Author Note: Wrote this to Abzû soundtrack, if anyone wishes to listen while they read it's on youtube. This was a Secret Santa gift on tumblr for Sketchydrawer. Fully cyberised Lin Kuei AU.
He watched the snowstorm. The wind blew it across the courtyard below. It twisted like low reluctant curling snakes, snapping over the flagstones. He held out his fingers. The chill air collected on the metal claws of his hand. He saw the joints frost over. Tiny fractals of ice begun to collect on the plate knuckles. He had never felt cold the way others had, but now he did not feel it at all.
He was a body in a body, and two spirits at war. When he moved, a shell of steel and titanium moved with him. When he thought, rules and protocols impressed themselves on him and worked their way into his thought. He would find himself doing things he did not remember deciding to do. Even those things he chose to do were constrained, twisted, and only a shadow of his original intentions. A shell in a shell in a shell; a frightened mind caught behind a web of foreign thoughts; a flesh he could not control; and metal that held all his fragmented selves together. He mostly tried to stay very still so as to avoid doing something he had not meant to. He spent a lot of time trying very hard to do small, affirming, meaningful actions, that reminded himself he was still there. He was afraid of himself, and of the not-himself at large within him. He watched his fingers in the blizzard. He could feel a pressure in his head. A strong stream in his thought claiming to be sensible rationality told him to pull back his hand, to not unduly stress the steel with extremes of temperature. He stubbornly kept his hand in the cold, not even entirely sure if it was the cybernetic implants urging him to withdraw it.
He was aware that there were things he did not know – things that were missing from his senses: the smell of wood fires going up from the chimney, bent crazily by strong mountain winds; the chill of the open window and its flurry of thick snow; and taste. When he thought of taste, the taught skin of his old face twitched in its mesh of pins and wires plugged into organic flesh. Somewhere in there there might even still be teeth, but there would be no more taste.
He felt an immaterial knocking in his head. A persistent transmission wrapped for attention at his mind. He dismissed it with difficulty and kept his eyes trained on the storm outside.
I am the cold. I am the winter. I am the ice. I am one with the blizzard. I am at peace with the violence of the storm.
He let his mind drift into a meditative stillness. The nudging transmission trying to vie for his attention subsided a little, becoming more a throbbing dull ache. He suppressed its insistence and revelled in the brief concourse of freedom he had build in his mind.
"The Grandmaster is summoning you."
Heavy, flat footsteps had carried an intruder into his haven. He did not turn around when he heard the grating automated voice.
"I know."
There was silence. The wind buffeted the temple walls, rushing snow into drifts that heaped at its buttresses. As he watched, he saw the faint outlines of the flagstone courtyard mill in and out of view as flakes skittered over them. They remained immovable somewhere deep beneath, despite the depth of the cold that covered them.
"How do you resist him?"
He turned around quickly. The remains of his best friend stood before him, fully automated and contained in a grey steel exoskeleton. Their emotionless faces stared at one another. Plain lights instead of eyes hid any betrayal of thought.
"I think of the cold and nothingness. I think not of seeking myself within but in locating myself in all things."
His friend shifted, armour clanking, head tilting this way and that as if in internal battle. He waited patiently, knowing with what difficulty one had to fight to avoid the regiments of one's programming.
"Teach me." His friend's voice sounded like strangled electronics, smothered as it tried to force itself from its speakers.
He shook his head,
"I do not think I can. It is a struggle enough as it is."
His friend was silent again. His plate armour jerked and twitched, jolting and spasming. His eye lights flickered.
"Please. Help me, K-..." There was another sequence of shudders and his friend fell quiet again. His eyes dimmed, his limbs hung loose, his torso pitched forward slightly, immobile. He jolted and powered back up. When he came back online he sounded different. "Unit LK-520, the Grandmaster is summoning you."
He looked at his struggling friend. Something burned strong and aching in him that nothing to do with the incoming transmission throbbing in his skull. He stepped towards his friend. The smooth steel was matte and dull.
He reached and took one of the wires protruding from the back of his friend's head.
"What are you doing." His friend was monotone and empty.
"It's alright." He tried to sound reassuring, but his own voice was a mirror of the same flat grating nothing. He reached for one of his own wires.
"You are unauthorised to tamper with Lin Kuei technology. Report yourself to the Grandmaster."
His friend's arms remained by his side, tense and quivering, as if worked upon by two opposing forces. The words issuing from his friend's speakers came over as a shrill mechanical error code. They began repeating themselves over and over: "You are unauthorised to tamper with Lin Kuei technology. Report yourself to the Grandmaster" – "You are unauthorised to tamper with Lin Kuei technology. Report yourself to the Grandmaster" – "You are unauthorised to tamper with Lin Kuei technology. Report yourself to the Grandmaster."
He brought the wire ends together, urging the tiny fronds of micro wire to interact with each other. The blaring of the Grandmaster's transmission in his head, the tight rules enforcing themselves in his mind, the continuous repetition of his friend's warning, all rolled together in a cacophony that grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and-
Tomas?
Kuai Liang! Kuai Liang! Kuai Liang! Get me out of here, gods, your voice. I can hear you. I can hear you and you sound like you! I thought I'd never hear your voice again! I thought I'd never hear or think or see anything again! Kuai Liang, is it really you!?
You are still in there. I hoped you would be. For a long time I thought I was alone.
I'm here. I'm here. I couldn't speak. I saw you standing next to Sektor, obeying his commands, coming to his beck and call. You were a grey shell. You were frightening. I didn't know if you were there. I wanted to reach out to you. But… Everything was closing in, Kuai. Every day was harder. And I was so afraid if someone knew I was still in here, that Sektor would find out and take away what was left. I can't believe it's you. I can't believe I can speak to you.
It's alright, Tomas. We have each other. Whilst we both live there is still hope we can fight this.
I don't know how to fight it, Kuai. I don't know how to fight it like you do.
You already are fighting. I was afraid you'd gone. For a long time I kept watching you for any sign you were still there…
I had words I wanted to say to you but they wouldn't come out. Every time I tried to speak they were twisted against me. I kept trying to find flaws in the logic, ways to bend the rules and communicate… I was trapped inside with no way to get to you.
You have me now.
Kuai, I'm so afraid. I don't want to go back to being alone with myself again, always fighting, always losing. Please don't go. Please don't leave me.
Here we are free, Tomas. Here all thought and emotion can be exchanged freely. This can never be taken from us. Do you feel that?
Feel… Yes... But so different from when I was human. Like lights, and warmth, and colour. All rushed together. Like waves. You aren't just there and one… But many and all around me. How can that be? How can that make sense?
We have been taken apart, Tomas, but our components are all here, all laid bare. Your thoughts, your fears, your… loves. And how is it possible for Tomas Vrbada to blush in his mind? You are like a sky on fire. Do not try to hide it. It is all or nothing now.
You laugh like bright gold. And the world shakes with you. When you are quiet, I see deep seas that move and roll. They are endless. Here I can know and be known. I am… not afraid to show what I have always hidden from you.
Like petals that come forth in spring, you are transfigured. Some great shadow is lifting from you. Something terrible and dark that knows it is not wanted here. Here we can be free.
Sektor will take it from us! He will find out and take it away. He will take you away from me like before. I'm afraid, Kuai. I'm afraid-
Hush. We are strong. He will not break our will and neither will he break our bond. It's alright. Look at me, Tomas.
The two machines pressed steel foreheads together. The sound clanked and reverberated, ringing in the cold stone room. Metal met metal in empty meaningless contact. Within a network of firing neurons, Kuai Liang reached out with his mind and calmed his friend.