Snowflakes by Dib07
Disclaimer:
I do not own the IZ characters. However this story and this idea is mine.
Warnings:
Angst
Dib07: Hello dear reader, this is a little story I had lurking in my files, it isn't much, it is just something I needed to get out of my system at the time. I thought I'd share it. Hope you enjoy! ^^ A massive shout out to your support, it gives me confidence to upload locked away stories, oneshots and other things I wrote during bouts of madness!
I can barely breathe
In this broken world
Please tell me, what have we become?
Metropia
The sky is filled with white.
The terrible cold makes his chest ache, and causes his breath to mist in the air.
Beyond the pain, something registers, deep down, but he doesn't know what it is.
They twirl down, softly and slowly, and without a sound they mark the earth with ghostly touches. He stands, surveying it for longer than is necessary, and raises a mittened hand to the crystallized ice drops, antennae bobbing and weaving for noise when there is nothing to hear save his own breathing, the gentle hum of his PAK and the crunch as his boot heels sink into the snow. Even Gir's frantic dance does not dissuade his focus as he pauses, bemused, tufts and drifts falling down around him in silent cascades.
They are fragile, diaphanous, melting away as soon as they come into existence; not leaving a trace.
He clasps his mitten over the frosted shape and when he opens it out again there is a little shiny tear-drop puddle in its place.
The forest that surrounds him is equally quiet, with little to rob the solemn serenity that fills every space and breath. Icicles of bluish shine twinkle out from the scraggly fingers of twigs. An owl watches from her perch in the canopy.
The river is a frozen white ribbon running down ice-rimmed banks of pebble and reeds. Things are captured, of water frozen in the moment, of flowers crystallized, the trees immobile and deathlike, their bark as black as night as they stand as still as statues in the frost. The valleys, undulations and mounds of snow glitter sharply in dizzying spectrums of silver, white and blue.
The exhilaration of the cold touches and reawakens something inside that the toil of duty has been unable to do beyond his confinement.
He rips off his mitten and the black of his swathed hand is speckled in white. Sensations unfamiliar to him are stirred up inside, sensations that confuse him. This world is no different. It is just another rock, spinning through cold space, another insignificant dot in a merciless vacuum. Countless other planets have held beauty similar to this one, and every so often he'll glance at a different sunset, the moment held in his mind before it is carted away beneath cold, automated restraint.
Snowflakes hit his skin and antennae. It softly decorates the Voot, covering her in a thin layer of what looks like icing sugar.
Blisters begin to form up the smoothness of his neck and skull, the discomfort a vague and persistent stinging.
The remotest pangs murmur deep down, and he can feel something twist inside.
A thousand times he had seen skies burn, the colours leaving enough of an impression to remember it by as other details turn to fog beyond his memory. A thousand more he has experienced inside simulations, witnessing the infallible plight with an attained and automated numbness.
He snaps his eyes shut, closing himself off from the snow falling from the sky.
He cannot stand the feelings inside.
He'd prefer it if there was nothing beyond the simulations, nothing beyond the walls.
Nothing to feel.
He tightens a hand to his chest, wishing he didn't breathe, that he wouldn't hurt, wishing he was a machine that wasn't mortally frail and full of regret.
When he closes his eyes, he can see it, the strewn and bloodied battlefields, and the corpses floating in brackish, murky snowmelt of another world where a different sun presides over a different earth.
He is one of the many soldiers storming forwards; a part of the Empire's closing jaws.
He opens his eyes and looks to the shifting skies. The clouds are this amazing grey, swilling into the sky and thickening like metal. It is destruction he seeks, fire that fills him, pain that carts the loneliness away. It settles over the doubts and hides the failure.
Exhaling, watching his breath freeze in the air, the ache reminds him of the snowflake's fading existence.
Gir waddles over, little hands rolling around a ball that is steadily growing larger. He adds it to the pile of other growing balls, his passages intersecting and connecting around Zim in looping ruts and trenches.
He pans round to look at the machine hunched in the snow. Snow stings and nips at unprotected and exposed skin.
The machine has lost its appeal, the shadow of motivation lost beneath the bewitching dazzle of snowfall.
When class was over, long before the pain, he'd lifted his rucksack to his PAK and exited the hallway to the doors opening onto the playing yard. A snowflake had drifted down, touching his forehead, and he had paused, looking up, riveted to the ghostly fall of snow.
The machine stands in the shadow of the Voot Runner, its chassis open to emit wires that curl like hair out of the opening. With a self-chastised murmur, he turns away from it. He supposes it's really of no consequence. It stands there, shiny and new, ice rimming its pads and axels. The solitude is better, but he is less enthused on the feelings it has caused.
