(A/N)- Last Whumptober fic for the month and oh hey more Aldnoah fix fic!
Broken record time, the AU changes for this particular series are that Slaine joined the Earth forces in Episode 7 instead of getting shot down so he was with Asseylum and the strike team for the assault on Saazbaum's landing castle, and the confrontation inside the castle went down quite differently leading to Saazbaum capturing Inaho and bringing him back with him to the moon base and Slaine and Asseylum escaping with the Earth resistance.
As I mentioned before, this is not a nice time for Inaho. Warnings for references to torture, unwanted surgical body modification, and um... eye scream/eye injury. You'll see.
Prompts used: No. 14 Die A Hero Or Live Long Enough To Become A Villain: Desperate Measures/Failed Escape/"I'll be right behind you"
Disclaimer: Just two changes, just just TWO CHANGES please give me the series and let me fix it I swear I can do it. *cries*
Table Conversation
Inaho stared down at the plate of food in front of him. Chicken breast, in a red tomato sauce, with cut pieces of vegetables on the side. A very simple meal, arranged pleasantly on fine porcelain dishes.
Whatever he had been expecting when the guards pulled him from his cell, unwound the bandages from his left eye and dragged him up here, it had not been this.
Inaho glanced around the room, slightly dazed, more than a little confused. The room was pristine, every surface polished. There was plaster molding decorating the walls, giving the room a fancy, aristocratic look. Everything was clean and well-lit, starkly different from the... lab? torture room? that he'd been visiting most of his days and the darkened cell he was kept in otherwise.
Even his pilot's uniform, though still tattered, had been washed, the blood meticulously cleaned out of it before being given back to him to change into.
Inaho fidgeted, his hands curled into fists on his thighs. Saazbaum sat at the head of the long white dining table centerpiecing the room, knife and fork clinking against the plate as he enjoyed his own meal.
The boy looked down at the plate again. Almost immediately text and a wire display of the food appeared in front of his vision, on the left side, detailing its nutritional properties, ingredients and—
Inaho shut his eyes tightly. The display vanished, but the bionic implant throbbed in its socket, still active. Inaho carefully opened his eyes back up, and was relieved when the implant did not pop up the text again. He didn't know how to turn that off. He wasn't sure it did turn off. Its function was still a mystery. Thus far all Inaho could glean was that it was designed to help him collect, process, and analyze data. A lot of data.
He knew his friends had joked about him being a supercomputer sometimes but this was too much. Too much to sort through, too much to filter out that was irrelevant. It made his head hurt.
"Nothing to say, little pilot? You're awfully quiet down there," Saazbaum spoke up unexpectedly, making Inaho startle a little.
He looked up. Saazbaum had a thin smile on his face, and an amused glint behind his eyes. Unsettling, Inaho thought. Far too pleasant.
His eye began immediately measuring the count's heartbeat, vocal inflection, and sweat gland production in a little digital display across his left eye. Inaho's mouth firmed.
Stop that, he wanted to growl in irritation, but he couldn't halt the implant from conducting its analysis.
"If you're worried about the food, it is not poisoned," Saazbaum assured him, seemingly oblivious.
Nothing changed about the measurements displayed in his field of vision. Inaho stared at the flickering numbers, slowly piecing it together in his mind. It took a moment.
"You're telling the truth," he said blankly.
The eerie, too-pleasant smile widened, sharp with a sneering edge. "Have I ever lied to you?" Saazbaum asked.
Inaho broke eye contact, uncomfortable. No. The man hadn't. Even while overseeing Inaho's torture he had kept every promise he'd made, never tried to deceive him.
"Well?"
Inaho bit his lip, giving the minutest shake of his head. He hoped that would be enough response to satisfy the count, because it seemed particularly hard for words to find their way to his mouth right now. The silence between them made him anxious, a thin wire of noise scraping up and down his nerves.
