A/N: Another post Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance fic. Set ll characters belong to their respective creators. Set 9 years after the events in Revengeance. Thanks to all the reviewers on my last story, Phantom Butterflies. I finally found some inspiration to write another story! It only took six months... I'm not entirely happy with it, yet - I may change the story substantially, probably out of first person. The direction this story's going in is Raiden's non-consentual conversion from man to Cyborg pre-MGS4. Canon and Lore are things I will try to respect, but I might mess up - in which case, please tell me!
Synthetic blood tastes even more coppery than bio-blood. That's one of the first things I learned, soon after my involuntary change.
I sigh and drop the pen, rolling my eyes to the ceiling. I've been trying to write this story down for the past day, but I keep getting stuck on tiny, inconsequential details, like the taste of artificial blood, or how unspent artificial adrenaline makes you queasy, just like the real stuff. John leaves on exchange for Uni in a week, and I want him to hear my story from me, not some cybernetics professor or, god forbid, an archived newspaper article. Beginning, middle, end. While my story started in the battlefields of Liberia, weirdly enough that has been easy to talk about, now that John is old enough to understand. He took my experiences as a child soldier hard, of course, but it wasn't so hard for me as it was for him. That cold, white clinic room where I was changed, though? I couldn't bring myself to talk to him about it. I haven't even told Rose much, except that I was cold, angry, afraid. Sunny knows more, of course. She knows, because she was held in those white, white halls, too. But I won't ask her to tell the story of those days to anyone, even though she would, for me.
A knock at the door, then Rose's scent is in the room with me. "Jack, come to bed? It's four in the morning. Your story can wait another night, can't it?" Her smile is the same as always, gentle, warm, reassuring. It's embellished now with the lightest touch of crow's feet, which she hates. I can't find the words to tell her it makes her more beautiful than ever, just like the rare strands of silver starting to grace her mahogany hair, like touches of moonlight on a dark sea. I would give anything to be growing older with her, but the machine of my body whirs ever on, tireless, relentless, frozen.
Still, my ever-youthful body has it's benefits, so I bound across the room, easily sweeping her into my arms for a kiss. "Bed, or something sweeter?" I murmur this into her ear as I carry her up the stairs, accentuating my words with a nibble. She laughs, and kisses me, and I swear, I can almost feel her warm lips against my neck, almost, almost. "John is sleeping downstairs, you incorrigible rake," is her mocking reply, but she kisses me again and I can hear her heartbeat quicken. As I ease her onto the bed, I encourage her to kiss me again, the only part that's left of me. As we tangle into the blankets in the dark, her kisses on my cheeks set my last remaining nerves on fire, and for a moment I'm a whole man again, and there is nothing in all the world but the two of us.
Later, I'm watching her sleep. Something I've never told her is that I don't really sleep, any more. I go to bed, and I rest for a few hours a day, but it's not the same. Despite all our leaps and bounds - many pioneered by Doktor and I, experimenting for the 'Desperado Children', as they became known, cyborg bodies are still primarily about efficiency and function, and no part of human science has yet found a way to replicate sleep in an artificial body. So I still heal my wounds with electrolytes and charge my batteries the literal way, but I don't mind so much - sleep rarely ever brought me anything but nightmares. The hardest part is getting out of the bed without waking my wife- my civilian frame, man-sized though it is, weighs something like three times what I would weigh if I were human - close to 270 kilograms - so the bed struggles, even though we opted for the spring system which boasted 'no partner disturbance.' Yeah, right. I manage, all the same, and slink back to my study.
I guess you might find it odd that I, one of the least-human cyborgs around, would write with something as primitive as a pen and paper. Call me only-fashioned, or a hopeless romantic, but I find it calming to write with a pen. With a computer, it's too easy to link myself up and spew all of my thoughts into a word processor - the pen makes me dig deeper.
Weirdly enough, it's the darkness of the night, and the warm yellow glow of the desk lamp that pushes my demons far enough away to start to write, this time, from the start.
A/N: Thanks for reading! It's all downhill from here. The next chapter will be up in a few days. As always, I welcome any and all criticism.