Chapter Text
When he zones, he sinks.
There’s a reason that Vox takes good care of himself. His senses always teeter on the edge of too-much, too-loud, too-bright; there is a very fine line between overstimulation and his base level of perception. Like the cut of a blade, sharp and searing, cutting through his head until he passes out.
But in the heat of battle, it is difficult to properly control himself. He quite literally cannot let his guard down or he risks letting a bullet slip through his defences and bury itself in his ribcage. Vox needs to sense, needs to see, needs to hear as far as he can, as intently as he can, in order to make sure his team comes back from the mission.
He has an excellent track record. His squad has the highest survival rate of the entire military department, in part because Vox only selects the exceptional, in part because Vox is exceptional. He sees further than any man alive in the Empire, hears the tiniest sounds with alarming clarity; not even the smallest movement gets by him. With a talent like that, he’s heralded as the head of the new age of the Empire.
With a talent like that, there is a small note on his file that states he is a flight risk.
==
Vox wakes to nothing. The room is painted completely white, an empty void with a dim light that’s easy on the eyes. The walls are padded, muffling the sounds from the hallway and outside the building. The sheets are soft and smooth, targeted at reducing the risk of touch sensitivity as much as possible.
He breathes, eyes focused on the ring of light embedded into the ceiling. His senses slowly filter back in, one at a time; the light shifts from something calming to something blinding, and Vox has to avert his gaze. He cannot stare directly at it.
His hearing is the next to return. Whispers from the corridor slowly trip into his ears; they are still a haphazard mess of noise at the moment, too jumbled for Vox to parse, but he can hear them. The squeak of wheels on the metal floor. The clinking of glass tubes knocking against each other. The sloshing of liquid in the IV drips.
At least the room has been carefully aerated, Vox thinks weakly, trying to ease the tension from his shoulders. There are a few of his personal effects neatly arranged on the nearby table, clearly intended to make this foreign place feel a little more familiar. The room smells sterile, but there is the slightest hint of freshly ground coffee beans, gentle enough to caress instad of hurt his senses.
He lies there, limp and useless, for a few more minutes before he sits up and swings his feet to the side of the bed. The IV drip has run its course by now, and he carefully removes the needle from under his skin. Vox stays still to let the pounding in his head settle, then he stands and grabs his jacket hanging off the back of the chair near his bed.
The door to the room slides open with a brief touch. Vox peers his head out, checking both ways to make sure the coast is clear. Right as he thinks it’s safe to sneak out, he hears a familiar set of footsteps clicking three floors below. Vox freezes, trying to gauge how much time he has, and whether it’s enough to flee or whether he should return to his temporary bed.
Eventually, he decides that discretion is the better part of valor and beats a hasty retreat back to his bed.
Twenty minutes later, the door slides open to reveal an irate Reimu.
“You know you’re not supposed to get up,” she snipes, stepping in and giving him a dirty look. “You forgot to put the needle back in your hand.”
“I didn’t want to put it back in,” Vox complains, turning his head so he doesn’t have to watch her disapproving gaze. “How long was I out?”
“Three weeks.” Her voice is hard, and he can hear her settle into the chair next to his bed. There’s the sound of fabric ruffling, and Vox turns back with a frown on his face.
“Your hand?”
Reimu shrugs. “Broken. Some guy got me while I was dragging your sorry ass back to ship.”
Vox stares. He swallows, jaw tight with an emotion he refuses to recognise. “Sorry,” he says, and Reimu immediately looks contrite, like she hadn’t meant to say any of that.
“‘S not your fault,” she mumbles. “You zoned midway through. It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
There isn’t much to do other than to shrug. Vox’s mind is a slippery, shattered, sharp thing—Guides have described it like a field of broken glass, shards cutting into their bare feet everywhere they go. The Empire has sent him for mandatory guiding sessions to try and wrest his mind under control, but those sessions never work. The Guides do their best, but Vox knows better than anyone that if his mind refuses to cooperate, then it is nigh impossible for anyone to beat it into submission.
Without a Guide to properly sort through the complicated mess in his head, Vox will never perform at his peak. Worse, Vox can feel his mind deteriorating. The stress of unguarded senses on a mind is something that scientists and academics alike have attempted to study for decades, but nothing conclusive has ever arisen out of it. There has been no solution. There have only been dead Sentinels, one after another, a star that burned too bright and fell too soon.
The previous Sentinel with a power that rivalled Vox had lived for only a short twenty years. At twenty-three, Vox is already breaking records.
“You need to go back to the Centre,” Reimu says, worrying at her bottom lip. “You know we can’t let you go on like this.”
“I’m sorry, am I the Empire’s youngest General, or are you?”
“We’ll all go on strike if you don’t go to the Centre,” she insists, and Vox knows that her words are a very real threat, even if she says it without any heat. His team would be flogged for insubordination if they were under any other General, but Vox is different.