There is light, suddenly peering through the treeline like a Cyclops eye staring straight into his retinas. It betrays the dimmer shade of evening: the harsh light cutting through the softer evening hue like a splitting laser that carves the colours in two. He hears the thunderous baying of a dog, antennae picking up on the abrasive and metallic cling in each bark as it resonates across the span of white emptiness.
He steps towards the Voot, claws reaching for the windshield when another bark rips across the woodland: closer. Eyes dart to Gir who looks up at him. The snow that falls and settles on his metal body melts, some of it trickling down his rivets and chassis. His eyes glow knowingly in kind.
Icicles shimmer; their icy casing reflecting his passage as he flees across the snow, his footfalls and tumbles leaving dents and hollows telling of his passage. His boots, sharp and pointed, go straight through with ease, he sinks, his knees disappear into the white, and the baying is closing, the owl takes flight, and the trees warble from the caustic echoes. Snow falls in clumps from branches. Streams of dark birds take flight, their caws reverberating across the grey.
The limbs of trees close in, their trunks bodies that move to intercept him, fingers reach out and snag and drag at his uniform, skin catching on twigs as he pulls himself forwards. The sharp end of what feels like a knife is twisting his guts. He changes direction when he comes to the frozen shiny belt of river and hits his knee against a rock that's half hidden in snow.
The chrome extensions spring open from a neurological tap from brain to PAK, and with four strokes his cybernetic swords cut through the snow, but they sink too, the earth underneath unknown until his weight touches down, and his balance is thrown one way or the other as his chrome legs hit more hidden rock, or a drop that goes further than he is expecting. He turns round, and the dog explodes from sparkling white foliage. Its chassis is smooth and unblemished from rivets and segments that make it. Its eyes are hollow slits, its teeth grey steel icicles that snap and close as it leaps towards him.
There isn't time to calculate, only fall on instinct. The metal shaft goes into the beast's mouth; jaws crunch on the prosthetic's length, teeth slicing through from the force of its gears that make the axels of its jaw. The dog starts shaking its head with the prosthetic locked in its teeth and the joints protest and groan as plastic and metal ligament is torn in the connecting socket to the next segment of PAK leg.
The teeth seer through, and the pointy half hits the snow. He sits there in the white, watching the dog shaking and tearing into the length of metal shaft, and for a moment the haze descends, there is only darkness, and when it finally lifts, when the sky painfully fills his eyes, he pulls himself to his feet and the remaining three metal legs gracelessly carry him to a sheet of silver that seems to hang in the nether, bleeding beneath a red sun.
Banks of snow-encrusted earth hug this sheet of reddened silver that refracts the deepening sunset. Beams of gold and pink stretch across its surface, his pale reflection caught in the prism as he turns in its centre, the dog standing at the edge. Through the thin weaving of trees that bright light flashes through, hitting the magenta of his eyes: paling them in ghostly fuchsia.
He brings a boot heel back slightly, feeling the solidness of the ice, and how his boots slide over it.
Sheets of snow fall silently around him, the crimson of his uniform plainly noticeable in the white-swept and ivory sculptured hills behind his thin and willowy form.
Lean and tall, his form emerges, the lens of his glasses filling with the red of the sinking sun. The torch held in one hand winks back, its beam cutting straight into his eyes.
He takes another step away, and raises his PAK legs, the one torn through the middle bleeding discharges of bright, leaping pink.
His exposed skin burns, with blisters steaming on his neck and cheeks. He doesn't feel it.
Gravity pulls on him, his breath catching in his chest.
The distance between them does little to ameliorate the twisting, turning inside.
The man gestures with the heavy flashlight, the dog barks.
His antennae independently flicker beneath the touch and caress of the snow as it falls on their thin and delicate membranes.
The sunset throws fire into the sky, and the beauty of it flashes into his eyes. He takes a step towards it, he can feel the crunch of ice underfoot, and he is taken to the edge, out of the simulation, and the ache is all there is.
The ice cracks and he is falling, his only thought: I don't want to die before the water closes over him. He sinks, the darkness takes hold, he screams, and bubbles burst out of his throat to a surface he cannot reach.
His hands claw for the shimmering, fading light as he is carried down, darkness closes, his legs uselessly kick and thrash but the weight of the PAK takes him further and further down.
A pale human hand emerges from the dark and stretches for him.
Beyond the pain, something registers, deep down, but he doesn't know what it is.