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“Fuck. Looks like we’re walking to exfil.”
Iris throws the wrench in her hand at the broken vehicle she had been attempting to fix for the past twenty minutes in a pitiful show rage, along with a few choice phrases about the vehicle’s impotence and uselessness. Able doesn’t know anything about cars, and he could have told her that before she even popped the hood. Even he knew black smoke from a piece of technology wasn’t a good sign.
“C’mon big guy, it’s over this way.” She jerks her head in the direction they were suppose to be heading, before setting off, her back to him, completely unafraid.
Iris was his favorite out of all of Omega-7. Resourceful and headstrong, good iron someone had left out on the side of the road. All Able had to do was beat it into steel—an infuriating process that Able was currently undertaking. Humans were frustratingly fragile to handle. If he pushed too hard, they broke.
Not that he particularly cared when they broke. Another body on the pile, a puddle of gore for him to step over. Nothing of true value was ever lost when one fell apart in his hands.
Although—he was keen on keeping Iris together. Her potential to become a formidable warrior was too great to waste. Anyone who could beat him at anything was worth at least attempting to forge into something greater. So he was more careful with her, if only just so.
It had some... unintentional side effects.
Iris looks back at him, but not in fear. He doesn’t see a hint of it on her face, nor in her eyes. After a moment, she looks away, back at the road before them. She adjusts her backpack on her shoulders, saying nothing.
She does it again and again, he starts to count. Twice, three—four times. Why did she keep doing that?
“Why do you keep looking at me?” He asks, after the fifth time. They had been walking for a little over two hours at that point.
Iris shrugs. “Dunno. Making sure you’re still back there?” She says it like a question, like the answer was some nebulous thing he would have to make sense of himself.
Her words take him back to a time when he was three thousand years younger, when he was neither warrior nor weapon.
When she looks back, he’s reminded of his sister. Awan would play amongst his sheep, when she was little. She used to pretend to be a shepherd, like him. Always turning back to make sure he was watching, crying, ’Watch me Able! Watch me!’ while trying (and failing) to herd his flock. She and Seth would play in the dirt, pretending to be farmers and shepherds, pretending to delegate like their mother, or pretending to go to war like their father. And always, always she would glance back to make sure he was still there.
Something stirs in him then. Some primordial ache, the empty half of him he buried thousands of years prior at the feet of his brother, when Cain spilled his blood at the foot of their father’s throne. The part of him that was killed long ago, knowing it would do him no good. Feeble emotions that belonged to feeble beings, and Able was no human. Not anymore. Siblings were a useless endeavor. What good were they, when one could not protect them, or be protected from them?
It has been so long since he considered himself someone’s brother. His own brother had driven a rock into his skull for a throne their father would not give them.
Iris looks back at him again.
“What’cha thinkin’ about, big guy?”
Iris was not his little sister. She was steel, a sword to be shaped.
(if he listened hard enough, he could still hear his sister’s laughter as she weaved between the sheep)
“I am thinking about how many times you’re going to keep looking back here. I am not going anywhere, girl, so you can quit.”
Iris looks a little taken aback, but she is not afraid. There is no glint of fear in her eyes.
The last time she had looked at him in fear it was not because she was afraid of him. It was because of that lizard—the stupid beast the little soldiers around him had called 682. They were his soldiers though, so he had gone to face the beast himself; but it wasn’t until he had seen the fear in Iris’ eyes that he had seen red—
Iris was not his little sister.
She is a weapon to be cultivated.
Able does not have any siblings. He does not need them.