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In a shocking turn of events, Tesla isn’t in nearly as much pain as she is accustomed to. Certainly it is not ideal to be over-warm and aching, but it beats the sting of preservative fluid against open wounds. Of –
There’s the fading (dying) cacophony of her species ringing in the back of her newly-intact skull. Angels spilling out of shattered lightbulbs grasp desperately for her attention. They’re pulling it with the same tenderness she remembers them using when she was in the early days of floating in those tanks, listening to the hum of the instruments reading out her “stable” physiological data to an audience of none. They are gentle with her, even in their final, agonizing moments. It's the least she can do, to follow their guidance away from screens declaring her “ALIVE”.
No longer is she in several pieces, though she is not unscathed. Her limbs, intact as they are, have scars that pull strangely as she levers herself up to sit. Blinking, she realizes she only has one eye. At least, if her lack of depth perception is anything to go by. Reaching a hand up to where she’d once found her optic nerve, and is relieved beyond even what the hivemind of her aunts and sisters and brothers can comprehend. The area is sealed with scar tissue, the very same in the crook of one elbow, wrapped around half her ankle, the taper of her waist.
Fifty years was a long time to not grow up. But it would seem that she has traded an immaculate recovery for the kindness of her physical age catching up to her.
At least, she assumes so. The smoldering wreckage of SEEDS Ship Six isn’t exactly brimming with mirrors. The waves of heat warping her view of the mangled metal, broken glass, and shattered composites around her is a mercy as much as it is disorienting. It means she can follow the urging of her kind to look beyond the gore of human and Plantkind alike, out to where the dim, smoky air is cut through with a splash of warm, incandescent light.
So different, Tesla marvels, from the fluorescent and LED bulbs she was studied under. How viscerally satisfying it is to see them more broken than she had been.
Where could she be, though? She hesitates, once she manages to get her legs under the rest of her and stand without a tremble in her knees for the first time since she’d hit what was called her preadolescence. Her gaze drifts once again, but an outcry from her kin stops her short there, as well.
There is nothing for Tesla here. Her progenitors tell her this by opening a yawning pit of dread and sucking emptiness behind her sternum.
She feels the flickering of one of her sisters burning out. With her final sparks, she puts light in that chasm. She, among many others, have given their lives for her. Tesla cups her hands around the feeling, the soft flesh there giving way. Like Rem’s had, when she was tiny and weak enough to the humans to be carried and cradled. It had not lasted.
Rem, her aunts agree. Rem is why they are winking out like the tail-ends of supernovas to hand her the second chance burning impossibly in Tesla’s grasp.
If she lingers on these things, Tesla will not make it out of the crash site to see where her freedom is beginning to unfold before her. And then it will all be for nothing.
Rem trying so very hard to do right by the twins will have been for nothing. Nai crashing the ships will have been for nothing. Vash dropping that knife and listening to Rem’s speech will have been for nothing. Rem saving as many lives as she could – indiscriminately – would have all been for absolutely nothing.
It’s a lot to take in. Decades spent in the dull hum of awareness of her entire species would have overwhelmed any human, but this cacophony threatens to make Tesla shake like a scared child again.
She has to go. Her family is urging her forward. At least, those who lay dying in the wreckage around her. Vash and Knives, so distinct and bright in the distance, are their own steady chord. She wonders if they can hear her the same way. If she burns just as bright as they do now. If the carnage around her has reached their ears.
The smoke of burning fuel and grease and scorched metal and melting glass did not do more than irritate her throat. The weight of what her existence has done to Rem’s sons is doing its level best to crush her.
Tens of thousands of hands press at her back. Tesla takes her first steps in fifty years toward that shaft of incandescent light.
Something hits her face when she begins to emerge from the remains of Ship Six. Only, when she uses her hand to get it off, she feels nothing but air and movement. When she opens her eye back up, she sees nothing but light for a moment. Bright and hot – but not as hot as the burning ruins she’s still hip-deep in. Struggling her way out into open air (not recycled. Never again recycled, if she can help it), she’s on her knees in some gritty, stinging-hot, shifting substance. The brightness comes from two blinding stars, huge in their closeness, setting to her left. Five dimmer bodies rise to her right, the much more normally sized pinpricks of stars peeking out from the darker portion of the sky.
All around her, it’s red and smells like the metal tools the doctor she’d hated the least – Conrad – had allowed her to touch so she’d stop flinching from his needles. Standing again, her palms and knees and shins come up sticky. A tragedy lies around her.
Her sisters whisper things in her ears, even as they gasp in the air they are not built to breathe. The grit is sand and the moving air is wind and the dim spheres to her right are moons and she is on a desert planet.
Tesla, with the light of two suns, their refracted light from the moons, and the wind on her bare skin, stands free. Behind her, the sins of others enacted upon her lay in the rubble. Her files likely never to be found again, cracked and melting in their ruined drives. Before her lies an open sky and endless ground to walk on, unimpeded. Her hair blows in her face, the wind changing direction, the heat of the stars fading as they sink below the raised horizon of dunes.
With her aunts’ blessings, Tesla drags in a deep, greedy pull of unfiltered, putrid air. She picks out the beacons of Rem’s sons, and she begins to walk towards her future.
If Rem could choose to change, if the dependent plants could decide to save her; if Nai and Vash could trade dispositions… Tesla can wrangle what’s left of them all.
Never again, will anyone have to endure what she has. Will feel the need to grip hope like a lifeline or sink into fear and drag everyone else down into its depths with them. She will make sure of it, and her first task will be to drag her brothers out of it. They should get to know what this freedom, this lack of terror, feels like too.
If all of this began with her, Tesla will end it as well. And it begins with the far horizon, beyond where she witnessed the moons rising for the first time she never imagined she would get to have.
Tesla walks.