Childhood's over the moment you know you're gonna
die. - The Crow
*****
Things were all dark, except for a gleam of wire. He was trying to hold still, to avoid the wires, when he felt water welling up around his feet; the water continued rising. When it reached his knees, he moved to run, to find some high ground in the dark, but all he did was tangle his hand in the wire.
Moving, he realized the wire was wound catching his limbs, holding him there as the water rose above his head. He tried to hold his breath, failed, and started choking, struggling; every move made the wires dig in and start jabs of pain, so he saw blood drifting in the water, as a final wire yanked at his neck like a leash, the water flooding his lungs, he couldn't scream, he couldn't breathe, the more he struggled, the more he hurt and the more the water filled his lungs.
He woke up, tangled in the blankets, afraid to go back to sleep; he left his room and padded down the hall. He found what he knew to be Garland's room; the door opened.
At first, he ran ahead of his mind. Garland's mostly mechanical frame was opened and in spread pieces, everything suspended by machinery and wires; he held his breath, waiting for water to rise, not wanting to move. Nothing happened, and his memory brought up that it was no leash and bindings of garrote, just the self-repair system for keeping up Garland's cybernetics; the red orb, normally in his chest, was in a mount just in front of his body; he noted, confused, that Garland's aura was centered on the orb.
"Garland?", he warbled. There was no response. Was he dead? Kuja didn't like Garland, but he didn't want to be alone either. "Garland?!" The mechanisms whirred, shifting; the orb pulled back in, as Garland's body pulled back together, then stirred.
"What is it?" He was irritated, and Kuja felt the tingling of the implant.
"I had a bad dream, and I can't sleep, and I wanted to know if I could sleep in here..." He was rambling, hurried, afraid he was getting in trouble.
Garland stared down, irritated at the disturbance but unable to find anything wrong with the situation, besides the momentary annoyance of having his self-repair cycle disrupted. He glared down grimly, as the child shrank away. "Very well."
He went back into self-repair; Kuja found the process ghoulish, but at least there was that other aura, another presence so he wasn't alone; he curled up on the floor and dropped off, asleep.
He was two - eight-equivalent - the first time he saw one of the genomes die. A wild beast, one of the warped things that lurked outside the Bran Bal compound, had broken in; Garland left Pandemonium to oversee the damages, and he followed. The area was damaged in the fight, and some of the other genomes were already working on repairs; a torn, unmoving corpse, aura dead, energy bleeding off, was laid out to the side, a trail of blood marking where it had been drug out of the way; the corpse's head was only barely attached. The dead beast was next to it; on the other side of the dead genome was a genome that was still breathing despite being partly eviscerated.
Academically, he knew the injuries, the kind of blow that had likely caused them, the organs visible, what had been damaged and how. That didn't cover the blood painting the walls like one of his bored scribbles he was always punished for, or the sheer amount of the blood splattered everywhere; the broken sprawl of the corpse; the evil gleam in the dead, staring eyes of the beast; the feeble, ragged breathing of the eviscerated one, the way the body tried to continue working in spite of the fact that its insides were laid out on the stone. The corpse's eyes were open; the blank, glassy stare wasn't all that different from a living genome. The wounded one was still apparently awake, keeping the same blank look; Kuja thought he saw a faint ghost of expression - some glimmer of pain through the unmoving bloodied puppet-face, although it could've been his imagination; he wasn't sure which was scarier, if somewhere under the programming and emptiness the genomes actually did feel things, or if they really were just empty vessels with no soul to feel.
Garland walked forward, inspecting the injured one, Kuja keeping close in the sweep of his cloak; morbid curiosity aside, he didn't really want to go closer, but he was more afraid to be away from Garland. The old machine was cold comfort, but he was something, and he was the only other sentient thing in the compound.
"Is he dying?", he asked, voice shaking.
"The damage is past all reasonable repair." He may as well have been speaking of a broken computer part. Garland patched into the computer, activating the disposal switch on the damaged genome, then turned away to inspect the beast.
Kuja stayed, frozen, as the dying genome's breathing grew more ragged and irregular. The computer in him knew what the disposal switch caused - rapid tissue breakdown, starting in the less vital systems where the self-repair mechanisms were weaker, swiftly eating away at everything. Now he started getting an image to go with it.
