Hi my name is Kayla and I've started another Deus Ex fic that will probably go for about six chapters longer than I meant it to. Okay real talk I can't stop writing about these characters. I'd been wanting to tackle Adam's reconciliation with David for a long time, but didn't feel I had the grasp to do it. How do you absolve someone who cut you apart for his own gain? How do you forgive that kind of pain and loss? David took three healthy limbs from Adam without blinking, used his DNA on the down low, and lied to him about it but I can't stomach the idea of them being in opposition forever so I wanted to explore what that kind of healing would look like. Here goes.
The only thing that seemed to calm the hive that Adam's mind had become was the quiet, misty gray of dawn.
He sat on the beach with his knees drawn up, facing east as the sun made its methodical way into the sky. The ocean rushed up with a rhythm like breathing, and he tried to match it. The salty air swept through the back of his throat and he closed his eyes, letting it comb through his hair and down the contours of his arms, his back. He'd expected to hate the ocean, after Panchaea, but he didn't. It told him when to draw breath, and when to relinquish it again on the faith that he would have the time, the energy, the ability to take another.
Malik wasn't awake yet, and he was grateful. The entire vacation had been her idea—or at least that's what he kept telling himself. She was the one who'd come to his apartment a week after Panchaea and forced him to do something besides prepare. She'd found him doing endless pushups and situps. He'd even resorted to chin-ups for a sense of normalcy, and he missed the lactic burn he used to get in his shoulders and arms after a good workout. Instead his chest and back muscles protested the constant strain and he tried to picture what sore biceps felt like again. It was like a constant itch, the need to keep busy so everything that had happened would stay hovering on his shoulders. If he stopped the truth about Megan, about David, about everything, threatened to suffocate. He knew what happened when he suffocated. He didn't die. He was like a flame—just when it is starved to the edge of snuffing out oxygen rushes back and it flares with vengeance, burning everything around it.
The tips of the waves took a gold glow that reminded him of nightline Detroit as the sun went higher, and he felt Hugh Darrow's words chew at his spine.
Like Daedalus, he'd said. Watching helplessly as his child crashes into the sea.
Adam rubbed his metal fingers together, watched the gold reflect in his forearms, and he wondered if he was Icarus or the sun that felled him. He ran his hand up his own arm and trailed his fingers over the long healed seams of flesh and metal that made up his shoulders. One by one he traced the edges of million dollar prosthetics through his t-shirt, and he wondered how long he'd been only half human to Megan, to David. Surely long before his rebirth they'd been laying him out like a da Vinci sketch in their minds, hacking pieces of his living flesh away so they could meld him with glittering sinew.
One arm. That's all he'd needed replaced when he'd been brought into the operating theater clinging to life. One arm, part of his skull, and his entire chest cavity. As if that wasn't enough. He ran his fingers through his hair and then down his face, closing his eyes as he noted the difference between metal plug and marrow filled bone. The soft clink of his thumb against his eye augments was abrasive. He'd read the medical report until it was braided into his DNA.
One previous operation, 6 months ago, life-critical.
He pressed his fingers into his eyes, rubbing away the implications. They'd taken him apart and stitched him back together in one session. Shock alone should have stopped his heart. Normal augmentations went in stages. Normal humans would never have survived what they did to him.
Requiring full replacement of chest cavity and left arm.
He slid his hand down the side of his neck, pressing harder when he reached the cradle of his collarbones. The twin chinks of metal gave a glimpse of what his breastbone, his spine, had become. He felt bio-tech tissues personally invented and patented by his boss flex as he drew another breath on the ocean's command, and he pressed his fingers into the muscle filling spaces between bars that pretended to be ribs. He couldn't feel his heartbeat. He ground the heel of his artificial hand into his artificial sternum and wished that he could. He clutched at his chest and lowered his head to his knees, grinding his teeth together as he lost the battle against his thoughts.
Right arm and legs replaced at behest of employer, authority granted under terms of employment contract.
He clenched the hand against his breast into his shirt, twisting the fabric as his other hand tore at the sand by his side.
Replaced—behest of employer.
