Chapter 49: Remorse

At that precise moment, nothing had compared to the fear that had burst, unexpected and uninvited, through Sydney's veins at the sight of the streams of blood that had stained the face of her beautiful clockwork soldier.

Quintus himself had shown no signs of pain whatsoever, and in this, he found much confusion.

At first, he had thought that she had been injured, judging from the way she had cried out, as it was a noise of pure pain and anguish, yet, as he quickly looked over her form, he found no signs of bodily harm.

Yet, Sydney's attentions were purely focused on the clockwork musketeer rather than herself, and she did not bother to even take so much as a glance at her own figure, which only aided to support Quintus' prediction in that she herself had not obtained injury.

However, if one were to look at her face and solely her face, that individual would most certainly think otherwise.

Her mouth was open in a gaping scream of terror, her grey eyes wide as her pupils almost seemed to twitch, having not quite decided on dilating or constricting and instead rapidly alternating between the two, and this in itself was a terrifying sight – the privateer's almost corpse – like face, speckled with the blood of the clockwork and the tears that had somehow leaked out of her eyes, unnoticed until now.

Without another look back at her chained shipmates, Sydney clenched the fingers of her calloused hands around one of Quintus' thin, stick – like wrists, quite literally dragging him behind her as she dashed out of the room, through the hallway and up the staircase that led to the main deck, her voice venturing into a dangerously high range of pitch as she frantically shrieked indiscernible strings of inhuman sounds and words, a blur of syllables and mauled sentences.

The clockwork had seen his Commander in what he would have, before, considered a frenzied, unstable state, but nothing, nothing compared to what he was seeing now, as he tripped over himself to keep from falling as she barreled forwards, the colors – the colors, he realized, the colors that he could now see, and so much more clearly – rushing past, the black of the sails and the mast, the grey – dark wood of the deck, and the blue of the skies before these vivid, vibrant colors were sucked into a sort of void as everything around him lost its light, and it was only then that Quintus realized that they had returned to the cabin.

Oh what have I done –

Oh unforgivable CRIMES!

It was as if his visual mechanisms had become hypersensitive, overnight – and it was only the pain of his eyelids, stretched and torn over the glass spheres that they had not been built to cover such objects that reminded him of the new installations to his frame.

They were foreign objects, and would remain so – it felt odd, thinking about the newly installed visual mechanisms in this manner.

I've RUINED YOU!

A bang, a crash, the scraping of nails against wood and the thudding of thick boot – heels against wooden planks.

Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry…

He flinched as the cold skin of the privateer's finger pads and palms came in contact with his face, his porcelain – skinned, burgundy – stained face, and for a few seconds, there was simply no way to evade locking eyes with her, crystal – blue with granite – grey, even if just for a few agonizing seconds.

"Sssshhh…" Sydney pressed a single, shaking finger to the clockwork musketeer's pale lips, despite the fact that he had been silent to begin with. It was almost as if her actions were aimed more towards calming herself instead of her soldier.

However, this subconscious attempt at quieting herself caused an adverse effect to the one that she had hoped for, and now, as she drew what looked like a white handkerchief from one of her many internal coat pockets, her hand was shaking more than ever, and Quintus could feel the rattling through his skin as she touched the fabric to his slim face, her wrist weakly moving back and forth in attempt to wipe the blood off of his face.

"It…no…it's all going to be all…all right…yes…"

And her swiping became more furious with her words, the fabric being pressed harder and her attempted ministrations becoming ever harsher until she had created several red welts, streaking down his face in the place of the crimson rivers that had seeped from the torn flesh around his ice – like eyes.

She was now placing a painful amount of pressure down onto her pointed fingers, clenched over the white fabric, so that the swipes of her hands left scratches rather than welts, partially due to the shaking that wracked her entire body.

"Ye – yes…everything is going…to be okay…!"

Yet her eyes clearly stated otherwise, they contradicted her statement entirely, filled with fear and tears that threatened to cascade down her sunken cheeks.

By the time that she had cleaned the dried blood off of his face and managed to wrap a new layer of bandages over his eyes – he almost found himself internally mourning this, gaining such vivid sight only to have it repressed again – she could barely perform basic motor functions, as proven by the numerous times she had let the bandage slip through her fumbling fingers.

His sight now kept from processing a second time, Quintus could not determine his Commander's exact location by sight, the telltale thud of her mass being transferred from her feet to her knees allowed him to do so.

