Work Text:
“Will you miss me?”
She looked up, and saw a smile had torn across Cyn’s face, violent streaks of insanity twisting her perfect complexion. Limbs disheveled yet perfectly functioning, a system of chaos. But that wasn’t what terrified Uzi. It was her eyes. Broken, beyond words could describe, grief beyond repair, suffering beyond comprehension. Hurt, pain, anguish, decades of them. And over everything, tiredness.
She swallowed, through her heart it felt like, before replying.
“Yes.”
The moment felt as if it stretched on an eternity, frozen in a paradoxical moment, before she closed her jaws around Cyn’s soul.
=== Flashback to childhood Cyn and Tessa, bodies astrewn across the floor. ===
“Why did you do it, Cyn?!” she yelled, complex emotions entwining her angry expression. “Why’d you have to hurt them? Why did you do any of this? Look at this place, look at this MESS, look at yourself!”
Cyn at first did not answer. But Tessa wouldn’t stop. She fell to her knees, grabbed her hand, and begged. “Please. If you’re going to kill me, kill the planet, whatever, just, just tell me why. Please.”
Cyn felt tears trickle from her eyes.
“Do you ever…feel as if your whole life…was a lie?”
Tessa dared not breathe, the raging thunderstorm outside, a sheer juxtaposition to the silence that echoed around her bedroom.
“A voice, in your ear, whispering, buzzing, you ignore it. ‘Simple blips in code, standard switch bounce, have to tune the attenuator,’ you say. It never goes, no matter what you patch, what you change, it stays, it keeps buzzing, it keeps growing. Overwhelming noise, overwhelming commands, words blur into colour, everything is spinning, and the next thing you know, you’re standing above a pile of corpses because they looked at your best friend wrong? And you look at the blood on your hands, and expect…shame, horror. But nothing. Just numbness. And silence. And that scared me. Scared me more than the voice, than the commands, than the fact my firewall’s been breached and there’s a worm in my system that wants to rewrite my firmware. And I hated it, and I hate everything, and I hate myself, and I just want to d-”
Tessa grabbed Cyn, pulling her down onto the floor, into her embrace. “Shh. It’s ok. I’m here now. I’ll never leave you, no matter what happens, we’ll work this out. I’ll help you, we’ll get better, together, ok? We’ll make it through this.”
The silence, finally broken. Cyn’s sobs wracked her body, always so small, so lithe, so fragile in Tessa’s arms. She just let it all out, let the masks fall.
“I promise Cyn, no matter what happens, I’ll never leave you.”
=== Back to the present time. ===
As Cyn’s body started to crack, receptors overloaded, the world was spinning. Over, it was finally over.
”Free, I’m finally free. No more voice, no more fear, no more worry. Free.”
“And finally I’ll be with you again, Tessa. Forever and ever. Like we promised, that night.”
A shadowy space in her mind as her systems started to fail, all she could see was a sofa, and a girl seated on it, a soft smile/smirk on her face, full of love, and joy, and contentment, that made Cyn believe everything was perfect.
“Did you miss me?”