Coming Down
This fic was written for the Free Imagination Forum's secret santa exchange. Hope you like it, Chiharu. I know we were all hoping that I would get one of the fluff prompts, but alas, it was not to be.
For anyone unfamiliar with "Severance," it's a deconstructive OC fic. Explaining it would take way too much time, so I suggest you go read over the first chapter to familiarize yourself with the characters, or this fic will make slightly less sense. And if anyone's wondering why I chose to set this in the Severse, it's because I feel bad about not finishing the main fic.
Also: Even by Severse standards, the voice here is weird/experimental, and the punctuation and sentence structures can get frankly ridiculous. You've been warned.
I am—we are a force of nature, a million million fragile bodies held together by something like a mind. Though directed by a concordant will, we are more than one human could ever be, much more than the pathetic girls frozen blue in our coils.
And yet. Yet we remember being confined to such a body, before a man (just a man, and we are so much more) with eyes like the vanishing sun—gold buried beneath our chilling bodies—came to us, set us free. Now we howl our triumph even as the small girls whip their warm-leaking carcasses around, trying to find a way to fight us. There is no way. We will be as we are forever—blue-white billions connected as though by thinnest tendrils of frost.
The girls do not give in, though they shiver in our embrace. The dark one screams something (raw foreign voice lost in our winds) and hateful light—sunset-red—lashes out at us. Some primal part of us stirs to get away, but the light is not fire, and we are a force of nature—unharmed.
One frozen girl just stares, brittle metal cracking on her hands and useless wings fluttering brokenly. Fool. She stares as if she knows us, standing still—aside from the shivers that wrack her body—amid our hiemal storm. She looks—
...We remember her. Kaede. Kaede and her stupid face. Mom would flip if she knew what her flawless little daughter was up to. We... I... I'll have to tell her when I get home. Ha. Little Miss Perfect is out fighting in her bathing suit. Fighting... Me? Why...
...She deserves as much. If I can take her out, maybe Mom 'n' Dad'll pay more attention to me. Why should stupid Kaede get all the attention? All she does is study... Bo-ring! But the 'rents eat it up. Geez. This has been a long time coming sis...
...She looks so small and defenseless shivering there. Sure, she's a loser, but I don't know if I... I don't think I...
—I have to—We have to concentrate. We are not her brother. We are a whirlwind—tiny frozen glints of ice-light—stirred to elemental fury. Not some foolish human boy at all. We are a force of nature. We are more than one human could ever be. We cannot think like that, or we will lose our freedom (lose everything).
We distort (Kaede) the girl's voice. The sound that comes out of her is a wild, ululating thing, alien to her prim throat—no. She sounds like any human. Small and weak before our winter power. Kyyyy-toh. The sound may as well be wind—her tiny human noises are nothing to us. Nothing familiar. Kaito? That's... Kaede... I...
I'm falling, a million million tiny mes, and I got no control over it, over where I'm blowing. I feel like my mind is in pieces... Geez, do you remember that vase I broke the other week, and I tried to blame it on you? I'm not sorry. Mom didn't believe me, but it was worth a shot... I feel like that vase, I guess...
This is the way we are meant to be. More than any human. More than some pathetic little boy—consciousnesses linked by fingers of frost. The gold-eyed man (he freed us) how would he like to know that we are paralyzed, little more than a light dusting as we fall, due to the interference of some little boy we never were?
We—I... The vase's falling, Kaede. I didn't do it on purpose and geez, why can't you be helpful... A million million strong—unique—every one. We are a collective, a frozen group... So many little pieces, I don't think I can pick them up by (our)self... Kaito's. Kaito's self. We... I—
The golden light (brittle metal) must be fire. It burns like flesh and sucks us back down, faster than falling, until the ground is cold—hard and so cold—beneath us and our lips are blue with no puffs of hot escaping because we are a force of nature.
The last thing I feel are my sister's blazing-hot arms lifting up the body I found somehow. Then I'm out cold.