The construct's skin seemed to thin, veins and bone more visible through it, until it started dissolving into a thick, bloody fluid. Successive layers of tissue followed, muscles being bared before they melted away, the genome still breathing through the first part; after the lungs quit working as the breakdown moved deeper, the patterns of straight blood in the soupy mess showed that the heart was still diligently beating. The bones even were dissolved gradually, calcium-white streaks marbling into the red liquid; he lost track of the movement of attempted circulation in the macabre mess, still rooted dumbly even after the last bit of recognizable remains dissolved among the drenched, blood-dyed remains of torn clothing. Even with no body left, he still saw a heartbeat in the swirls of the organic soup, his child mind filling in the sign of life though the mass. His mouth had gone dry, he felt bile rising and somehow didn't get sick; too busy being paralyzed to throw up. The broad red pool spread in front of him, coating the flat ground, flowing outward around his feet.
Heavy metal footsteps disturbed the liquid behind him as Garland walked over, a dark vast shadow falling over him, over the red pool. He stooped, transfixed, touching the surface, then stood, staring at the blood dripping down his own small hand; the contact confirmed that it was real, that it had actually happened.
"Kuja? The cleanup will be handled as usual." Curt, businesslike, no reaction to having just dissolved a living creature.
"Is..." His voice was a thin, hoarse squeak; he noticed other patterns forming, where Garland must have activated the trigger on the already-dead one, the fluid being easier to clean up than a dead body. The pool spread further for it. "Is that...what will happen...when I die?" There was a damp feeling, a flutter; tears were starting to form, and his stomach had knotted with the connection. It seemed impossible to just breathe normally, calmly.
"Yes." His usual officiousness; he had no time for comforting words or consideration, or even malice; it was the truth, and there was no room in his clockwork plans for dealing with a child's fears, if he even bothered to take the time to comprehend.
Kuja's breath caught, slipping ragged, like the dying genome. He turned and ran for Pandemonium, fearing that he might be mistaken for a broken one if he didn't move, not wanting to face the bone-swirled red pool and the great dark shadow looming over it. He kept running until he was in his storage-closet room, huddled in his nest of blankets, sobbing. He uncurled enough to look out across the room, his room, the one place in Pandemonium he could try and turn into something that looked lived in. His eyes caught a mirror, and the images caught him without escape; bloody soup drenching crumbling silver feathers, his amethyst eyes dissolving, the skull visible briefly before it would dissolve as well...he violently wrenched back into fetal position, clutching and tangling into the blankets, the blood on his left hand getting smeared all over him and the bedding. He'd never be able to look at the ghastly forms of Pandemonium again without seeing something dying and decomposing - and wasn't that what it and the rest of this world were?
The door slithered open. "Kuja?" Garland actually seemed confused, perturbed at this new disturbance in his clockwork world. Kuja gasped between sobs, not finding the air or will to speak. "What's gotten into you?"
"Am I broken?" Garland had always called him a mistake; how long would Garland leave the mistake before he deemed it time to dispose of it?
"Aside from the glitch of a soul, you seem intact."
"If I get hurt, will you....will you...just...dispose of me like that?" He was speaking rapidly between sobs.
"If the damage is beyond reasonable repair."
"I don't want to die!", he yelled, howling. "I don't want to die, I don't want to, to, to just dissolve like that!"
Garland had nothing close to a suitable answer, nor a response to this outburst, so he did the efficient thing and left to do something more useful.
Kuja tangled himself deeper in the blankets, crying, using the cloth tension to make sure he was still solid. He knew it for sure now; when he saw the bloody pool with Garland's looming shadow, he'd seen his future.
For some time after the incident, Kuja was unusually subdued and skittish, scrambling through things in between bouts of freezing. He was torn between being terrified of Garland, his creator, the one that controlled his implants and the shadow of his death, and just wanting someone, anyone, nearby. The genomes were no use; their programming had been adjusted to ignore the glitch, particularly when he was disrupting their work. The only other thing that had any kind of response was Garland.
The nightmares started in earnest, going from normal, sporadic childhood bad dreams to night frights and panic attacks. The waters around the garrote wires turned to blood, blood from other creations of Garland's being disposed of; instead of being alone in the wire net, he was joined by melting corpses. For a few months, he spent more nights at Garland's feet than in his own room. Garland didn't even seem to notice any of it, besides a slowly increasing irritation at having his self-repair cycles interrupted, to the point that he ordered Kuja not to disturb him when he came in to get away from the night frights. He still caught the references - he was a glitch, a mistake, not supposed to exist.
One morning, Garland gave him a lengthy section of computer code to debug - the first time Garland had told him to do something. Then, Garland left, his annual trip to Gaea, to check on the Iifa System.
