Chapter Text

﹏𓂁﹏

There was nothing but black and the warmth coming off the walls on every side, only inches away. It was the low, humming thrum of hidden pipework rumbling all around her in an endless, soul-numbing drone.

Ah.

Bare back, frigid metal, slippery puddles of grime.

Here again.

The ‘waking up’ part never startled Kelly — not much did. It was more of a… sleepy feeling for her more than anything else. She couldn’t deny, though, she did despise the-

The tray squealed, rolling forward under her with a sickening inertia. Kelly’s back slid in the blood, and she gripped the sides of the bed as it slammed out, banged and jolted to a stop. She laid there under the harsh light, fingers refusing to loosen. She was too damn big for this tiny death- er— lifetrap. The tray would always tip back at just enough of an angle to feel like Kelly was going to slide off it headfirst. She never did, but even after all this time, it was the only trick that still got her.

An irritated growl stirred in her chest, but it came out a raspy sigh. Foreign as it was, this body knew her better than she did, and she was way too tired to go scrounging up any frustration. Not over this, anyway. Brick-like claws eased their hold on the newly crinkled metal.

Kelly sat up slow, hardened arms lifting harder weight. The thin sheet of iron creaked beneath her, and cold feet slid to meet colder concrete. It was wet and tacky with blood, but still a welcome feeling. Grounding, or at least much more than a rickety sliding tray was. A bad sensory issue’s better than a shitty one — especially if you’re blind.

She could still sense light fine, but the whole damn world was frosted glass on a foggy day. Not that it mattered. She mostly just relied on her nose after all these years, anyway. Its pinpoint accuracy was far from a blessing in a hellhole like this, but there’s no use looking a gift horse in the… Kelly brought a thick hand to her jaw, rubbing the stiff muscle there — forever propped open just a little too wide by her own teeth. Ah, forget it.

Better get outta here before the bloody smells kick in.

She’d memorized where her clothes would be. Lift the cuff, adjust the straps, stomp the heel into the boot. She knew the way out by heart.

﹏𓂄﹏

The base was a sea of stenches, but everything was sorted by biome. The infirmary, swamped with blood and disinfectant, the lifts to the trenches ripe with fear, the mess hall rank from unchanged bins, and so on. It kept things structured, made it easy to tell when something was off — including with her subordinates. They parted as she stalked the crowded hall, hands behind her back, each of her breaths a rasping snarl.

That soldier’s stashing cigarettes.
This contam’s sick.
Those new recruits are nervous.

Things she’d all note for later. For now, she had a fucking job to do.

As she approached the room, the sound of it grew louder and louder. A wet echo of hooks and carving knives singing sweetly under the rafters, a holy symphony of ripping and sawing. Bins rattled across rusty rollers, and somewhere in the noise, a worker broke into a wet, distinctly uncovered series of coughs. Amidst the mire of blood and gristle, Kelly noted another smell stationed in the open doorway. She came to stand beside it, looking out over the indistinguishable blur of red and shabby industrial lighting.

Notes of salty sweat, thick hair, claggy cloth, and an introspective demeanor — he’d been working under her as an officer for a few years, now. He always had the rubbery smell of a gas mask on him these days.

“Corporal. How many’d we lose?”

“Fifteen, counting ‘yesself. There’s nine more injured back in the infirmary,” Warwick hummed, observing the crowded bins rolling along.

Kelly grunted, fists behind her back tightening subtly. Higher ranks were always prioritized for resurrection, but just for filing the bloody reports. It was going to be a long… shit, whatever the time was.

“This is the fourth case in a month, and the bombings always happen while a squadron’s changing stations,” she rasped out, her words a barely intelligible growl.

The corporal puffed a breath, shaking his head. “Some damn luck.”

“Two’s a coincidence. This isn’t.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“…You’re dismissed.”

She heard the shifting sound of fabric, his boots turning and fading down the hall. Warwick was no spy, she knew that much. He didn’t have the buried anxiety for it — just a quiet weariness, same as her. She felt a weight of exhaustion trying to settle in on her shoulders, but she shrugged it off and squared them instead. It’d be the dugouts again tomorrow.