The longer the silence dragged out, the more uncomfortable and confused Inaho became. This simple but pleasant dinner was becoming a burning question circling his mind. He didn't understand why Saazbaum had had his eye replaced with this... thing, why he seemed so satisfied now, why he'd had Inaho brought up here instead of...
He opened his mouth a few times, ramping up to speak and then holding back until it couldn't be stalled anymore.
The words made it past his mouth.
"...Why am I here?" he asked.
Saazbaum didn't even look up from slicing his chicken. "I should think that would be obvious. We are having dinner," he said. Haughty eyes glanced up, sneer curled a little tighter at the corner of his mouth. "Don't tell me you don't miss the delicacies of your homeworld," he said.
Inaho swallowed dryly, looking with dread at his food. He wasn't sure he could eat, the memory of that stark cold lab table and the ominously descending polearm, the horrible knifelike pinprick of blind white pain that tore shrieks of agony from him, seeing his eye speared on the tip of that needle before he—mercifully—passed out from the pain... it was lingering in his thoughts, making bile churn dully in his stomach.
Clawing for a distraction, he stared into the red sauce, mentally tallying up the cost of the ingredients. It was cheap, freezer safe chicken, hardly a delicacy. His eye calculated the current market value.
"507.86 yen," he blurted.
"That means absolutely nothing to me," Saazbaum snapped, eyes flashing with irritation, dropping his knife to the side of the plate with an aggravated metal clatter!
Inaho flinched, shoulders curling in. His pulse pricked up, flashes of memory threatening on the edges of vision. Saazbaum never liked irrelevant answers. Inaho braced for his retaliation. He was wiping his hands off with the cloth napkin now and Inaho's throat closed with tension, watching him with tightly-wound apprehension.
The count seemingly got over his anger, changing the subject.
"Did you know you can't get this kind of food on Vers?" he asked. Inaho didn't reply, staring quietly, so he continued. "Our main crops are chlorella and krill. My vassals would kill to eat food like this and Terra so offhandedly sends it as relief supplies," he said in disgust. The napkin was folded and laid down next to the plate. Saazbaum picked up his fork again, not even looking at Inaho now, burning holes at his food. "We are too busy scrounging for food to develop any kind of real culture of our own. Instead we are stuck in a stagnant feudal system centered around Aldnoah and those lucky enough to wield it."
Inaho's eye picked up on the tight emotion in Saazbaum's words. There was some kind of deep-seated anger behind this rant, he could tell, and while grateful that it wasn't aimed at him for once, it still made his breath hitch, made the fight or flight instincts inside him jostle wildly and flood him slowly with adrenaline.
Saazbaum's features contorting in rage, his hand snapping across Inaho's face at another delirious non-answer...
"But rather than use their power to help their people," Saazbaum went on, pulling Inaho from the memory, "the royal family whipped the knights into a jealous frenzy and sent them against Earth, fifteen years ago. They chose war to maintain order on Vers," he said, bitterly. His eyes finally pulled up from the plate, a cold fury in their depths. "And then... Heaven's Fall came about as a result and my betrothed, Orlane, lost her life!"
Inaho sat very still, hardly daring to even breathe too loudly. Thin inhales went through his nose, his eyes fixed open and alert.
Saazbaum casually flicked his fork, spearing a bit of cooked tomato. "That is why I must finish the task," he concluded, voice neutral but firm, like one committing to unpleasant but necessary work. "Take Earth and its bounty, increase the power of Vers... and then have my revenge on the royal bloodline for their crimes."
The last part sent a freezing shiver down Inaho's spine, and his breath shortened once again. His fisted hands tightened on his thighs, nails digging into the palms.
Seylum.
He thought of the count's murderous wrath as he'd tried to shoot the princess back on the landing castle, a rage that was echoed in his outburst just now. So it was revenge the man was after, atonement for his lost love. It made sense on the surface level but Inaho was struggling to comprehend it, the man responsible for Heaven's Fall was already long dead and Seylum was—she was innocent, she hadn't done anything, why would—why would he—?