She was crying now, he could hear it – her breathing, which, like most humans, was most often silent, was now audible, strained, and inconsistent as her torso heaved uncontrollably, her speech muffled by what was most likely her hands, clapped over her lips and teeth to prevent those sounds, which she considered to be of weakness, from escaping.

"Commander?"

Quintus took one step, two steps forward, his arms held out slightly ahead of him, in order to find any possible obstacles standing in his path ahead of time, before they could cause him damage, as his hearing was not nearly as reliable as his sight, just as how most living creatures were.

"I…I'm so, so sorry, Quintus…"

Her voice rang out again, cracked and broken and hoarse from screaming and sobbing, and he was now able to place his Commander as precisely three feet in front of where he was currently standing, most likely curled or kneeled on the floor, judging from the direction at which the sound had come up.

The clockwork musketeer took a single step forward, sticking his hands out by his sides to feel the floor as he slowly sank to his knees before reaching out, once again, slowly, in the direction of his Commander, only to be stopped by an impossibly strong tugging force that then latched onto his right forearm.

"I…I ruined you…I hurt you…"

Her voice was next to his head now, her arms wrapped around his torso, her folded knees pressed against his.

"I am terrible…"

Terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE –

HURT you –

"I assure you, Commander, I am of physical stability."

"No, no, Quintus, you…you don't understand…"

The clockwork remained silent, his arms wrapped around the privateer's torso, fingers weakly clinging on to her sharp – angled shoulder blades.

At this point, he had learned, it was unwise to respond to her in any manner, and he chose to await her response.

"You were perfect, you see…perfect…and I thought that I would make you more beautiful, but instead…I ruined you…!"

She spoke of his eyes, the two crystalline, ice – blue eyes that now sat where there were once empty, endless voids which yielded no signs of soul or emotion.

Yet, he did not see why she saw this as a disadvantage – after all, she had done nothing but improve the detail in which he saw and enhance the clarity of the images that he would process.

"You find this…disadvantageous, Commander…? The…installments?"

"No…not technically…"

"I fail to comprehend your message, Commander."

Sydney sighed, and her chest heaved mightily. She was frustrated, the clockwork could tell, and it was at times like this that he despised the void that had been placed into him in place of the ability to feel, for as a result, he could not reach out to her and offer aid.

"You look…so human now…"

And he did, she knew, he truly did. It was quite easy for her to see him as a pale, slender young man, an albino, rather than a clockwork. It gave her the illusion that his flesh held warmth, only to touch his face or his hand and find the cold of the metal that had truly remained unchanged. It was a cruel illusion, and she considered it cruel of herself to have brought it on.

An unforgivable crime, she thought of it as, her attempt to make him human.

She was, she thought, now like the child who would beat others down in order to make herself a little more confident, a little more comfortable with her own image and being.

When Sydney herself was a young trainee of the Resistance, she had considered such actions to be of nothing but dishonor – and to find herself falling to these primeval, dishonorable motivations now –

"I ruined you, Quintus…because I hated myself."

And more so than ever before, the clockwork found himself completely lacking in comprehension of her words.

"You were perfect before…you were a soldier."

I still am, Commander.

"And a clockwork soldier, too…"

I do not understand – has my physical form, my physical identity been altered?

"I thought I was doing the right thing!"

My vision has been improved –

"I thought I was making you more beautiful…but I was only making you more human…wasn't I…?"

And it clicked, even as uncertain of a click that it was.

He looked more like a human, therefore she perceived him to be more like a human automatically, despite her knowledge of his true type and kind – and in her mind, in this manner, he had been ruined – at least for her.

"It's the very thing that I hate about myself, you know - ? Being human?"

"I am aware, Commander, although I still fail to see the reason for your hatred of your own species."

"Humans are not like clockworks, Quintus…"

She broke apart from him now, bracing her palms against her strong thighs as she pushed herself back into a standing position, standing still for a moment to allow the blood to flow back into her legs before beginning to pace, Quintus could hear the heavy sounds of her boots connecting with the floor as she walked back and forth, and then back and forth again.

"We are not strong, and we are not smart. We decide everything based off of these unreliable, temporary little emotions to which facts take a backseat. It's impossible to ever achieve perfection, you see, when you're that…messed up."

