Work Text:
Sharp pain flares down Adam's arm, and he ignores it. He's at work, in TF29's base, sat at his desk, and he can't show weakness. Not here, not with colleagues who barely trust him at best and outright despise him at worst. The black ink of 'AUG IS HERE' lurks on the whiteboard in the corner of his vision, a reminder that he needs to be careful.
It's nothing new, anyway, and nothing that can be fixed, he's pretty sure. He hadn't mentioned it to Koller at his last check-up - it hadn't been as bad then - but Koller wouldn't have hesitated to bring it up if he'd noticed. It's probably psychosomatic or something.
His hand twitches a little, as if to give the lie to his thoughts, and Adam grimaces, clenches his fist and opens it again slowly. He doesn't stretch fully, doesn't open up his forearm - that will only draw attention, and it won't help. He's tried it before.
Instead, Adam keeps working, and ignores the pain til it fades away, just like it has done every time before.
A week or so later, he's back in Koller's workshop (he refuses to call it a dungeon), forcing himself to hold still as Koller pokes and prods at his shoulder. He'd wrenched it on a mission the night before, misjudged a jump to reach a vent at the very start and had to keep going with what he suspects would have been a dislocated shoulder if he'd still had his natural joints. Even with his augs, it had hurt, and still hurts, made worse by the fact that it's the same arm that keeps twinging at seemingly random intervals. His whole left arm is a mass of pain at this point.
"You keep pushing yourself too far, Adam," Koller complains, turning away for a moment and returning with what looks alarmingly like an electric screwdriver. "One day you're going to break yourself too much for even me to fix, maybe, and what will you do then, huh?"
Adam shrugs, and immediately regrets it. He forgets whatever retort he'd had on the tip of his tongue in favour of clenching his teeth and breathing steadily through the pain, trying not to make a sound. Even so, Koller gives him a concerned look.
"You okay, man?" he asks. "Look, I can fix this up, okay, but maybe I should turn off your pain sensors first? Just in that arm." He says it with the air of someone who expects to be rejected, because Adam always does. He hates the idea of losing sensation in any part of his body, natural or augmented, especially in a situation like this.
"Fine," Adam grits out, in too much pain to think straight, more pain than should be possible just from a wrenched shoulder - his arm, it has to be. Whatever's going on there has gotten worse. Fuck.
"Wait, you - huh," Koller says, clearly surprised, but already moving around to the back of the chair. Adam resists the urge to twist his neck to follow where Koller's going. He's let Koller knock him out before; this is nothing. He trusts Koller.
"Gonna feel a little pinch," Koller says, and it's less like a pinch and more like Adam's being stabbed in the back of the neck. But a moment later Koller's stepping back, and Adam's arm is impossibly, blissfully, free of pain.
He can still move it, as well, which he hadn't expected.
"I thought you were disabling it," he says, frowning, turning his hand back and forth. Koller shakes his head quickly, then darts forward to catch Adam's hand and pin it gently to the arm of the chair.
"Only the pain sensors," Koller says. "Why would I turn off the rest? I don't need to, you know?" He looks down at where he's holding Adam's hand, and Adam is letting him. "I am gonna need to strap you down, though. Just that arm, so I can work on it."
Adam lets him, opens up the inside of his forearm at Koller's request, and realises a moment later that Koller doesn't need to look at his forearm when it's Adam's shoulder he's meant to be working on.
He says as much, and Koller wags a finger.
"I know what I'm doing, Adam," he says, "and I saw you when you came in. Something else is going wrong with your arm, huh? It's okay, Vaclav will fix it, even if you should have told me, man. Just sit and relax."
Sometimes Adam forgets just how perceptive Koller can be. That's probably deliberate on Koller's part.
Silence descends on the workshop, broken only by Koller's soft murmuring to himself as he pokes and prods at the insides of Adam's arm. Adam doesn't watch - part of him wants to, wants to make sure nothing dubious is going on. The rest of him finds it viscerally disturbing to see someone else touching the insides of his body, and besides. He trusts Koller.
Finally, Koller taps lightly at the side of Adam's wrist.
"Okay, you can close it up now," he says. "Sarif really does do amazing work, huh?" He stares intently as Adam lets the plating close around the internal workings of his forearm. "So... I have good news and I have bad news for you."
Adam grimaces.
"Start with the bad," he says. Might as well get it over with.
Koller... hesitates. And that's never a good sign.
"Well..." he starts, and then pauses again.
"Koller," Adam says sharply, and Koller twitches.
"Okay, okay," he says, protesting. "I'm trying to think of how to say it to you, man, okay?" He heaves a sigh. "Look, how much do you know about the nerves in your augs?"
"Some," Adam answers cautiously. He's not an expert on augs, even his own.
"Right. So... you know they, uh, used some of your own nerves when they built them?"