He lounges for a while longer, then sighs and props himself up. “Tatsuki?”
“She’s been handling your paperwork for you while you’re out cold. She’s not happy about it, mind you.”
Vox snorts. He’s never met anyone happy to do paperwork. “Her Guide? We never managed to get that meeting. Does her Guide still want to join the team?”
“Her Guide’s civilian,” Reimu says quietly. “Tatsuki doesn’t want her on the team.”
“Does her Guide want to be on the team?”
Reimu considers it for a moment. “I think so, yes. She seems like the type who would want to be on-site in case anything happens.”
“Send her the relevant forms then. The indemnity one, the insurance one… What other forms do we have again? The weapon clearance one… And sign her up for that self-defense course.”
She sighs like Vox just asked her to go off and defend the home planet with nothing but a gun. Really, he doesn’t know where Reimu gets her dramatics from. Not from him, surely.
“Will do,” she groans, the complaint loud and audible in her voice. “Up and at ‘em, chief. Tatsuki will be glad to see you.”
“I will not be glad to see her,” Vox replies sourly, stumbling out of bed. Someone is mumbling about an unexpected pregnancy three doors down, and someone is trying to figure out the insurance coverage for a workplace injury on the floor above. There appears to be an inheritance battle happening somewhere nearby, and that’s when Vox decides to try and string up whatever mental defenses he can manage to try and shut out the noises in his head.
He isn’t successful. He’s never been successful at mentally self-regulating for a single second in his life, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. Vox can either pull himself together, or go straight back into that bed in that sterile room and zone.
Reimu glances at him, concern in her gaze as she grips him by the elbow, as if afraid he’d topple over if she wasn’t there to catch him.
==
Selen isn’t at his desk. In fact, there is no one at his desk. There is nothing on his desk. It is… miraculously free of paperwork. Vox stares, gobsmacked at the sight of the detailing on the surface of the wood. He thinks he hasn’t seen it in five years.
“Since when was my table this colour?” He asks, stunned. When he runs a hand over the smooth surface, there isn’t even the slightest hint of dust. It’s clean. Awfully clean, actually.
“Oh!” Reimu says, looking just as bowled over. “Has that guy come around already? So soon?”
“Who?” But Vox’s voice is drowned out by the sound of Selen stomping around the corner and bursting into his office.
Selen beams, drawing Vox into a quick hug before carefully looking him over. “Wow, you look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Vox replies dryly. “Did you clean my office?”
She barks out a laugh, chortling as she shakes her head at him. “As if. It’s that Eveland guy. The one that HR sent over.”
“HR sent someone over?” Vox stares, confusion rising the more he tries to sort through the events that must have occurred while he was lost in a zone. “They sent someone to… clean my table?”
Selen and Reimu share a look. “You, er, zone quite frequently now,” Selen says, hanging, drawing and quartering any tact she had then tossing it out the window. “And for long periods of time. You kind of get a lot of backlogged paperwork.”
“So they sent this Eveland guy,” Reimu continues. “To pick up the slack. Like a glorified secretary, I guess?”
“And he’s a Guide,” Selen adds. “If you’re interested.”
Vox raises his eyebrows at her. “You know just as well as I do that most Guides quake at the sight of me. I’m quite sure I’m blacklisted from the Centre. Or at least on some ‘kill on sight’ poster.”
“I know. But I heard he volunteered for this role.” Selen leans in conspirationally, lowering her voice even though every Sentinel worth their salt in Vox’s team will be able to hear their conversation regardless, what with how the door to his office is wide open. “A Guide, volunteering to be in our all-Sentinel team? Kinda interesting.”
“No,” Vox sighs. “At least the Guides at the Centre signed up for fighting through the swamp of a messy mind. Eveland is here to do paperwork, not try and piece together my head.”
Even if the man is damned good at paperwork, he thinks, eyeing his table speculatively. “You know, I’m certain I had paperwork here from two years ago,” he says idly. “Did Eveland really finish it all?”
“Oh, the man’s incredible. You know those fresh MK-8473s that we really wanted but the Weapons Department refused to give us? Eveland sent in a requisition request three days ago and we’ve got ten of those babies in our shooting range right now!”
“What?!” Reimu gasps, looking like she’s ready to fly down there and get her hands on one as soon as possible.
“Huh,” Vox says, impressed. “Last one there treats the team dinner tonight.”
And before either of the girls can react, Vox shoulders his way past them, sprinting towards the elevator.
==
When Vox first catches sight of the man, he double takes.
“Good God,” he murmurs, eyes wide as he stares. “Since when did we get an angel in our team?”
“Shut your mouth, you’re embarrassing us,” Enna complains, shoving Vox in the back. “Oi, Eveland! Over here!”
The stranger turns, the light catching on his golden rim glasses, and the completely unimpressed look on his face makes Vox want to burst into laughter.
