Chapter Text
when all is said and done and the dust is settling, when the knee-jerk rip-tear grief lets up enough she can think about it, she finds a computer. it doesn't work, of course, but she nudges it with a fraction of the power she knows floods the back of her soul and bleeds black-green electricity over her tongue, and it opens with a sigh and a scream and she's in.
finding the records doesn’t take much more than a thought. the memory banks are dead, but they haven't been destroyed by rogue actors yet. dead and destined for destruction— death and destruction wrought her and refined her. her power floods it quick and easy as sand floods a pair of new shoes.
when she finds it, she takes a moment to shake her hands out. this, too, is electricity, so she knows how it works, doesn't even have to think about it, but her hands aren't used to bending this way. the clicking of the keys is unfamiliar, grating. her fingers ache from the stiff, clawlike way she holds them above the letters, trying to hit only the ones she wants without taking too long.
not because she’s afraid of what she’ll see when she opens the file. It will say every crew she’s traveled with in fourteen years is exterminated, bar the most recent, has been exterminated. she’s known that for twelve years. she’s not afraid of that anymore.
but she opens the file that lays oil-heavy, oil-slick on her soul— has forever, she just didn’t know where the weight came from— eventually. it says she’s 4’8.
right across the top is emblazoned a name she’ll never know herself as, and right under it is a number. see— that's the funny thing about the batt. they say there's a truth to be found, and that truth is the smallest bit inside an empty, worthless shell.
they strip a person down to a tiny little thing, a name they were given and an appearance they inherited— not even inherited.
that could never be inheritance. inheritance is taking from the dead the things they no longer need, the things they can no longer use, the things that aren't used up or useless but are useless to their original owner. a gift, but if it's rejected there's no one to object, no one can be offended.
the batt strips a person to their unaltered, untouched appearance, and they call it the truest form of that person. they see the hair a person's born with, the skin untouched by the sun, and say it must be like that forever and ever. to change is to hide, they say, and hiding is a moment from dishonesty, and dishonesty is the antonym of truth. and truth, after all, this single unchangeable, untouchable, tiny, pure thing, this thing which must be stripped bare to be seen, must be found and revealed. a person is a tiny thing clawing to get out of the stifling pressures put on it.
citizens dress in plain clothes so their true forms may be seen, and the city may judge those.
she doesn't like that very much.
you pick your name in the zones. The batt calls her a project, an anomaly. project cryptokyesis. it’s only because the city has a desperate need to name everything it touches. maybe it isn’t a real name, not like the ones she knows the scarecrows or exterminators hold, or the ones the draculoids used to hold—and now hold again, released from their masks, but she was called it and they said she was it because it was placed upon her and it contained her. wasn't that enough?
but killjoys call themselves killjoys, and their crews call them by over-flashy names because they tell them to call them by over-flashy names, defying the rounded, blunted, generic syllables the batt says they should be called, and their clothes and hair are bright, color shining through the grease and dust, because they layer bleach and dye into themselves knowing they’ll be bright as flags. Once, she found a pair of six-inch stripper heels, and she must have stood at 5’2; when she kneels to tie her shoes or pick up her cat, she’s 2’8.
killjoys layer truth onto themselves bright as the sun, bright as fresh spray-paint, bright as a neon sign, each layer having as much value as the last. in choosing to live, they choose to live as, and that is more truth than anything the batt said about them.
the batt impressed truth into a person-- here is what you are, it said. peel away your layers and show the small thing you are underneath-- that's who you really are, that's who really has value.
the zones waited with baited breath and said, who are you? they held out color and fire and danger to lay into a person's skin, calling out, show us who you are! who do you want to be-- that's who you are. put on who you are-- become yourself.
the system resists her when she erases the whole of the “project” it calls her by, nipping at her as she chases down every tail linking it together. it snapped like a rubber band around skin as she roots out the protocols she’d been treated with as a three-year-old, the guards trusted with her safety, the number of the C.A.T. who’d follow her around for years. it snips at her as she rubs out the number she was stored under, too, but she bites back and its weakly reanimated wrath settles.
then she moves on. all she'd wanted to know was a bit more about herself, and as much as this system claimed to hold that little thing the batt called the truth, the root and center of her, it had nothing but a hodge-podge, outdated, unrecognizable homunculous of her.
name: the girl.
all they had for her were placeholders.