"With all due respect, Commander, your species has a clear – "

"That's not the point! I was jealous, and I ruined you BECAUSE of it!" Sydney's voice rose to a grating shriek, and the sound rang in the clockwork's processor long after the words had left her lips.

"It was so…so selfish of me…"

And at this point, Quintus could simply not take his own lack of vision anymore.

Although he often felt vulnerable while in extremely close proximity with his Commander, he had always been able to take it – up until now.

Now, there was too much fear, too much risk, all laden within her words and her actions over the last several days, and Quintus fully recognized and could identify his own fear very distinctly.

Sliding his fingers underneath the edge of the bandage wrapped around his eyes, Quintus carefully traced it with a single pointer finger until he found the knot that Sydney had made behind his head, immediately setting to undo it.

The bandages fell from his eyes to his neck and the clockwork was now able to see – although part of him had wished that he had decided against his earlier instincts and refrained from uncovering his eyes; the sight of his Commander was not, in any way, shape, or form, comforting.

An animal has taken her body.

It was the first thought that had jumped to him, automatically, and he was almost dismayed by it, how he had been so quick to compare her in negative light to her previous "self", as she often called it.

After all, there were benefits – she was now closer than ever to reaching her goal, she had taken (what seemed to be) the first steps towards severing her ties to those who she believed to limit her.

And although the consequences (most of which the clockwork did not have enough information to adequately predict) of her actions were not necessarily all of the positive nature, Quintus' function was purely to aid her in achieving her goals, aspirations, and wishes – whatever those could possibly be.

Like many times before, the clockwork had found himself torn, supposedly straight down the middle.

"I hated myself…I hate myself…and yet my solution was to bring you down…?!"

Sydney had moved across the room during the short period of time in which Quintus had immersed himself in his own ever – complex web of processing, and she was now standing by the leftmost area of wall nearest to the door, right in front of the small, circular mirror that hung there.

Quintus found this odd – she almost never looked in the mirror, at least not yet in his presence, and he had assumed that she cared not for the physical appearance of her own reflection, like so many humans did, and whenever she did look into the mirror, it was never more than a quick glance, just to assure herself of her own physical presence, perhaps.

However, this time, it was much more than a glance.

She was staring herself down, almost, betting her reflection to blink before her as she leaned closer, her eyebrows furrowing in frustration, in anger at something.

"It's all wrong."

Wrong?

Quintus had not been aware, he had not known that there was such a thing as a definite right and wrong when it came to the human body's physical appearance. It was impossible, he had subconsciously concluded, for there were millions of them, each appearing different.

It would be impossible to pin down the definition of "right" versus "wrong".

Yet, his Commander seemed to think otherwise.

"It's too rough…"

Her tricorn hat was pushed off of her head, falling to the ground with a soft thud as she combed her fingers through her thick (and now tangled), black hair. She was gentle to begin with, but her pace soon sped up until she appeared to be tearing it out rather than stroking or combing it, numerous black strands forced to part with the skin of her scalp only to be caught under her long, stained fingernails and in between the calloused digits of her hands with every passing second.

"Too rough, too dark – "

She is speaking of her hair, Quintus realized, her hair, which, up until now, had been of little importance to the privateer.

"Too broad."

Her hands had left her hair and had now moved down to her shoulders, and although she could not merely rip them out like she had to hundreds of strands of her hair, she gripped them as if she wished that she could.

Down again, down to her waist.

"Not narrow enough."

Her stomach, which was somewhere in between Samantha's washboard abdomen and Jewel's slender, flawless torso.

"Too big…"

Quintus felt his own blood rush in frustration at how quickly he had lost understanding of his Commander. One minute he thought he had finally caught on to her complex pattern of thinking, and it seemed like he would be able to finally map it out, only for her to immediately disprove it with another one of her spontaneous actions.

Too big, too big, what can she possibly mean, he thought, for there is no such size limit on a being of her species.

"Too big…FAT!"

Her voice escalated in volume unexpectedly, and Quintus nearly yelped – a human reaction, he knew – from the shock.

In a matter of a few seconds, Sydney had gone from being seemingly calm and critical to a state of raging fury that he had only ever heard once before – and he had not even been by her to witness the incident, as it had taken place on deck and had resulted in her almost tearing out the entirety of the swashbuckler Jewel Zabra's hair.

It was terrifying, he would most certainly admit, as he looked to her now, bent in what was almost a fighting stance towards her own reflection, her humanity almost completely unrecognizable, for it had been so masked with this animalistic rage.