﹏𓂁﹏

Dawn bruised across the sky, swimming in unnatural navies, sickly purples, and aches of greens and yellows climbing up the fringes. The planets must’ve been hanging still, blanketed somewhere behind the morning fog. It was some of the worst weather they could possibly get out here. Cold, wet, and uncomfortable; the prime conditions for sickness to set in. Made it harder for hitting targets, too.

The mist was cascading in and pooling all around the floor of the trench, soaking into tattered boots. White breath blew from the sides of Kelly’s teeth, grunting a snort and a snarl as she wrestled out supplies from her bag.

“Check the horizon for lights. There ought to be some movement this early.” The fog had a boon to offer despite its flaws, and that was the glow of enemy lamps shining up through the mist. Something Kelly wouldn’t put to waste.

A soldier creeped up against the dirt, lifting a rusty periscope above the swirls of wire. A precarious silence followed, bracing for the crack of a gunshot. Nothing came, just… stillness. The soldier slowly crawled back down.

“There’s some lights on but no movement, Lieutenant. Most of them are stationed just west of us.”

Kelly made a growling sound of acknowledgment, arms crossed. “Squadron three and four will take the east. The rest will cover the brunt of it.” At least the day was almost guaranteed to be a slow one — nobody would guzzle ammo on a target at they could barely make out. No, this would be another shift of standing guard against a potential rush that wouldn’t come.

That’s when she picked it up. In the quiet, stillness of the fog, an almost imperceptible tapping sound. A clicking. Then it stopped. She could hear the boots of the next squadron coming down to take position. Click. Click, click. Stop.

Her fists tightened.

The boots were getting louder.

Kelly turned her head slightly, angled an ear. Waited.

No clicking. Just her soldiers coming up for the morning.

She had a hunch.

As the platoon reached her, she made a small growl in greeting. ”Squadron three. East.” Then the group coming up behind them. ”Same for you lot. Five — you’ll be west.” The sound of shuffling boots in their respective directions carried no satisfaction. She tilted her head slightly. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t hear it in all the footfall.

Click, click, click.

You monster.

Her soldiers were moving further away in both directions.

Click.

Stop.

There were several subordinates stationed with her, that was nothing new; but someone was being discrete. It was hard to focus in on one thing with all the smells that go on in no man’s land. The constant stench of old and fresh blood was particularly unhelpful — it always put Kelly in a sharklike… well, to put it one way, her secret was she was always angry. The battlefield just didn’t help things. Someone was unloading a crate of rifles.

Click.

Nor did the sounds of little rats.

”Telegraph key,” she ordered, and a soldier brought her one. She didn’t need to tap out a report right now, but her test had done its work. Somewhere in the group, she picked up on a sharp pinch of anxiety. A heart beating fast. Fear always got her even more riled up than blood.

A growl pearled up through her throat, heavy hands slowly tightening their grip the device. The telegraph’s small flat of wood creaked and strained. Someone in this group was hiding their own way to talk. They must’ve thought she had caught them when she asked for her own. Not yet, not yet.

That’s when the bomb went off in the east.

The distant sound of shouts and spraying dirt rattled up through the fog, muffled and sharp as a syringe on the inside of a cold, numb, cheek. Another blast. Another echo of panic. Kelly knew they hadn’t gotten to a good spot to hide yet — maybe there’d be a foxhole, but if there was, it would only fit a few. Those squadrons were stuck in a hallway with no doors, and the only thing to do was run from the hell raining down on them. There was no way to help them, not immediately.

…Click click.

She turned, hulking shoulders square.

The soldiers around her were rushing, shouting information, focused on the blasts.

Somebody wasn’t.

﹏﹏﹏

Her brush lifted from the metal, and she stepped down from the ladder to admire her work, hands proudly on her hips. The bomber’s warpaint was perfect — the eyes angled down in angry rings of red and yellow, and it brandished a red-lipped smile, teeth zigzagging all the way up to the corners. The plane’s pointy nose really brought the whole thing together.

