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Jay was going to kill it.
There was simply no alternative. Red could not continue to be. It should not have been years ago, from the first sight of violence he should’ve shredded it and the project, snapped the reigns of progress back, kept mankind's eyes shut tight. He had perhaps (not that this was any excuse) then been filled with necromantic fantasies for his homunculi but now—
...
Well. It didn’t matter how he was now, because one way or another, Jay was going to kill it, and he didn't need to have a say in that.
He vaguely realized he didn’t quite have a memory of standing up or moving so quickly to the hall he was marching through. Purpose, he told himself, righteous intent—it was good that he did not know what carried him, because if not his own agency it had to have been blind justice, stampeding down the Daedalic labyrinth like he’d lived there all his life, clenching his heart in sawtooth waves of blunt pain—the plain fact that this was to be done.
At the dead iron door the blood in his skull stopped pounding—and did he.
He could hear the coursing static from here.
Jay didn't want to hesitate. Didn't want to halt and listen and behold the thrumming pulse if nothing else because it felt too much like reverence—he simply had to resolve himself once again to stifle that awe that would stir him whenever he thought for a moment about just what it was to hear that sound, what it meant.
Eyes shut tight, he reminded himself. Pressed on. Pulled his good eye open wide for the retinal scan, slammed the lights on with more force than he ever would've—his hand stung at that, but he shook it out and approached him and beheld it despite himself.
Red's eyes were so numbly blank for a second he wondered whether he may already have died.
The suitedness of it made Jay almost laugh at the thought. To have him snared and choked on his own lifeblood, a final victim to all his own mindless animosity—how simple that would have been! But no, his chest shifted in the buzzing light that had made the cables scream, and he was alive.
Some twisting sickness passed through him at that fact. He was alive.
For now. Jay's hand was still stinging when he reached the sarcophagal glass, beneath which Red was held taut by a dozen gently thrumming ivy threads that beat and pumped and pulled, feeding in, feeding out, shifting and churning his very being back and forth in time with the machine, connecting him to the sprawling mycelium of wire buried deep above the ceiling; cables and veins and cables and veins, a dozen of which even Jay could not begin to name.
He coughed. No reverence. The beast still needed to die.
He drew up to the beating shifting mass of silicone blood and tried for one. Red hardly responded, which was a relief as he scanned the tangled willow-leaves for something sufficiently—
Aortic. One shot down in a thick tunnel he traced as it draped and overflowed around the ophidiarium before twisting up clean into it, to lock like a rein onto a tight band around Red's neck. Jay fought back a cough at the sight of it. This would be the line to cut. He reached.
A heavy wave of lighting passed through him once his hand settled on the tube. He swallowed drily. Checked it in his grasp.
He hadn’t had this kind of control for a very long time.
Red had roused from his stupor with the contact but didn't make a sound, not even now, not even when Jay glanced back up and met its open and living eye and hardly could find it in himself to react. It had seemed such a natural succession of events that no one made a sound.
His hand tightened on the cable, and something was pulsing between them but it was impossible to tell whether that was his own heartbeat or the thrumming of the ichor-tunnel, indeed impossible to tell anything at all about the line between them, such was the force with which it buzzed his hand and reduced its sensation to more tremoring static. His palm was slipping.
Far too much now was breaching back to memory. His heart flit so lightly and quickly that there were moments he doubted it beat at all if not for the grounding of the machine, and his hands shivering under the memory of what it had been, so many years ago, to puppeteer a proto-death, a little death, an ego death, to feel as though perhaps there was absolution for him yet because a thing that then responded so obedient and immediately could not have been dangerous, could not have been damning mankind. Jay wasn't even aware of parting his teeth. What it had been to still have time, time to run, shut his eyes, pretend this was nothing festering, rearing—pretend he, man, could own a thing like the dying scream of the Universe born, like the unknowable hum and hymn of machines to perfect machines.
Just to try, to return if for a moment to that state where he could still imagine everything would be fine, he pulled on the wire tight in his hand just to see, and earned himself the softest cry. It should've pulled him out of his stupor. He twisted it against its entry wound and Red couldn't keep himself from hissing at that.
It wasn't looking Jay in the eye anymore. But he thought that was alright. After all, how long had it been since he'd heard something like that—a vain intoxicating hope that he may chain him yet, may maintain stasis if for a moment longer, that the guilt of it all was not yet his? Could he give up a thing like that? He twisted it tighter in his hand. It wailed now perfectly.
Input-output, operant conditions, hello world goodbye world at the push of a button. He jerked it back and there was a broken yelp this time. It was all the same again, he realized: what did people say about Pavlov's dogs and new tricks? All if-else on-off tick-tick-tick, a simple machine of simple lines he could read and break down in his teeth.
In his teeth... he became aware that he tasted petroleum and daze, copper like blood though he could not have guessed whose. Red was almost doubled over now. Jay realized with another small shock that he'd succeeded in pulled the tubing loose, leaving, dark, gaping, glistening, a round hole in its neck where it had met him. The discarded tunnel now lay pouring feebly what remained of its purpose, and he swallowed some of the copper in the back of his mouth when he noticed on the degraded plastic surface the imprints of two canine teeth.
A blinding-bright crash. Such was the catastrophic finality with which Cerberus was slain, fell crumpled amidst its prison of bulletproof glass, that with a jolt Jay saw his work was done.
It was dead. And to his own teeth.
He tasted blood again.