...Adam hadn't known that. He stares at his arm, and wonders just how much of it is his own body - how much of it always was his body, even before he came to terms with the augs.
"Basically," Koller goes on, "when they did that... Sarif does good work, right, amazing work. Gorgeous work. But there are limits even for augs as high-spec as yours, so they had to, uh, how to put it... They did some things with the nerves - they needed to integrate them with artificial ones, right? To make all of your augmentations work."
"Right," Adam says cautiously.
Koller nods. "And that was all okay, because Sarif augs are - they make them with love, man, especially yours. So it was fine. But then, whoever put in those experimental augs we found..."
"They fucked it up," Adam completes dully. Of course. Of course he's got fucking nerve damage from yet another thing that was done to him without his consent or even his knowledge, this time.
"Really fucked it up," Koller agrees fervently. "Like, this is... not good, man. I don't know why you didn't tell me earlier, this must have hurt."
"Used to it," Adam grunts, and Koller frowns.
"You shouldn't be used to it," he says vehemently. "I know augs, man. The rig you have there? It shouldn't hurt, at all, except if a natural body would hurt. If they hurt otherwise then something's wrong."
"Whatever," Adam says, not particularly wanting to address that right now. "Can you do anything about it?"
Koller narrows his eyes, gives Adam a look that says very clearly that they're not done with this even if he's letting it go for now.
"That's the good news," Koller says. "I can fix it - gonna have to put you under for it, though, and it will take a while. And I can't do it right now - I need to look at the specs for your new augs, make sure none of them get in the way. Unless you want it done now and lose access to some of them, maybe?" He shrugs. "I don't know how much you use them, now we fixed the overclocking."
Adam considers it for a moment. He doesn't use all the experimental augs, but he uses enough of them that he'd rather not lose any. The idea of being in pain for however long it takes Koller to figure it out, though...
"Can you leave the pain sensors turned off til you figure it out?" he asks, and Koller shakes his head immediately.
"That... would be a really bad idea. That's how you end up doing even more stupid shit than you normally do and doing way more damage to yourself. I could, but I'm not going to. Especially not for you, Adam." Koller gives him a reproving look. Adam can't really blame him, given that he only ever sees Koller when he's injured or his augs are somehow damaged.
"I don't want to spend the next few weeks with my arm useless," Adam says, and the words come out a little more honest than he intends.
"You have desk work, right?" Koller asks. "Do some of that. I will write you a doctor's note or something like that."
"Desk work makes it worse, too," Adam mutters, and Koller's eyes narrow.
"You did not mention that," he says accusingly. Adam's tempted to point out that technically, he didn't actually mention anything - Koller has worked all of this out on his own. "It's worse than I thought it was, then. Adam... are there any times when it doesn't hurt?"
Adam sighs, and he's tempted to bring his eyeshields back up - he's gotten in the habit of retracting them whenever he comes to see Koller, partly because it's dark in the workshop and partly because it seems to make Koller happy.
"It comes and goes," he admits. "Worse some days than others. It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing."
There's a long silence. Koller chews his lip, looking more worried than Adam's seen him in a while.
"I should look again," he says eventually, and moves back to Adam's side. "Open up?"
Adam obliges, and Koller skips the tools this time and goes straight for running careful fingers along the inside workings of the arm. Adam can't exactly feel it, but at the same time, he can - phantom sensations along nerves sheathed inside layers of metal. An involuntary shiver goes down his spine, and it's only the strap on the arm of the chair that stops him from pulling away.
"Okay," Koller says, still focused on Adam's arm. "I think I see it now. It's..." He pauses, grimaces. "I think probably I should fix this now, actually. We can fix the new augs later, right?"
"What's wrong?" Adam says, alarmed at Koller's sudden change of tune. If this is worse than Koller had thought...
"It's hard to explain," Koller says. "Especially in English - I have whole new words I can use in Czech that English never got around to, for augs. But... they installed the new augs badly, really badly, so that they're... scratching at the nerves you have in there." He grimaces. "Adam... you're lucky there's no permanent damage. But if I don't fix it today, and now, there will be."
Fuck.
"Do it," Adam says. He'd rather lose access to the new augs, hopefully temporarily, than end up with permanent nerve damage.
"Okay," Koller says, and stands up. "You need to, uh, stretch your legs? Use the restroom? Do anything at your apartment?"
"What?" Adam stares at him. "You said this was urgent, Koller, why are you trying to get me to leave?"
Koller shakes his head quickly. "No! No, you need to stay here - come back here - but this is going to take a while. You should eat something first, too."
And that's how Adam ends up sitting in Koller's chair, damaged arm still strapped down, eating shitty take-out with his free hand. When he's done, Koller nods to himself.
"Here we go," he says, lifting the mask to Adam's face. "Just relax, okay? It'll be fine."
Adam trusts Koller. So he takes a deep breath, and lets himself sink under.