“I can hear you, you know? Ike says dryly, expression flat. “No one needs Sentinel levels of hearing to be able to catch that.”
“Ignore him. He’s still dizzy from coming out of his zone,” Enna says dismissively. “C’mon, let’s go see how much alcohol you can take before you’re out cold!”
Ike smiles, a tiny upturn of his lips that Vox can’t help but focus on.
“You didn’t tell me he was attractive!” He whispers to Reimu, who shakes her head at him.
“You’re hopeless,” Reimu tells him. Vox ignores her, surreptitiously trying to check if his clothes are neatly pressed and if he looks presentable in the closest reflective surface.
When he slides into the only empty seat at the table, he blinks at the mocktail in front of him.
“No alcohol for a recovering patient,” Ike says before Vox can even ask the question. The man is seated right across him, and Vox wonders if it’s intentional. Surely not intentional on Ike’s part, considering the man doesn’t seem all that interested in him.
Two seats down, Selen gives him a painfully obvious thumbs up, then turns to talk to the green-haired girl next to her. Must be her Guide, Vox thinks, and leans back to get a better look. The girl is a small slip of a thing, much tinier than Selen, and she looks delicate enough that he starts wondering whether it’s a good idea for her to join the team.
They’re a team of Sentinels, see, but anyone’s bonded Guide has an open invitation to the squad. Vox tried integrating unbonded Guides into the team before, but things just got… messy. Some workplace rules were flouted. Relationships got tense. And every Guide eventually became afraid of Vox’s mind, so they just stopped rotating Guides through their team after a while.
Ike Eveland is the first unbonded Guide to join the team in over five years. If what Selen says is true, then the man even volunteered himself.
“You didn’t join as a Guide,” Vox notes, taking a sip of his mocktail. It’s surprisingly good—not too sweet, with a slight sour tang that refreshes his mouth. Not something he would have picked out for himself, but he can’t deny that it’s an excellent choice.
Ike turns away from the bubble of conversation next to him. “No,” he agrees, long fingers wrapped around the side of his glass. Are those… fishnet gloves? Who wears fishnet gloves?! Vox stares a little, fascinated, and wonders what that texture must feel like on his skin. As someone with over-heightened perception, he rarely strays away from what he knows works for him.
But the shadows cast by the crisscrossing fabric splayed over Ike’s palms makes Vox wonder if he’s been missing out.
“Why not?”
Ike blinks slowly at him. “I was under the impression that the Akuma squad wasn’t looking for Guides.”
“We aren’t. But most Guides apply as Guides.”
“You weren’t looking for a Guide. You were, however, in desperate need of someone to sort out the absolute horrifying mess of paperwork you had on your desk,” Ike says wryly, mouth curving in amusement. “Are all Generals this bad at paperwork, or is it just you?”
“Paperwork is hard,” Vox says defensively. “There’s a lot of technical jargon in there. My talents lie elsewhere.”
“I know. You are a very famous man, Mr. Akuma. Your file is very detailed.”
Vox startles. As a General, his file should have one of the highest, if not the highest clearance requirements. Ike Eveland is just a Lieutenant at best—he shouldn’t have the requisite clearance to access Vox’s files.
The surprise must show on his face, because Ike laughs. “Anyone planning to join your team gets a dossier on you, General Akuma. Heavily censored, of course, but enough to get an understanding of who you are as an individual. Especially so for Guides.”
“But you didn’t join as a Guide.”
Ike shrugs. “I cannot change my nature. If the need arises, I have the authority to attempt to bring you out of a zone. It was written into my contract when I was transferred to your team.”
That is a piece of information that Vox didn’t expect. He wets his lips, trying to think of a nice way to say this, but the words fail him.
“You don’t have to,” he says eventually, voice softer than normal. “I know what Guides think of my mind. Even if you have the necessary authority to try to guide me, you don’t have to.”
Ike gives him a long look. It’s a searching gaze, like he’s sizing Vox up, and it makes Vox sit up straighter. Vox goes so far as to pull his shoulders back, trying to look stately as possible.
“Yes, they did tell me you would say that. And I have heard what the Guides at the Centre think of you.”
Vox wilts a little. He knew his reputation preceeded him, but… It stings a little, hearing someone else acknowledge it.
But Ike smiles again, a commiserating smile that makes Vox sit up and pay attention.
“I’m not a very good Guide,” Ike says casually. “So who knows if I’ll even be able to help? I’m not holding my breath, General Akuma, so neither should you.”
His honesty and candor warms Vox. It suddenly feels a little easier to breathe, like the air cleared up.
“You don’t have to call me General,” he offers. “Akuma is fine.”
Ike looks surprised, like he didn’t expect Vox to welcome him into the fold so easily.
“Eveland, then. It’s a pleasure to join your team, Akuma.”
Vox smiles. It’s no hardship to be friendly, especially when Ike is so easy on the eyes.