“Woah,” an impressed voice sounded behind her, echoing throughout the hanger.

“It really does look just like a shark!”

﹏𓂄﹏

Cli-

Her fists were around a neck.

She heard the satisfying clatter of a telegraph key on the muddied boards, the wet choke of someone being lifted into the air. His fingers scrabbled and gripped at her sleeve, his legs swinging and kicking against nothing. His heart was a hornet’s nest. The trench was swimming in a bouquet of panic.

“L-Lieutenant—!” He gasped, his throat clicking thickly as her fingers squeezed. She was tired of that sound.

“You.” Another bomb rattled in the distance. Her snout was crumpled in a snarl, heavy muscles bunched and knotted into bulky, iron twists. Traitors and spies. To think the Machine had wasted resources on moles.

“Why-” he gurgled, his hands slowly losing their will to pry her big, gloved claws off his neck. “I didn’t- I— I’m—”

“-Machine food.” She finished for him with a grim finality. She felt the man freeze, the realization settling on his soul. He’d been caught, and there was no amount of squirming that would throw off Kelly’s famously good nose for lies. What was worse, he had braced himself for this kind of outcome for months; to be plucked apart and digested as a soldier of Theseus. But now it was actually here, with death’s hand on him. There was only one thing to do.

Another bomb struck in the distance. Most of the shouting had gone out by now.

﹏﹏﹏

“Think you could come paint my tank next? I’m thinking a mosquito theme — the cannon could be the nose, and you could give it one of those big toothy grins you’re always making!”

“I’ve got every soldier under the sun lined up for a request,” Kelly elbowed her uniformed friend playfully. “They commissioned me to be here for another two days, then I’m back to The City. I don’t belong in some muggy outpost, even if it’s on a picturesque beach. Makes me nervous.”

“I know, I know. A delicate painter through and through,” her friend chuckled, ruffling Kelly’s frizzy hair. Kelly’s cheeks turned a shade or two redder.

“But seriously. Is there anything I can do to get moved up a slot?”

Kelly hummed, rubbing her chin and unwittingly smearing a little pink paint on it. “Well, it is a pretty hot day today. It’d be nice to go swimming with someone.”

”I’ll raise you one better,” the girl nudged. “Good ol’ fashioned skinnydipping! It’s an army tradition — whaddeya say?”

Kelly practically turned into beat jelly. “GHSST. BWUH. GEH- HUH. UH uh uh uh uh uhh uh skin-SKINNYDIPPING???”

“Why not?? We’re both girls,” her friend smiled simply.

“True, but… isn’t it a bit… indecent?”

“Woman you’re getting paid to paint cartoony smiling faces on machines used to blow folks up. I think your standards of decency are a bit more dead and doubled than you realize.”

Kelly smiled sheepishly, “fair enough.”

“That’s the spirit!” her friend cackled, clapping a hand her shoulder.

“By the way, they don’t… they don’t like, try to bomb you guys or anything out here, right?”

“Hm? Oh nahhhh, nah. They haven’t even touched this place. We’ll be fine. Unless you can’t handle a few sharks~” she teased.

“S-Sharks?!”

“Relax! They’re pretty harmless. Collie sizes, most of ‘em.”

﹏𓂁﹏

Click.

The sound was close and familiar, and so was its smell. It came from the man dangling from her fist.

A spark. Some gunpowder.

O SHIT.

“GRENADE!” Kelly bellowed, hurling the man against the alley’s empty opening. It was the most likely spot there wouldn’t be soldiers, and she was the closest to cover the blow. People yelled and scrambled, hopef-

A shockwave of loud, hot, and sharp pillowed against, prickled, then cut, blasting the lieutenant backwards.

﹏﹏﹏

“Well she did sign the papers, right?”

“I think… I think we’re lookin’ at two bodies here, mate. Plus some— uhh… sushi.”

“Is that a shark fin??”