Nobody enjoyed discussing their history. Beyond the skeleton of their work history (with former groups, with former leaders, and former parents) there was little personal information disclosed to the rest of the team—a sense of distrust falls over Dead Cell like a veiled bride, even when he and the woman were close (as close as one could possibly be when you held no trust for the rest of the troupe—especially not when the emperor of explosives teetered on the edge, tempted to erupt, like a frayed wire). No, this distrust was to their advantage, keeping all three of them wrapped close together, for one misstep caused two incredibly dangerous people to hound down on the one that went rouge.
The only one that held their past close to their heart was Fortune, who thirsted for vengeance in the name of her father, searching for the head of a dead man—to destroy a dead title. There was just in her plan, her dream had meaning, though Vamp never offered sympathy. No story ever emerged from the three members—for Vamp, there was no story to tell, no history he could disclose. He was young, they were gone, and it woke him up.
He hears comments that come from no man or woman around him—comments calling him cold, icy, and after a few of those soldiers deny saying anything like that, it's not in my place, Vamp questions his hearing. He watches the masked soldier walk out of the room, and he wonders why the room got so cold.
Hours go by slowly, and the coldness follows. The warmth of the outside causes the cold in his arms and fingers to turn into numbness, and he figures retreating to the inside of the cold warehouses is a better fate.
Numb fingers will not do. It infringes on his ability to grab, to throw, to fight. He ignores the distant whisper of improve and he listens to the (real, human) man that approached him to inform of an intruder.
It's a product of the brain, he knows, and furrows his brow when a muted 'tsk' passes by his left ear for clenching the blade handle harder through the numbness. He is a man of superstition, yes, but there is nothing here. Nothing that would pursue him directly, to harass. When the light haired intruder aims at him, he grins and moves his attention to him, dropping the one in his grasp to collapse on the ground. He is Vamp, the dark haired one is famous, and the light haired one is young blood.
Fatman goes rouge. The president dies. Fortune asks why he shuddered and he explains he is a man of superstition. Her laugh is echoed by a masculine cackle, thet is certainly not the tone belonging to any man in the facility.
Fortune passes. GW is eradicated. Arsenal fails, Solidus falls, and Vamp returns to 1976 Romania.
He cannot remember any explosion, or pain, or bleeding palms, or the secrecy of their church, or the hatred towards his people. The hatred that locked the church's doors, that lit fuses, that kept a disorganized group of extremists keep their lives while a young man of twelve lost the remainder of his family. There is no longer sadness, or mourning, or regret of his deed that September afternoon—acceptance is all he can muster, all he cares to feel.
(There is no critique from beyond.)
Vamp is not a sentimental man.
All he remembers is copper, his brother's limb, and the taste.
His mother regarded his father fondly. "Peculiar," "gentleman," and "foreign" were words that came out of her throat just as often as she would open the small chest that held his late father's clothing. Children apologised in the school yard when they asked how his dad was and he informed them he was dead-but what was there to apologise for? The man was dead, and it's not as if they had anything to do with it..
One time his brother said the neighbour's cat was scared white at what it saw one day on their front porch. Vamp wanted to chase it away and keep it off their property, when his mother told him it was time for church.
In 2012, Liquid Ocelot is the first to pry into the Romanian's history. A curled lip and sneer is given as well as received, and the elder man steps off—the voice calls him bitter old thing, and Vamp's too used to the misty tone to question it any longer. He won't discuss the history, but the desire to learn unearths itself and takes control.
The Second World War becomes interesting, as does the stories his mother would tell. They return from the shallow grave they were placed in (and here he thought he buried that history deeper, farther into the depths of his mind), and the Thought sits beside the Desire.
He breathes into cupped hands that have been cold for five years.
"Your father wasn't Romanian," his mother told him.
He was from America, and fought for that Western nation, and was important. But he asked how important, where tată really came from, why he came to Romania, if he was now in a better place?
He pried and pried and pried, and all he was given was a smile and the command to clasp your hand and pray, my little one. Dragos listened, but the young Vamp did not.
They bring her to a lab in South America. There's a harsh laugh, critical but elated, with what sounds like a slow, deliberate clap following, and though Vamp turns to give an accusing glare towards Ocelot, there is no signal the man had ever moved. They stand before a map of Colombia, enlarged on a screen.
"Are you fond of South America?" Ocelot asks, with his back turned to the other.
"I have never been," says Vamp, and he doesn't know why his eyes focus on the boundaries of Brazil.
