All characters and settings used are the property of Capcom. I make no claim or profit, and am doing this entirely without permission.
Please note: this involves the growth of a slash pairing, which means a male/male romantic relationship. If this bothers you, you're welcome to read something else. However, the rating is entirely for language and violence. No smut, people: sorry.
1. Imbalance
Most things were a simple matter of balance.
This, for example. He spun the knife around, almost careless, as though he hadn't spent half an hour getting the sweep honed just the way he wanted it.
Things were getting out of hand fast. He wasn't in with Saddler, he never had been, and he wasn't getting any deeper. He was getting the dirty work done and spilling interesting details, sure, but getting nowhere. And he knew the look Saddler was starting to get around him. That was the look right when you heard, "he's outlived his usefulness."
So Saddler had picked up news from him. He'd gotten his own back: tatters and scraps of the plagas story, hints how they communicated, and lots of first-hand experience. He grinned, flexing his hand. Oh, yes, and wasn't that. . . well, a bitch. He'd read sci-fi as a kid, and when the villain replaced your missing hand with a robot one, you were getting strangled by your own arm soon. Having your arm amped was probably the same deal.
So why hadn't Saddler taken him out already? He considered, watching the knife point describe a circle. Probably didn't want to freak out the rest of the plagas—good little drones, but excitable.
Or Saddler was the worried one, less happy about Kennedy poking around than he let on.
Oops. Not supposed to know about Kennedy yet. He grinned. There was a brief, answering flex from just inside his ribs. Yeah, their little secret. So far. If the leech wanted to live. Cause it sure wasn't gonna make it outside his body.
Yeah, Kennedy was screwed. In about a day and a half he'd be getting. . . what had Luis said. . . "a permanent addition to his nervous system," a rider hooked straight into his brain. And then it'd be Saddler twitching his strings, and the world would be out one hero.
"Gotta admit, kinda curious what he's gonna turn into." Not like his syringe was marked "ARM" in giant letters, or the egg had little biceps. And his plaga wasn't the weird one. He'd taken the pictures of what was left of Mendez. Good on Kennedy. Too bad he was gonna sprout chitin and start cringing his way to Saddler soon.
Thing was, his own way out wasn't looking so clear. He didn't to throw a mission because Saddler looked at him funny. He'd bluffed or bashed through worse before, and he wasn't obviously expendable right now, right? He had a little time.
He wasn't an idiot. He knew Saddler had some backup plan for him. He could give his plaga the arm command without saying anything. If that didn't mean there were new little neural paths monitoring his brain, waiting for the order to overrun him, what did? Sera had said it missed the stage in its development for that, but then again, Sera was an assmunch. What'd he know about these things, really? Him and his talk about symbiosis. . . and didn't he hate that word, get flashes of him and his arm singing kumbaya. Balance was weighted in his favor, though. If he died, it died. And he'd gotten the idea that his plaga was a survival junkie.
"So. . ." he ran his fingertips across the knife's plunge line, "what do you think?" The plaga was silent. It usually was when he remembered who needed who more.
Thing was, if Kennedy was there shaking things up, Saddler wasn't concentrating on the little questions. Like how one Jack Krauser'd been so easily available for hire and, lucky Saddler, willing to accept a freakish little brain-eating squid-thing into his body, and, holy Jesus was Saddler rolling the sixes, prepared to stick around and do grunt work.
Now, if Saddler tossed the kid into a pit for a day and a half, he'd have time to wonder. Then Jack'd be sent on a quick visit to Salazar, and end up strung up in the dungeon with his eyeballs gone and Ramon ringing the dinner bell. 'Cept if Leon would just keep scooting around like his ass was on fire, Saddler would stay scrambling to ready the death traps and move the troops, and he could poke around a bit, just see what he could find.
He sheathed the knife. Yeah. Things might work out better that way.