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Chapter 5 – Trial and Error

"I will fucking destroy it, do you hear me?" The blonde boy was aimlessly weaving his way around the clearing, acting out his aggression with the arm of his that still worked. The other hung uselessly against his side, flapping against his hip as if to punctuate how far his statements were from coming true.

He'd been going on like that for hours, snarling and carrying on at length about how he was the one who mattered and how dare it and frankly it all got a little bit old. It was obvious he'd never seen anything like this before. It was obvious he was terrified, trying to work out his anger on something that wouldn't push back, lashing out to heal his wounded pride.

He'd tried me first, grabbing the front of my shirt and hurling insults into my face until I could feel spit splashing against it. He stopped before long, when I didn't react at all. I was focused on other things. I've never seen anything like this either, and I'm honest enough to tell you when I'm afraid.

My hands were shaking. I'd died, you see, and that wasn't such a bad thing in my shoes. I wasn't expecting to be alive afterwards, much less somewhere else. I wasn't expecting to run for the life I thought I didn't want, to see things I'd never dreamed of, that if I did I'd have woken up screaming, but, well.

Life throws these curveballs at you sometimes.

Hi. I'm Alex Requin, and I don't like being fucked with.

I was focused now. I opened my mouth and saw the world, saw this impotent ass as what he was; a tool, and nothing more. He saw me, too, locked onto my eyes as I looked upwards and was already stomping towards me, hands curled into a fist and a half. I met his gaze with a grin.

"Oh look, he's back with us. Mister absolutely fucking useless deigned to join us again. What'cha gonna do now, bitch? I don't even see the girl, so you can't hit on her, what else do you even do? Just stand there?" The scorn dripped from him, but I smiled—No, that was too nice a word for what I did. I bared my teeth.

"What I'm going to do is find those things and break parts off until they scream." I kept grinning, but his expression went wary. He didn't like not being on top, but I could see his calculating eyes, and soon his smile matched mine.

"Alright. Good ol' revenge, I can live with that. You're gonna have to learn some things first, though. About this place works. How you survive."

I could see how much it hurt him to bite back his pride, but I could use what he knew. It wouldn't hurt to suck it up and feed his ego for a few days. I nodded, extending a hand, hoping I made it look good enough, hoping he saw what he wanted to see. He grasped it, looking over me, judging, and smiled again before letting his hand drop and, a moment later, taking a swing at my face with all his strength.

I could have stopped it. I thought I'd figured out the knack, the kind of—it wasn't quite a feeling, more like a place you had to push in your mind, the place I'd pushed when I thought I'd die in the night and again with the monster. I could have called it, the cold thing in the air with teeth, and stopped him. It wouldn't even have been a fight. But I let him take the shot. I cried out and let the blow knock me back to the ground. He laughed, spouting off some absurd justification, and extended a hand to help me up again.

It was fine. He could have this moment. He can be the big man for now, for a few hours, for a day or two, until I don't need him anymore.

And then it'll all be mine.

I thought I was going mad the first time I saw it. Taichi had just ordered his dinosaur to immolate another one of their pawns, and this time I watched. I don't know why I didn't watch before. Fear? I thought I was beyond that, there've been times... We've all faced death, now. We're all still here. Was I just squeamish?

This time I watched.

I know what I was expecting. I've studied anatomy. I'm not stupid, even if I am a child. There should have been bones. There should have been ash. Charred blood, smoking chunks of skin and flesh, something worth the bile in my throat, the choked feeling in my lungs, but I steeled myself for nothing. The thing just flaked and peeled away into the sky. There was nothing left behind.

It happened again. And again. Every time we really fought one of them, every time we scored a true and decisive victory... Nothing left. Not even dust. It didn't matter how we killed them. It wasn't that we were using disintegration beams or anything, we weren't ripping molecules apart, they just weren't there anymore. It didn't happen to anything else. Trees were fine, they just burned or froze or broke apart. When one of those fireballs engulfed part of a building or a hill or a patch of desert instead of whatever thing was trying to kill us that day, it only left scorch marks. So... what was going on?

You... I don't know if anyone will ever read this but if you do—if you are out there days or months or years from now and judging who I am and what I've done—you have to understand that I wanted nothing more than to be a scientist. I thought that still mattered, then. I thought I might go back. I know better—We all do, we know so much more about why we're here, what we are, what this means—but then, I still thought my ambitions mattered. I was rigorous.

There were experiments.

I couldn't just forget. I knew too much about how the world was supposed to work to let it go that easily. My... my curiosity, I guess... took me to some dark places. I guess that's why, later on, I was so quick to give it up. As soon as I could get away, when Tai and the others were busy with some argument or complaining about how much their feet hurt or—I don't even remember anymore—I crept off and found some small smiling thing with big eyes and no fear and tore it apart just so I could watch it bleed.

And it did bleed! That was the thing! I was so shocked and excited that I almost ran to tell them before I remembered myself, remembered what it would look like, what I'd really done. I looked at its broken body and tried to feel some kind of shame but I couldn't. I'd made a discovery. It was important. That, then and now, is all I could feel.

And besides, it couldn't hurt to double-check.

Koushiro Izumi, Probably July
~

The yellow-and-white rectangle slid to the floor—was quickly retrieved and placed where it was accustomed, laid millimeter-perfect over the hole in the dust—as the servitors' attention faltered. The man in the wall cricked his neck with what little range of motion he had, his eyes still sore from staring even if they weren't quite human anymore.

He could stay like this for hours, sometimes, reliving the past.

He was still sure the things he had done had been right. It was harder to think, now, through the clacking buzzing susurrus that flowed through the missing parts of his mind, but enough was left. Enough of him worked to pretend to be whole.

He couldn't have told them. He'd learned and he couldn't have told them and it probably killed them but even then, even now, he thought it was better. The weight of it would have broken their minds.

He'd done right by them. He'd been entirely illogical. He'd let them die.

A/N: Terribly sorry, the second half of this was intended to be about twice as long and spell things out rather more explicitly, but in the interest of actually publishing something once in a while I'm cutting it short and sticking the rest into a future chapter or something. I've had the first half written since May and the italicized bit written for at least a month. Enough's enough, ever onward.

I can't right-align things here. This is very frustrating. It also isn't letting me line break things properly.

Oh, and yeah, I aten't dead.

~11/04/13