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The first few hours were true torture.
Walrider couldn't seem to find the right pace to keep up with him, like the ground-breaking machine very much fucking should.
Walrider ripples at his vertebrae, displeased, when he remembers it. When Waylon told him he saw them standing there, at the front gates, seemingly fine, Miles could only stare. What he recalls are screaming static and buzzing clusters of nanobots clinging to his body, endless attempts to stop his blood and intestines from spilling out by stuffing him with robots like a filler in a child's toy, all because of his torso being made into a sifter and Walrider not knowing how to deal with a host that wasn't hooked up to life support.
So, the pace. They couldn't get it right, and it's not like Miles could've lended Walrider time by not breathing, blinking, swallowing , so it became more a question of when , not if, his skin and tissues have been pierced through enough to have to be filled in, too. Walrider had to drag what was left of him into the woods, away from the ongoing investigation, to try and learn to deal with a human body on the spot.
When it got ahold of his ruptured vocal cords, he finally interrupted the buzzing, very, very carefully.
“What are you doing?” Miles rasped and felt his lungs being fixated in place right as he was about to go through a coughing fit, the feeling completely surreal, like time itself has been stopped. He opened his mouth uselessly, and something had cut deep into his chin.
Momentarily he lost what little control he had to not let him swing, flail and do other dumb shit people in pain usually do. He felt like a reanimated corpse.
Miles could swear the static sounded angry when the machine stuffed the new cut. The golden forest around him started going fuzzy.
Walrider started breathing for him and used his mouth to say,
“What,” the exact way he himself has said it, with intonation cut-off like on a stopped recording.
What he had meant to say was something along the lines of why me, I should be dead, just go pick a soldier , but feeling better actually felt nice . He might have sworn even his fingers were being restored, but he couldn't risk moving his head to look. Moving against Walrider when it wasn't anticipating it was like moving through a cloud of needles. He didn't want to know what would happen if his brain got pierced like his eyes did.
“What's your plan?” Miles then realised his tongue had moved to form a 'p', and risked cutting in, “I swear to God, don't just repeat 'plan' at me.” Not controlling his own air flow made his speech nearly incomprehensible, but Walrider has got it.
“What's your plan?” He more so felt the words than heard them. There was probably supposed to be an emphasis on your . Speech is so complicated.
“Not dying, shockingly,” he started feeling his back and oh, so he was reclined on a tree, that's sweet. “I'm not really in charge here.”
There was a pause as one of them had to swallow.
“plan's I'm Not dying.”
Miles nearly shaked his – their? – head trying to ward off thoughts of Billy.
The buzzing of nanites started to subside. It was a beautiful morning, and it wasn't his last.
“And you need me for it.”
“And you need me for it.”
“I-- fuck,” he laughed a little, and it didn't hurt. “Okay. Sure.”
“What's your plan?”
“Going home. Working. I don't know.”
“you don't know.”
“I don't know what state I'm in. Are you done? Can I see?”
“Not.”
A gust of wind went by, and Miles had barely felt it – he could only suspect it at the time, but most of his face was made of big black spots of nanites. It will heal eventually, his own skin will grow over the fillers with Walrider's help... but he didn't know and wouldn't have cared anyway.
He took part in their next breath, appearing just in the right place between shocked indifference and the high of past horrors to see this story through.
”We can go live my life, if you want to,” now Walrider tickles his throat, calling him a sap, but Miles still thinks it was a nice way of starting this. “Even if something with me, or us, is really wrong, I will figure it out.”
“ We will figure it out.”
“Yeah,” Walrider nudged his head gently down to show him his new fingers. Miles smiled. “We will.”