder starts right where his arm used to be. Hers is no longer wrapped.
He lifts himself up slightly on his elbow, his breath catching. Her left arm is swollen, radiating warmth, but the marks are unmistakably his tattoos. His stories, exactly as he remembers them, just as he told her. His father’s name, a slightly swollen symbol on the soft, round skin of her shoulder. His first climb documented just above her elbow. The first weapon he ever made, his first kill, his favorite cave on the side of the cliff where he spent his first night outside on his own. It’s all there, resurrected. Renewed. He almost tries to flex his left hand, thinking hers will close on his command.
His eyes find her face. She’s awake, watching him closely, waiting for his reaction. He doesn’t know how to tell her about the thing in his chest, this tug that used to remind him of how much he missed what he used to be, is now pulling him closer to her instead.
He lays back down and feels the warmth from her still healing skin seep into his body like water. The metal all around him is cold and dead, and the air is still. But he looks down at his left side again, seeing his life etched into the skin of a warrior much greater than him, and her eyes are full of some emotion he can’t identify. Whatever was missing, an arm or a purpose or a home, isn’t anymore.
Something clicks gently into place.