Chapter Text
Tamari thought he was in a position of privilege, all things considered; he was the only one with true awareness, the only one privy to a truth exclusive to him, one that seemed determined to make him feel crazy with how isolating it was, simply by the virtue of knowing about it. He could’ve been surrounded by people, he could've been let free into the open air, and it still would’ve felt like he was trapped in solitary confinement.
That’s why it wasn’t enough, he told himself, that’s why he wasn’t enough, that’s why he was desperate to search for another reality. It was the pursuit of freedom, it was an act of self-harm, it was whatever it needed to be, because Tamari would find any and every possible way to justify it. He'd find patterns where there were none, seek out signs within coincidences, all to prove a conclusion he'd already come to.
That's how he ended up here, he supposed.
When they talk about steel, they talk about it in inanimate extremes. It’s either unfeelingly cold, or overwhelmingly hot; in both circumstances, it’s appropriately unnatural, and perfectly inorganic
Tamari always felt like he fit into one or the other. He sometimes felt like he was frozen in time, like he was immensely, unbearably still, stuck in his numbness, dull and gray. Or, he was a volatile thing, overwhelmed with sharp, jagged anger that made the copper oil within him boil away, leaving behind the raw nerve endings.
No one told him that he could be anything else, that there was even such a thing as a middle ground for him. Then, he felt Mariyam take his hands into her own, and within them he felt enveloped with a sense of gentle warmth. Between the carbon coating of their palms and the electricity that made their gears turn, between two mechanical souls, vessels constructed from dirt not unlike Adam himself, there was simple compassion that threatened to break him apart.
Tamari felt himself be brought down; when his heels made contact with the ground, he didn’t know. All he could feel, within his inanimate mind, was an imposing sense of grief, so much larger than he ever could be. He wanted so desperately to feel human, to be treated as though he were a person, oppressively alive. It was cruel of Mariyam to offer him this comfort, this care and consideration, when he would never be anything but a machine. To make him feel, in the enormity of a second, everything that he could never have. Not in the way he wanted, not in the way he needed; through this gesture of kindness, he learned, truly, what he could never get from his mother.
It was then, at that moment, that he realized how little he actually knew, about anything.