Kuja turned to the convoluted bit, going over it line by line, glyphs covering the force-screen in front of him at a high rate. It was busy work, something to concentrate on, but it was interesting for the first couple hours.
Then his attention wandered. Another hour and he was bored with it. He stood from the screen, leaving it stopped, and headed for the door into the Bran Bal complex.
There was a warning tingle as he approached the door; it wouldn't open, so he tried to rewire it. As soon as he touched the mechanisms, there was a sharp pull of pain, the implant's metaphorical leash being yanked. According to Pandemonium's main computer, Garland had set it up to monitor Kuja's actions in his absence, with temporary control over the implant.
He glowered at the door. He could go back to the debugging quietly, but that would mean admitting defeat; the door and implant became the major test of whether or not he'd let it get the better of him.
He practically attacked the mechanism, working through the constant sharp sensation of the implant; the final mess was haphazard, more damage than hacked, but the door opened. He stumbled through, the implant's torment getting worse the further he moved from the door; his head swam, but he pushed forward, refusing to give in. He got fifteen feet before he blacked out from the strain, collapsing unconscious.
He woke up back in the chamber, with Garland standing over him. The implant was off, but he still felt tingling and twinging along most of his nerves.
"Why did you do that?"
The boy hauled himself up, sitting, tail twitching. "I didn't want to stay here. It was boring."
"You are not going to be allowed to run amuck as you have in the past; what you want does not enter into it."
"I still got outside."
"Fifteen feet."
"It was outside!" The small growl was starting again.
Garland stared down coolly. "The boundaries on your behavior are very real. You will be controlled."
His tail was lashing; he was snarling. Garland turned and left the sulking, fuming child.
Kuja attacked the boundaries with renewed resolve. He went out of his way to confuse the genomes and scramble their programming, until Garland banned him from entering Bran Bal, setting the tracking system to activate his implant if he tried; he fought it for a month, much the way he'd fought the door.
He didn't even leave a period of peace before he started a different tack - sabotaging whatever was handy whenever Garland wasn't looking. Every time there was the bite of the implant, but it was becoming less of a deterrent; it was a sign that he'd broken another boundary.
Garland ended the string when he caught Kuja after an elaborate sabotage run. The implant came on strongly enough that it drove the child to his knees, suddenly; when the flashes in his vision cleared, he was staring, yet again, at Garland's ankles.
"I may not be able to take readings, monitor energy systems, and study your glitch properly when you are unconscious, but I can just as easily study it while you are permanently restrained." There was more of an irritated edge in his voice than Kuja had ever heard. "One more outburst, and allowing you movement will become a liability." Garland turned and left; the door into the corridor hissed closed, leaving Kuja alone, in the dark hallway, on his hands and knees.
He'd found the end of the leash; one more boundary crossed, and he'd be tied down in one of the labs and kept that way. He liked being able to move around and see different things, and he didn't want to give that up. He didn't doubt that Garland would make good on the threat. He'd always wanted to get some kind of proof that Garland really had emotions, but now that he had it, he regretted it.
He stood up and went to his room, and mostly stayed there for days, until he felt safe following Garland again. He went subdued again, quiet, afraid of Garland as more than just his eventual death; he could not defy Garland, not without consequences he dared not face, no matter how much he hated being yanked underfoot like that. He wasn't like the genomes; he didn't want to be treated like them. Someday, he would break the leash, but for now, he had no other choice but to quietly go along, with no more sign of how much he hated things than glares and quiet growls, sullen tones; so long as he did not actually do anything, he could be as obvious as he wanted about hating Garland.
The open hatred seemed to die down gradually, but not because it was flagging; it was simply being pulled into the shadows, to wait.
His usual mischief being outlawed, he set to other things to do; digging through computer archives for reading material, practicing playing with magic, tinkering on broken or cast-aside bits of machinery. Time went on as Pandemonium and Bran Bal settled back into usual patterns, although he'd stopped going to Garland when he had nightmares; Garland was one of his nightmares anyway, so he started just huddling into the blankets listening to the fortress breathe.
*****
The disposal switch was never meant to be the killswitch activated at the end of the game, ergo why it
doesn't quite work the same...it just sorta...nagged
at me and wouldn't go away, of having a mechanism meant to dispose of corpses
without burial, carrion, etc. as well as the "shut-down" mechanism
and the "standby/sleep" button. The manifestation being that
horrific was...added bonus isn't quite the word here, but it serves its
purpose. :P The blurring of time's also sort-of
intentional, since the frigging place never *changes*.