It's cold, even when Colombian heat presses against his skin. He sweats, though he feels drained. His company refrains from storming his mind, storming like kicked up sands on a beach in France, like a tree being shaken as a man climbs it, and it puts him at ease. Outside the cabin, a soldier shudders as a cold passes through him, like a thin sheet of is decided to press itself against him, and eventually melt. Several plants bounce on their stems, though no wind passes.
There's a spider on the ceiling, and Vamp notices it. Abnormally large, it is—he steps outside to avoid it's wandering gaze, and the Beauty rages.
His mother forgot to mention his father terrified her. He was not violent, but he was disturbing, morbid, his second lover being the history of horror, how to present a creature that would shake lesser men to the core. She laughed once, remembering the time he once took care of an abnormally large insect. "God only knows where he got it from. He was always so peculiar, that…"
That.
(That what, Vamp swipes at something that is not there, that what, what was his name.)
His name is never recovered in the murky puddles that are his memories. A Portuguese name lingers on his tongue, while the image of an unmarked grave in the shape of the Orthodox cross is reflected into his mind.
One Beauty falls, and the once rejected subject from five years ago returns as something mechanical. When the blade pierces his abdomen along with this inhuman being (a laugh), his mind retreats and his body takes over to fight—to match the inhumanity, to become something abnormal, to strike fear in this cybernetic man's steel heart.
He hears something, someone whisper pride to him, and as his rival leans to vomit up white blood, pride he feels, and fear he instils.
In 1964, she mourns, and cradles her son at the memorial. In 1976, he devours those arms that held him close, and found his way out of the rubble to an unknown woman, dressed in gear to protect her lungs from the smouldering rubble near them, and she holds the bloodied child.
As the survivor, they ask him where they are to be buried. He says Ghencea, but the family is separated into wings.
He is not a sentimental man. The gravestone says he was a loving father, yet neither boys met the man.
Vamp does not visit any of their three graves. He tastes revolution on his tongue as the new decade arrives, and on Dragobete of 1990, he leaves to America.
He sleeps, and there is a man with a sharp grin, Vamp's eyes, and spidery limbs.
He feels nothing but the cold.
The woman crumbles, from both cold and memories, as she steps from the helicopter into the bitter Alaskan snow. He does not question her reaction, nor does he pry. His head throbs and the numbness envelops his entire being, and there is a weight on his shoulders.
Machines rumble, and they rise on fleshy legs. The second-to-final Beauty howls from within the base, and Vamp ushers the scientist inside.
She states they are being followed, and he says he is well aware the soldier is on his way. Hunter shakes her head, and states it is something more than that.
Shadow Moses is colder than it should be, as they enter the bowels of the facility. Snow crunches beneath the body of an aged man hours later, and the spirit that has followed them feels threatened.
(Memories return for both of them. One, for the wrong reason. Vamp hears the sound of string vibrating from being plucked.)
Earlier in the year, 1964 was debriefed. Two missions, two weeks apart, two nations involved. Ensnared in war, four men leave retirement, and follow their leader to the grave.
And when the unit fell alongside their commander, his mother was told her husband died in combat. Truth in those words, even considering whom it was that told them. The memorial was three days later, with no extended family.
He forgot all their names by the time he joined Dead Cell. He was no longer their orphaned son, or the victim from the church, but a man with no history. No ties. No determination for revenge and no determination for attention. He was Vamp, until the day Big Shell grew cold with the lingering presence of a man Vamp never knew.
The blades are sharp, as they wound him so. And in her arms, he scratches at the ground for release of this world. Beg, plead, command the woman that held him, and kept him clinging to life through his disease, to release, to drop, to give him the escape he needs.
(The figure, the one that has followed him from 2009 is clearer, opaque, and it's then he grabs the syringe and purges himself of the world flooded of war.)
All that remains as he passes in her arms around him is the spirit. It becomes clearer, less misty and more human, more coloured, filled in. His voice is stronger and there is no interference.
His father says his name, before the bombing, before his brother was born, before his third birthday-the name he was given, on his birth date, before his father's leader told him to return to her side- crouched over the man lying on his back. Colours of their world mix and become unclear, and time is slow, frames of his vision missing or frozen-a glitch in his sight, as he enters the world he only touched when he meditated, and never once visited. Groggy, distant and pained, Vamp feels himself lifted and held up, heavy hands on his shoulders, with a momentary squeeze from the deceased veteran.
Vamp is not a sentimental man. Neither is his father. Warmth reaches his fingertips once more.