"EVERYTHING IS TOO BIG! THESE!"

She dug her nails into the bones and flesh of her hips, the circumference of which was significantly wider than her waist –

"AND THIS – "

Once again to the flesh of her abdomen, pinching and pulling at the skin as if she was willing it to become detached from her body.

"AND THESE!"

Even to her thighs.

At this point, the clockwork was confused beyond all belief – humans gained physical strength by building tissues called muscle, he learned, and the larger these muscles were, the stronger they were. He had seen his Commander's strength as she battled Kane, and how her legs, which were almost strong enough to rival Samantha's, had propelled her forwards at impossible speeds and helped her to deliver blows of a tremendous amount of force.

It was, quite literally, her greatest strength – and Quintus could not bring himself to reason as to why she was berating her own advantages so.

"And YOU…"

Sydney looked back up to the mirror, to her own enraged reflection, an accusatory finger pointed at the image of her own face.

"An ugly, hideous MONSTER!"

With a crash, the privateer, drove her fist into the very center of the mirror, the glass cracking and yielding to her hand, the razor – sharp shards raining down upon her boots and upon the floorboards, a few somehow clinging to the frame despite the force of the impact.

Ignoring the hundreds of pieces of glass that now surrounded her feet, Sydney now let loose a feral growl from between her lips, focusing her attention on one particularly large shard, one that was approximately the size of her palm, that had managed to remain attached to the edge of the frame. She slid a single finger underneath the slightly upturned edge of the sharp fragment, gripping it with the rest of her fingers before yanking it from the grip of the frame, now holding it in her palm, gazing upon it as if it were a precious jewel of sorts.

How odd, Quintus had started to think, for he had never seen another human display this sort of behavior prior to this, but he was then interrupted by a rustling sound as she hurriedly undid the multiple buttons on her coat before flinging the heavy black garment off of her shoulders and onto the floor, followed almost immediately by her thin, white shirt.

She seemed not to have a care as to where these articles of clothing ended up, instead immediately turning her attention to the flesh of her abdomen, completely bare save for the heavily – layered strip of bandages that she had wrapped around her bosom, and, gripping the shard of glass within her hand, struck the point of her primeval weapon across her flesh.

And it was not just once.

She continued, she did it again.

Several times, over and over, she drew her hand back, only to bring it down again and slice across her flesh, without a glint of hesitation or doubt in her eyes.

"YOU - ! SELFISH - ! WRETCHED - ! MAGGOT - !"

The number of horizontal crimson lines being drawn over her abdomen, over her hips and her waist, over her ribcage, steadily increased, as did the amount of blood that slowly began to seep out of these lines, and Quintus realized, several moments too late.

"Commander, STOP!" He ran towards her, pushing her backwards and knocking the both of them down to the floor before wrestling the bloodied shard away from her, although she attempted to hold fast to it, letting it sink into the flesh of her own palms as to prevent him from taking it from her.

"NO - ! I NEED IT - "

"You – you're injured…"

By now, the clockwork's entire frame was shaking with fear, and he ever – so - softly reached out a hand towards her abdomen, the most minute of ghosting touches staining his gloves red.

"Co…Commander….how c – could you…?"

"It's easy," Sydney breathed in reply, locking eyes with him for a brief second before his eyes raked over the rest of her flesh only to discover more of these lines, similar in width and length, different only in color.

Instead of red, they were white – traces, reminders of what had once been open wounds, like these were now.

"You…you have…"

She only nodded, the rage gone from her eyes, although her chest still rose and fell and her blood still pumped fast.

"I hate my frame, Quintus…it's not like yours…"

"You…you are of a different species, Commander, I do not –"

"I know. And I realize that. But, you see – instead of raising my own standards – to make myself more like you, and more like your kind – I brought you down."

Made you human

Made you like me

The me that I hate.

The clockwork shook his head, unable to believe the new discovery that he had just made, and he scrambled backwards in his kneeling position, only for Sydney to jerk herself up and latch her hands onto his wrists, preventing him from going any farther.

But it's okay now, Quintus.

"You just wait…you just wait. You'll see, Quintus, my dear…I'll find a way…"

She smiled, and it was genuine – the word had a frightful association to it, as of now.

"I'm going to be perfect…just like you."


I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and be sure to leave a REVIEW!

Until the next chapter,

- Severina