Inaho remembered the devastated look in her eyes as she clung to a dying Slaine, hanging awkwardly half-off her, the reluctance on her face as she looked back and forth between them, paralyzed by Saazbaum's ultimatum.
"I'll be right behind you," he'd assured her, even though he couldn't even stand and blood was dripping into his eyes and his head hurt terribly.
And still she'd hesitated, agony in those innocent green eyes.
How could anyone want to hurt her, just because of who her family was? Because of what her father had done when she was too young to even remember?
Inaho felt sick. The questions swirled around inside his head with no answers, the biggest one of all still burning in the center of his mind. Why was he here? Why was he sitting down at this fake semblance of a polite dinner? Why was Saazbaum telling him this?
"Still nothing to say?" The count's voice drifted from the end of the table, lightly sneering. "No questions to ask, to satisfy your curiosity?" Saazbaum's lips quirked, that too-sharp smile back again. "Have you already figured it out, then? What I'm after? Why I took you with me when we escaped the landing castle and have suffered your Terran presence, these past months?"
No, Inaho wanted to say, I don't understand. Saazbaum was looking at him like he expected Inaho to answer, and he was trying to speak but he couldn't, words refused to come, his throat was closed, and the longer the minute stretched out the more panicked Inaho became.
Say something, say something, beat the pulse inside his ears. Think, he told himself. What did Saazbaum want? What did he stand to gain? The first... several... rounds of torture had been for information. About Asseylum, where she was, where she might flee to. About the UEF, about their military kataphrakts.
His left eye swarmed his vision with overlapping windows as he thought it, making him flinch. Inaho watched as the display brought up dozens of images, pictures of the princess, of Earth, his school, Yuki. They looked like stillframe screencaps of his own memories, digitized and apparently stored in the RAM of his bionic eye for easy recall.
A slowly dawning realization crept over him.
Unbidden, his eye brought up its own specs. Inaho's horror grew. A powerful quantum processor. Neural interfacing. Camera recording. Internal data storage. An uplink that granted remote access.
Me, he realized. He gains me.
His knowledge. His memories. His thoughts. His carefully kept secrets.
His entire mind.
A sound left him, breathless like he'd been punched. Saazbaum shifted back in his seat with a satisfied smirk—apparently that was the reaction he'd been hoping for.
"Ah, see. I knew you'd puzzle it out." The knife descended into his chicken. "It's a remarkable device, really. All that time you wasted protecting your little Terran secrets?" A cruel gleam was in his eyes. "Now I can just go in—" He sawed the meat cleanly, straight through. "—and rip them out of your head." He chuckled, a low, ominous sound. "Who knows what else I'll find in there? Battle tactics. Strategies. Solutions to problems I hadn't considered."
Inaho gaped in horror and shock and denial and open fear. Wordless sirens screeched inside the boy's head; alarmed, he began looking around the room for exits. The only door seemed to be the one he'd come through. He made a catalogue of potential weapons—the knife next to his own plate, a brass candelabra on a side table—a paltry selection but he'd have to make do. Escape was now the most paramount importance, overriding everything else, every other instinct and fear inside him. Panic sounded throughout his head and he forced it into something more manageable as his eye spewed data wildly.
The distance to the door was suboptimal. Saazbaum was busy chewing his food, Inaho's brief scan off him reading as pleased and content. Did the count still have a firearm on his person?
Inaho took a peek with his new eye. No, he didn't.
The knife then.
Inaho grabbed it with a noisy clatter, on his feet and stabbing it towards Saazbaum's face in an instant.
His forward motion was arrested as Saazbaum nonchalantly caught the knife with one bare hand. Inaho gaped, eyes widening in shock. The blade dug into the man's palm, cutting into flesh and drawing blood that dripped down his wrist, but he paid it as much thought as if it was simply a mere annoyance.
