Chapter Text
The Pit didn't have weather, not really. Just the constant grey drizzle of ash falling from somewhere above, and the smell — that thick, rotting-sweet smell that clung to everything down here, the smell of a world that had decided it was garbage and built itself a religion out of saying so.
Zanka Nijiku had smelled a lot of things in his life. The antiseptic halls of the Hell Guard Academy. The metal tang of his own blood, more times than he wanted to count. But there was one smell he hated more than any of those, because it didn't belong to the world. It belonged to a person.
Bitter. Chemical. Sweet at the edges, like rot trying to disguise itself as candy.
"You're tense," Rudo said, glancing sideways at him as they picked through a collapsed heap of Akuta. "You smell something?"
"No," Zanka said. Too fast.
He smelled it. He always smelled it before he saw him. That was the worst part — the half-second of dread before Jabber Wonger ever opened his mouth, the moment where Zanka's body reacted before his mind caught up, his pulse climbing, his hand finding the strap of Bakuzan without him telling it to.
"Zanka—"
"I said I'm fine, Rudo."
He wasn't fine. He hadn't been fine since their second fight, since the moment Jabber's Vital Instrument had bloomed open like some grotesque flower and the air itself had started to taste like poison. Zanka remembered very little of what happened after that. He remembered laughing. He remembered Jabber laughing back, closer than an enemy should ever be, breath hot against his ear, saying something about finally, finally, someone who understands—
And then Riyo's gunfire, and the manhole, and three weeks of fever dreams in the infirmary where he couldn't tell if he was dreaming about killing Jabber or—
He cut that thought off like cauterizing a wound.
"There." Rudo pointed.
A shape was sitting on top of the wreckage. Not lurking. Not lunging. Just sitting, knees drawn up, looking out over the endless grey expanse of the Pit like a man waiting for a bus that was never going to come.
Jabber Wonger.
Except — wrong. Something about him was wrong.
His claws, Mankira's ten rings, were folded neatly against his forearm, dormant, dull. No poison in the air. No grin splitting his face ear to ear. He was just sitting there, hunched slightly, one hand pressed to his stomach, and when he turned his head toward them his eyes were — tired. Sunken. The eyes of someone who hadn't slept.
"Oh," Jabber said. His voice was quieter than Zanka had ever heard it. Almost polite. "Sorry. I'll move."
He started to stand, swaying, and one knee buckled. He caught himself on the wreckage with a soft grunt of pain, and Zanka realized, with a jolt that went straight through his chest, that Jabber's hand was shaking.
Rudo's grip tightened on his Vital Instrument. "Don't move," he warned. "Whatever trick this is—"
"It's not a trick," Jabber said, and laughed — but it wasn't his laugh. It was small, almost embarrassed, like he was apologizing for something. "I'm just— between doses. Mankira needs to, ah, refill. Takes a day or two. I'm not much good for anything right now." He looked at his own hand like it belonged to a stranger. "Honestly you could probably just kill me. I wouldn't even be mad."
Rudo's brow furrowed. "...What?"
"That's not funny," Zanka said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
Jabber's gaze flicked to him — and something in his expression changed. Not the manic hunger Zanka remembered. Something smaller. Almost like recognition. Almost like shame.
"You're the Cleaner," Jabber said slowly. "From the rematch. The—" he gestured vaguely at his own neck, at the place where Zanka's collar sat, where a thin white scar lived now under the fabric. "I did that, didn't I."
"You don't remember?"
"I remember some of it." Jabber's jaw tightened. He looked away, out at the grey horizon again, and for a moment he looked younger than eighteen — looked like a kid who'd been caught doing something he couldn't take back. "I remember enough."
Zanka didn't move. Neither did Rudo, though his Vital Instrument hummed low and ready in his grip, a held breath waiting to be released. The wind shifted, and that smell came again — but fainter now, almost gone, like a perfume worn days ago that had nearly washed out of the fabric.
This wasn't the Jabber from the fight. The one who'd pressed close and grinned with too many teeth and called him friend in a voice that made the word sound like a confession. This Jabber sat small against the wreckage, poison-starved and aching, and looked at Zanka like he was bracing for a blow he thought he deserved.
"You should go," Jabber said quietly, to both of them, but his eyes stayed on Zanka. "I mean it. I'm not— I can't fight like this. And if you wait around for Mankira to recharge, I'll probably say something I can't take back again." A humorless little smile. "Seems to be a pattern with me."
"Why are you telling us this?" Zanka demanded. "You're a Raider. We're Cleaners. You should be trying to—"
"I know what I should be doing." For the first time, something sharp slipped into Jabber's voice — not malice, but exhaustion, old and deep. "I should be a lot of things. Doesn't change what I am when the toxin's running. And what I am right now is—" he gestured at himself, at his trembling hands, his hunched shoulders, "—just some guy. Not even an interesting one."
He pushed himself up properly this time, legs unsteady, and didn't look at either of them again. He started picking his way down the far side of the wreckage, slow and careful, like every joint hurt.
Zanka should have let him go. Every instinct trained into him at the Academy, every lesson Enjin had ever drilled into him about Raiders and mercy, said let him go, this is the easiest kill you'll ever get, and it's not even a kill, it's a mercy —
"Wait."
The word left his mouth before he decided to say it. Jabber stopped, didn't turn around.
"That fight," Zanka said. His hands had curled into fists without his permission. "The things you said. Were any of it— was any of that you? Or was that just the poison talking?"
A long silence. Ash drifted down between them, grey and weightless.
"...Does it matter?" Jabber asked, finally. His voice had gone strange again — not the manic high, not quite this tired quiet either. Something caught in between, raw at the edges. "I said it. I meant it, while I was saying it. That's the part that scares me, if you want to know the truth. It's not that the toxin makes me say things I don't mean." He turned his head, just enough that Zanka could see the corner of his face, the dark circle under one eye. "It's that it makes me say the things I do mean, and don't have the nerve to say sober."
Then he was gone, swallowed by the wreckage and the grey, and the smell of him faded until it was just ash again — ash and rot, the ordinary smell of a world that had given up on itself.
Rudo let out a breath. "...What the hell was that?"
"I don't know," Zanka said.
It was true. He didn't know. But his pulse hadn't slowed down, and his hand was still locked white-knuckled around Bakuzan's strap, and underneath the relief of he's gone, it's over, we're safe there was something else — something smaller and uglier, curling in his chest like smoke.
It's that it makes me say the things I do mean.
Zanka thought about the way Jabber had pressed close to him in their second fight, breath hot, eyes blown wide with that terrible hunger, saying when you're with me, you're free like it was the only true thing he'd ever said in his life.
He thought about the scar on his neck, and the fact that some nights, lying awake in the infirmary, he hadn't been thinking about how much he hated Jabber Wonger.
He'd been thinking about that voice.
"Zanka." Rudo's hand landed on his shoulder, grounding. "You good?"
"Yeah." Zanka made himself move, made himself start walking back toward the rest of the team, away from the wreckage and the fading smell and the small, tired, trembling thing that Jabber Wonger became when the poison ran dry. "Yeah. I'm good."
He wasn't.
And somewhere behind him, in the grey, he was certain — certain — that Jabber Wonger wasn't either.
End of Chapter 1.