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“You said someone created you.”
Nailer doesn’t really know why he’s talking. It’s too late at night to be trying to start conversations. The ricocheting of the train on the tracks is deafening, enough that he has to raise his voice to hear himself. He doesn’t know how Nita’s still asleep. And the only other one to hear him doesn’t care that much.
“It’s not important,” Tool tells him, picking at a claw.
“…Who?”
Tool is silent. His forearms rest on his knees, and he stares at the trees whipping past with gleaming yellow eyes. “I told you.”
Nailer feels his face grow hot. “I think it’s real important, actually,” he snips.
Tool turns his gaze on him, and Nailer suddenly feels the urge to tuck his face into his shirt and recoil into the dark of the train car. But he’s all but wedged between the ladder and the train itself, so he can’t go much of anywhere without looking like an absolute fool.
“You dislike your father.” Tool says eventually. he turns his gaze back away from Nailer, one big paw of a hand clasping the railing of the ladder like he’s at any risk of falling off. “I do, too, in a sense.”
“Half-men don’t have fathers.” Nailer doesn’t actually know if that’s true. He knows of the Life Cult, the women selling off their eggs to breeders all over the country, but that isn’t a mother. That’s just a donor.
“I do.”
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
Tool is unequivocally terrifying, when he really wants to be, and the snarling smile he gives to Nailer has the very distinct undertones of I’ll fuck you up. “Do you really think we make sense?” He asks, low and drawling. “You people created me from dog and jackal and hyena and man and assumed I’d make sense to your puny little brains. I don’t need to make sense. I’m more powerful than you will ever be.”
Nailer shuts his mouth. His face is burning– embarrassment or fear, he doesn’t actually know, but he looks away.
It’s late. Really late. Nailer can’t remember a time that he’s been beyond Bright Sands Beach, and if he was back there, if none of that shit had just happened, he’d probably be asleep. Probably with a fresh black eye that he’d have to explain later.
“I don’t hate my dad.” He tells Tool, eventually. “I mean– he’s my dad. I can’t.”
“I do,” Tool repeats. “Very much. Being borne of someone does not give you an obligation to them.”
Nailer silently thinks that that’s really funny. Half-men are supposed to be loyal to their owners, to their masters– unto death, he’s pretty sure. They coil up and die when their masters do. He has the most obligation to blood out of any of them.
“He’s still my dad,” he offers. “Even if he…” he mimes swinging a fist, through the rails of the ladder he’s pressed behind. “Y’know.”
“Beats you.”
“Rust Saint,” Nailer hisses, “you don’t know what being normal is, do you?”
Nita, when he leans over past Tool to check, is still fast asleep with her forehead resting on one of the ladder rungs and arms looped over another. Nailer’s forehead still smarts from when he did the same and was woken up by a bump in the rails that slammed his head, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to wake her up.
“I’m not normal.”
“Yeah. I got that.”
Nailer never really imagined being able to just talk to a half-man like this. Lucky Strike had always employed at least a few, for muscle, but he thinks it was more a show. The Luck God had that one tight, and you don’t mess with that. You just try to get close.
He remembers Moon Girl and her offer of Black Ling, her attempt to get the Fates’ favors along with him.
Obviously didn’t work. If the Rust Saint liked him all that much, he wouldn’t be riding a train car with a swank and a half-man.
“You can hate whoever you want.” Tool tells him. “That doesn’t matter. Hate is just a feeling. It’s when people get hurt over it, that you become in the wrong.”
Nailer doesn’t look at him. “You hurt people all the time.”
“I never said I was opposed to being in the wrong.”
They fall silent. Tool’s breathing is eerily quiet, it almost sounds like he isn’t at all, and the roar of the train swallows any other sounds they might have made.
Nita’s breathing quietly, inhaling and exhaling along with the clack of the train wheels. Her wrist dangles, pretty gilded bracelets shimmering against her dark skin. The next bump the train goes over, her head slams back against the car of the train, and she wakes up with a swear.
“Good morning,” Tool tells her, baring his teeth in what’s supposed to be a smile but really isn’t one.
“Good morning,” she frowns right back, yawning wide. Her teeth are a perfect, pearl-white, the sort that must be fake. Nailer’s never seen anyone with teeth so perfect before. “How close are we?”
“A few more hours.”
Nailer doesn’t know how Tool knows that, but he doesn’t really want to ask. Nita just nods. Braces her arm against the ladder and puts her head down, eyes closing.
“You should go back to sleep, too,” Tool tells Nailer, not looking at him. “I don’t know how much rest we’ll get in Orleans II. Not with so many people looking for us.”
Nailer eyes Tool, wary of falling asleep next to him. Tool just frowns. “I would have killed you already, if I was planning to.”
“Fine,” Nailer grumbles. he leans his own head against his forearm and inhales fresh, clean air, the salt of Bright Sands Beach already fading away on the breeze.