The slap of metal on metal was sharp, aggressive as Adam ripped his hand from the beach and gripped his shin, curling up tighter. His dual-toed feet flexed servos and glittering black tendons with human agony and burrowed deeper into the beach. He lost the easy pace of his breathing and felt himself grow light-headed.
Behest
Of
Employer.
David Sarif, a man he'd trusted, a man he'd started to grow close to, had looked at his healthy limbs and hadn't flinched against hacking them off. He'd laid out six months plus of physical therapy, of phantom pains and morphine fueled nightmares, of crushed clock faces and mirrors and glasses and the mocking scribbles that Adam's written intelligence had become with the careless flick of his pen against paper. With one swoop of Sarif's signature flourish Adam had become David's Vitruvian man.
He could feel his heart now, the bundle of muscle slamming against Adam's knuckles with a force that was almost painful. His muscles strained with the tension pulling him into himself. The ocean could no longer reach him and his breath came in shattered dry sobs, pangs of phantom pains running through toes and arteries he no longer possessed.
He trembled with the force of it until the frantic skittering of calcium carbonate across his feet startled him back into awareness of the world around him. He was momentarily blinded as his eyes flew open and he jerked back, blinking away the searing white-gold as his glasses flicked closed on instinct, trying to protect his retinas. He panted, just seeing the flash of orange as it skittered frantically past him. On reflex he snatched a hand out and caged it with splayed fingers, his breathing calming slowly as he leaned forward to inspect the creature trapped beneath his palm.
Rosy orange legs spread between his knuckles and scratched frantically at the sand, the claws snapping useless and pinned. The crab was just smaller than his hand, and he stared down at it for several blank moments, trying to understand why it had run across his feet instead of going around him. Its eye stalks were poking up either side of his pointer finger, and they twitched towards his right. He looked up. A child was coming to a frantic stop, a look of shock on her face as she backpedaled, nearly slipping in the sand. She was clutching a pail that couldn't possibly have any water left in it after the swinging around it had endured. She didn't look older than eight.
He blinked up at her. Her expression was mildly horrified, and at first he thought it was because the beach was private and she shouldn't be there. Then he glanced down at the crab and his own sleek black lines against it and he swallowed, clicking back his glasses. She wasn't looking at the crab anymore. She was looking at him, at the sunlight reflecting off his hardware.
"You shouldn't chase these things, you're going to get pinched," He said, lifting his hand and letting the animal rush away. He closed his hand and looked away from the girl, but he didn't hear her retreat.
"I—I'm sorry," she stuttered, and he looked up to see her white-knuckling on the pail. It was like she couldn't turn and move. He turned towards her and she flinched, as though expecting him to attack her. He realized with a painful click that she'd probably been attacked by an augmented person during the stint with the chips. Maybe even a member of her own family, or heaven forbid a parent, had attacked her.
"It's all right," he assured her, feeling the calm of the ocean wash back into his breathing. When he moved, he did it very slowly. "I just didn't want you to get hurt," he said keeping eye contact. "If you're going to collect things from the beach, look for shells, maybe pirate coins," he suggested, glancing around the area. "Here, let me help you get your collection started," he said, spotting a shell the same color as the crab. He reached away from her and picked it up, curling it gently in his hand before holding it out to her with an open palm. She blinked, swallowing. Slowly, at no more than a shuffle that piled sand around her feet, she moved close enough to reach out and take it from him. He sat stock still, waiting until the shell was fully closed in her hand to lower his. He was careful not to let their hands touch.
"Thank you," she whispered, and a little of the tension seemed to leave her shoulders as she finally managed to look away from him to inspect the shell.
"You're welcome. You should keep looking, get all the good shells before everyone else wakes up."
She nodded, placing the shell gingerly into the bucket. She looked like she was going to say something else to him, but then a voice sounded down the beach and the tension came back to her shoulders and her head whipped around. Adam leaned back to look past her down the beach, but he couldn't make out more than a female figure waving at the girl.
The girl looked back at him, clutching at her bucket again, though this time the fear in her eyes was different. He just couldn't place how.