Animate
From the very first moment, her eyes had captured him.
They were glittering amber marbles in the darkness, and because young Knives had always appreciated shiny things, he noticed her first. His breath plumed out in frosty waves from between chapped lips, and he shivered. At first he thought it was the girl that he had always admired from afar – a girl who remained under lock and key for the time being – but the presence of this visitor was far more arresting. Her eyes made short work of the illusion that life was a grand adventure in which people could be friends and get along if only they tried. He grasped this not in words but in a chill that gripped his spine, made the cold air cutting into his heavy jacket seem practically tropical by comparison.
He nudged his brother.
"Is it her?" Vash said.
"No," was all Knives could think of to say.
Tessla led them down a secret corridor, behind a secret door, and there they discovered a whole world of secrets: a Narnia in reverse, where little girls were not clothed in royal garb and given precious gifts but instead were stripped bare and given electroshock treatments, and far worse.
That was the end – and beginning – of everything.
Knives often reflected on those times with a mixture of abject loathing and bland amusement. He was amused because he could never now believe that he had been so naïve. Even Vash – wimpy, goody-two-shoes Vash – had been more wary of the humans than he. It was funny. In the interim, he reserved his loathing for every single human that had been present on that ship, and sometimes for his brother if he was in an especially bad mood. They deserved far worse than the death he'd given them.
After their experiments, the crew had been allowed to return to cold sleep. Most likely they would be hailed as heroes in the scientific community upon planetfall, the grisly context for their findings regarding Plant biology conveniently expunged from the public record. Dr. Conrad and Rem would not speak out; they already knew (thought) it would be hopeless. This in spite of:
Tumors have been discovered on the subject in multiple locations.
Confirmed sharp decline in renewal functions.
Subject's weakness readily apparent.
Subject's hair loss continues unabated.
Upon getting up, subject fractured thighbone.
Distinct odor.
Subject suddenly went into convulsions...
...all physical functions have ceased.
They would never face justice.
When he thought about that (both then and now) he wanted to spit, to scream to vomit to descend into a frothing madness that left all in his presence paralyzed, infected with his righteous hate. As a child, he had been able to coax his expression into a pleasant smile; and yet, if one looked hard enough, that person would be able to see the insanity that touched his eyes.
But then, even supposing that they had been punished, did it really mean anything coming from a member of the very same species? From a creature that likewise had the capacity to do... what they had done?
That was why she had led him there, he decided. She had wanted justice. So even when half of his body and soul betrayed him – even when his thoughts turned to Vash laughing with Rem and his traitorous hand crept into his mouth and forced him to swallow blood – he had not wavered when he approached the controls to the ship. With only a few strokes on a keyboard, he doomed the human race.
At first he had been motivated solely by justice. But over time that abstract concept had been superseded by Tessla herself. Although he never discovered more details about her, he spent the next century and a half sketching out a personality for her, a personality that grew more and more solid with each passing year. Perhaps, if she had been allowed to grow up, she would have been drawn to animals, and kept a brightly chirping canary in a cage. Perhaps she would have owned dolls or kites or quantum theory textbooks. Perhaps she would have loved avocados (Knives's favorite food as a child). It infuriated him even more to think that he was not imagining something that may have existed, but something that had never been allowed to exist at all.
In his mind, she was now as old as he.
It was this image of her that haunted his nightly dreams, her amber eyes silently probing his soul, and the level of his devotion for her. Always, he was found wanting. He could see his own reflection encased in her eyes, as though he were an insect that had been trapped in tree sap. It grew smaller and smaller as she approached him, until it was no more. Near the conclusion of these dreams, she would set upon him with bared teeth and bloody claws and make a meal of him. Always, he wept for mercy; and always, none was forthcoming.
Knives appreciated these dreams (he would not call them nightmares). He often went to work on the humans much harder and with much more vigor on mornings when he had been judged according to the will of Tessla. It was her means of leading him onward, towards Eden. And it was not her only method.
He had other dreams of her, dreams that left him feeling excited and shameful when he awoke. Sometimes he even noticed that, after extended periods of unconsciousness, his clothing had grown sticky with his own passions for her. Every time Knives absorbed one of his sisters into his own body, he felt a delicious sense of possession, as though he were Tessla and had taken (seduced) one of his subjects into the folds of his flesh. They swirled in his joints like unblocked points of chi, ready to direct his powerful energy in whatever way he saw fit.
The third variation of his dreams was the worst. In those dreams he could still see her dissected remains floating to the top of the liquid-filled chamber like a rotted piece of wood. He and Vash were thin, sickly children, and the chamber towered over their heads for iles. An impossibly thick miasma belched out from the top of it, overturning the chamber's ceiling and disgorging a horrible brown liquid all over the chrome steel floor. One moment he and his brother stood there; the next, they were both screaming as their own bodies melted into a primordial ooze, upon which carried the scent of sterilized hospital instruments, as well as gobs of flesh that resembled hearts and lungs and brains.
His death, her death, his brother's death: all were one in the eyes of the humans. This was the inevitable conclusion if they were not disposed of – forever.
Therefore, no matter the form in which she visited him each night, he continued with his work. He owed her nothing less than his very best.
After all, she was the one that had empowered him to grasp the future with his own two hands: to cut loose the puppet strings by which the humans had desired to control him, the strings to which his brother was still so cruelly tethered. She made him realize that he had free will. She had animated him.
He worshiped her.
Vash, the fool, may have thought he had a goddess in Rem. But Knives knew that the divinity of his race could have only ever been because Tessla was the first.
A/N: There's never been an official coloring of Tessla, has there? I don't know why, but I always thought she would have amber eyes.