Work Text:
After her brother had gone, and her mother too, chasing that old unreachable ideal, the lab head had turned to Tangent and said in a voice nearly gentle, I will need your support. It had been meant as a handhold in turbulent waters. Tangent had looked at that handhold, and acknowledged it for what it was, and let go instead, sinking down into the depths with her family until her brain was consumed by the flood.
When she awoke later in metal and wires, Tiphereth-who-had-once-been-her-brother had not recognized her. Tiphereth-who-had-once-been-Tangent accepted this, and thus cleaved the addendum off both her name and his: from that moment on they were simply Tiphereth and Tiphereth, managers of Central Command.
Despite this Tiphereth had expected things to be as they’d been in that time before, her odd brother running off and leaving her to deal with the brunt of the real work. Her the shining star of the department, him the oddball no one could ever rely on; she felt nearly bad for him, imagining it.
And yet reality quickly proved otherwise. Tiphereth, before--she had understood the facility as a whole, the factors behind the raising and falling Qliphoth counter, the process of EGO harvesting and even, to some extent, Cogito itself. There’d been talk, before everything, that she ought to train up to be Assistant Facility Director, to work side by side with the Manager and keep the whole place running smoothly, because when it came to the Corporation she understood it all truly and deeply.
None of that had anything to do with managing a floor. The only thing that mattered when it came to that specific job was one thing: knowledge of the Abnormalities themselves. This one was not to be worked with twice in a row, this one needed attention every three hours, this one would throw fits if you did not, of all things, spend exactly twenty-seven minutes reciting it poetry. Ridiculous.
Naturally her brother took to it like a fish to water. Within a week it became evident that Tiphereth should hand out assignments and pick out relevant EGO and send each worker on their way, and Tiphereth’s sister should do paperwork in the back of their office and seethe.
The worst part was that he thought nothing of his own skill. “I dunno,” said Tiphereth, when she’d finally swallowed her pride and asked him how he did it; his new body did not shrug but she could picture it, the casual slope of his shoulders, hands shoved in his pockets. His voice was easy. She still remembers very distinctly at that moment thinking that their new job, and his amnesia, suited him well. “Just comes naturally, I guess.”
Ridiculous. If it came to him then it would come to her, too, even if the coming was harder. At nights he would power down and she would not, her gears grinding through each late hour as she made her way through the halls and stamped the pattern of each and every Abnormality into her mind.
It took time. There was nothing logical about any of the things in this place, what they wanted and whined for. But this was her life now: Tiphereth, floor manager, Central Command. Her presence was no longer welcome in Information, or Records, or Extraction; there was no spot left open for her at the lab. If that was the case at the very least she would not be a failure at what little she had left.
Time, at least, was the one thing they had in abundance. Eventually they stopped being Tiphereth and Tiphereth’s sister, and instead became Tiphereth and Tiphereth, leaders of the Central Command. And then one day--
“Tiphereth!” She’d been furious--their perfect record in shambles, and all because her stupid brother had sent one of their workers into the room with that disgusting ooze (that was not a prince, no matter its name) one time too many. “Did you forget that he’d been there twice already?!”
A pause, a whirring noise. It had occurred to her right then, in the silence of the corpses, that his body had not been built for anyone to hear his machineries at play, and then her brother had turned to her and said, voice genuinely baffled, “Who?”
There was protocol for this. Procedures. His new body had taken the memory transfer well, and until he’d fully adjusted she’d covered for him, until they were no longer Tiphereth and Tiphereth’s brother but again, Tiphereth and Tiphereth. Or at least until an Ordeal had come, those enormous purple beasts that could gobble up an employee in an instant, and faced with them her brother had, of all things, let Big Bird free to clean up the mess.
The worst part wasn’t that he’d been stupid enough to assume a Waw-level Abnormality would be easier to suppress than a Teth-level Ordeal. The worst part was that, when their employees had begun to flee, screaming in terror, he’d turned to her and said, quietly, “How did it even get out?”
Rewind, reset. Another new body, another Tiphereth. This time they stayed Tiphereth and Tiphereth’s brother long enough that when their department was again wiped out, the name they cried in their death throes she knew to be hers. Again: rewind, reset. Rewind, reset. Rewind, reset.
Time blurred. Managers came and went. Still she remained the same; still Tiphereth stayed by her side. Even as he was rebuilt, remade, granted a new body that would inevitably join the growing pile of his own corpses--still he was there, her one and only brother, his soul at least the same as before.
(She hoped.)
Over time she began to lose things herself. Not her own old name--not when her brother would say it to her sometimes, idly, half-distracted by paperwork and needing to double-check something, even though he couldn’t remember where he learned it or what it meant--but his, their mother’s, the ones that’d belonged to the people she’d long-ago called her friends.
And even more than that: the taste of food, the warmth of a body, the colors of a friendship bracelet she’d received when she was small. The point of their research, their mother’s goal. At one point the company logo had been painted on the lobby wall, until a particularly vicious intrusion from the Sweepers had gouged a hole there, and when they’d plastered it over the end of it had been lost. Face the fear, build… something.
Whatever it was, it’d been enough for the rest of her family to die for. As for Tiphereth, she’d followed them because… Well. That’d been another thing she’d lost: her own reasons, her own heart. Who she might’ve been if she hadn’t, and what she might’ve done. It's all turned to sand, swept away in the wind. In its place is Tiphereth, head of Central Command--and her brother, still there, still there, still there.