The man's eyes flicked up to meet Inaho's wide-open ones and his expression was utterly chilling.
"What was your plan after killing me?" he asked calmly.
He shoved Inaho back by that single hand holding the blade, and Inaho stumbled, bumping into his own chair.
"You would still have to fight your way through the moon base, past hundreds of Versian soldiers and counts," Saazbaum pointed out, wiping off his bloody hand with the napkin and standing to his feet, intimidatingly tall. "Not all of whom are as forgiving or see as much use for you as I do," he said, a threatening inflection emphasizing his words.
Bewildered, Inaho stood there a moment, right hand still tightly gripped around his knife, trembling. His mind was as paralyzed with fear as his body for a moment, fighting to think.
Saazbaum was right. Inaho didn't know his way around the base. He didn't know its size or layout. He didn't know how many enemies there were between him and potential escape. Even as he glanced towards the door, his eye bringing up a thermal scan of the guards outside, he calculated his chances of success at a very low margin. But he had to do something. He couldn't let Saazbaum—He couldn't let him—Yuki and Inko and the Lieutenant and—
He flinched sharply as Saazbaum stepped out from the head of the table, the knife in his hand raising, warding the man off.
"Why don't you just put that down, hmm?" the man said, tone almost soothing, parental.
Terror tightened his throat. Inaho squeezed the knife, mind flying through options.
His stomach clenched but he steeled himself.
He turned the knife around and aimed it for his left eye, stabbing.
Saazbaum moved alarmingly fast, hand grabbing and gripping around Inaho's right wrist and freezing the knife an inch from his tear ducts. Inaho's fist shook with strain, fighting the man's strength.
The knife was forced back. Saazbaum twisted his wrist down and reached with his other hand to shove at Inaho's right shoulder.
Inaho was turned around, pushed smack into the edge of the table and then slammed face-first into its surface and pinned there, Saazbaum's hand heavy on the back of his neck, the grip on his wrist shifting to yank his arm harshly behind his back.
"Ah-nngh!" he cried shortly, teeth and eyes clenching from the pressure and strain.
Saazbaum crushed his trapped wrist until his fingers loosened around the knife.
It slid out of his hand, off his back and dropped somewhere, clattering noisily. Inaho felt numb as he heard it fall, just trying to breathe past the pain.
"That implant is expensive," Saazbaum scolded. "You won't get rid of it that easily, boy." He leaned down, all his weight on Inaho's back, breath whispering through the back of his hair. "It's wired into your brain."
Inaho shook with barely-contained fear. His eyes burned when he opened them, the bionic implant pinching with his expression, bulky and awkward and uncomfortable and Get it out, please please, get it out, his mind begged.
"You should be proud," Saazbaum was saying, voice lighter. "You'll be the first Versian soldier of your kind."
Denial loosed his tongue, pulled the block out of his lungs with a shudder.
"I won't help you hurt Asseylum," he gasped out.
"You'll do as I say," Saazbaum growled, hand on his neck pressing down again, "if you ever hope to have a prayer of seeing your beloved Terra again."
Saazbaum pulled him up, barking a command towards the door.
"Enter!"
The guards came in, quickly moving to their lord's side to take Inaho, who struggled, pulling this way and that until his arms were forced behind him, wrists latched in steel handcuffs.
"Take him back to his cell," Saazbaum ordered. His sharp, too-pleasant smile was needle-thin and wirey, cruel with self-satisfaction. "Make sure he doesn't do anything drastic."
Inaho choked on his own breath as he was led away, digging in his heels and kicking, panic in every frantic futile motion, dread beginning to congeal into a solid mass that pulled his limbs down limply after a while.
And all that time his eye scanned and analyzed and calculated with neutral indifference.
(A/N)- Yeah things don't get better for Inaho for a while, I'm sorry. Anyway, hope you enjoyed dear readers!