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Two posts in one night! Goodness. :)
I'm a terrible person for making this take so long, but i'm so happy that people are sticking with it. I'm slooooowly writing charity auction fics, as well, haven't forgotten those!
And again, and as always, thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkhavens for the beta! And Snow for the once-over and approval. :)
Also at AO3.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. ‘Kubla Kahn’ - by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“It’s been three weeks,” Jared said, and Doc just looked at him, her hair askew under a pair of safety goggles, her lab coat crumpled and three sizes too large. The scanner glasses caught the glare of her computer screens, blue-white rectangles that for a moment obscured her eyes, making her seem blind.
“You guys said- You said you knew what was going on with him. You said you could fix it, that he could fix…. That this was going to be our ticket out of the Company.”
Doc stared at him a moment longer and then sighed, her narrow shoulders slumping. “We can. He can. And we will. It’s just...not that easy. It’s pretty damn hard, really.”
Jared rubbed his hand back through his hair, huffing and Doc rolled her eyes.
“Look, okay….” She sat up a little straighter on the stool she was perched on, her elbow knocking into a rack of tubes, making them chime faintly against each other. She grimaced and pushed them a little further away, out of the line of fire. “Right now, his ‘net is working, which it shouldn’t be. When they muster Angels out, they do a purge, and they inject this...kill virus. It turns off the ‘net. The net’s a living thing, it’s not a machine, it’s not circuity, it’s not even nanobots, or, it is, but...it’s organic, and it grows. If the Company never made those kill-switches and checks and the virus, your ‘net would grow through your whole body. It would replace some things, it would just become...you.”
“Yeah, okay. So - you said his ‘net isn’t off. The virus or whatever didn’t work. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, it’s damaged. Badly. It came back online when he did. He tried to kill himself when he was mustering out - twice, at least. And he almost managed it. They had to put him in a coma, blast him with immunosuppressors and generation bacteria and pretty much everything they could throw at him. Because his ‘net was down. It went...dormant. Suspended, kind of like him.”
Doc put a hand up to rub at her head and got her fingers tangled in the goggles. She slid them off and tossed them down, ran her fingers back through her hair, scrubbing hard, like she was trying to scrub her brain awake. “But then he’d come back - they’d wake him up - and his ‘net would wake up, too. And the kill-virus, it’s still in there. It’s damaged from all the resets, it got fragmented by the comas and the generation bacteria, but it’s still there, just...waiting. And every time his ‘net heals itself to a certain level of...of…. “ - Doc waved her hand around - “of sentience, it runs head-on into the kill-virus, and it goes back down. That’s why Jensen keeps swinging between kind-of okay and really, really bad.”
“Okay, so, so what now? What are you-? How can you-?”
“Jared, “ Doc said, and Jared stopped, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “His ‘net’s too entwined in him to ever get it out, and it’s changed him. He’s generating it now. The kill-virus is just too good - it targets exactly the right spots, every time, it’s designed to do what it’s doing. So we have to kill all of it. And all the bits of the ‘net it’s infected. Everything.”
“But - you’ll kill Jensen.”
“No - no, we won’t. We can keep him alive, and he’ll regenerate the net. We’ve seen it happen, in his blood, in tissue samples. It works. It’s just the virus is too good; it’s sneaky and it’s fast. So we have to make him sick.”
“He’s already sick! He’s dying from all-” Jared flung his hands up, furious. “From all this crap you’re putting him through! Have you looked at him lately? How is making him more sick going to help?”
“I know it seems crazy!” Doc snapped, and then sighed, rubbing at her eyes for a moment, under the scanner glasses. “ We basically have to take him back to zero. It’s called a cytokine storm. We flood his system with cytotoxic cells - machrophages - which will eat every bit of the kill-switch, and the infected ‘net - everything. Then we shut it down, and he regenerates the ‘net. Only this time, it doesn’t have any kill-switch in it; it doesn’t have anything the company put in there to stop it. All that crap is gone and he’s got a clean ‘net. And once we’ve got a clean sample…. We can send it into anybody. They put cancer in the ‘net, all kinds of shit, different stuff for different people, experimenting, just…playing.” Doc stopped again, a furious, disgusted scowl twisting her features.
And Jared understood that, understood her fury at having this thing inside her that someone had deliberately crippled - poisoned. Just to keep it to themselves. Just for the greed of it.
“They’re trying to find...anything to keep it from doing what it’s capable of. Anything so they can hold all the cards. Angels nets are the closest to pure to begin with, they just build in addictions and trip wires and all that...conditioning shit. They’re getting close to their idea of perfect people. Perfect fucking dolls they can program. They got so close, with the Angels, the ArchAngels. We just need the pure stuff - the building blocks - and Jensen has them.”
Jared turned his shoulder to Doc, looking through the observation window at where Jensen lay, sleeping restlessly, so pale, and so thin, now - burned down to whipcord and bone. “I’m scared you’re going to kill him, Doc. He’s so- He’s so sick. And he doesn’t...he doesn’t even understand what’s going on, what you...what we are doing. He doesn’t even know.” Jensen’s gaunt, pleading face, the pathetic little bundle of junk he wouldn’t let out of his sight - it hurt every time Jared thought about. That that was all he had, all he was. Junkie dreams and junkie comfort, to hold a darkness as wide and as deep as the abyssal eternity they flew through.
“I know,” Doc said, soft. But Jared could hear the core of steel in her voice, the resolution. “I don’t think he’s clearly understood...anything...since he was a kid, Jared. After what happened on the Glorianna... He never really recovered from that. He’s never really been given choices. Even now - the ‘net, what they did - he can’t escape it. If we let him go right now, he’d go back to the drugs, and he’d be dead in a month. Sooner. It takes so much out of him, to regenerate. He can’t survive it much longer.”
Jared wiped furiously at his eyes and looked away from Jensen, reaching for that same core that he knew he himself had; the core that had propelled him off distant Kin-Gin, and into the company. The drive to live, above all else. “I know. I know. I just wish...it didn’t have to be so fucked up.”
“Hey, Jared.” Jo Two in the doorway, blinking in the light, back from some run or other, a smudge of what might be blood on his cheek. He held up a tiny titanium data tape, blue-silver glint. “Got something you might wanna see.”
They got it up and running on one of Doc’s scan processor computers, super-fast and elegant in its construction - way more computer than they needed, but nobody cared. It was the personnel file for the Glorianna, the one that listed the original crew. Jared had seen that before - a string of names and identity numbers, dates and dry facts. But this - this had pictures, and movies, goodbye messages, and the last words of the men and women who never expected to see their families or Old Earth again. Jo Two skipped through them, fingers swooping across the hologram keyboard, then stopped and hit ‘play’.
And Jared’s face...was on the screen. It was a younger Jared, one that had never been locked into an exoskeleton and fed through a tube, never felt his body losing cohesion and autonomy one nerve-cell at a time. He was a little thinner, hair a bit shorter, but it was the same grin, the same eyes, and Jared felt his heart stutter and then pound, fit to break his ribs. Sam Winchester printed underneath, with birth date and rank and job - PseudoWomb technician - and a string of designations, of degrees and ranks earned.
But Jared ignored it all to watch his doppelganger talk: saying hello, saying goodbye, laying out his hopes and dreams and fears in eight and a half hurried, stuttering minutes. He looked terrified, and elated, and sad, and Jared couldn’t breathe.
“It says he died. Whatever did the main damage to the ship, the fire? He was caught in it. He- He died from his burns the same day. It says his last words were about...Jensen,” Jo Two said, and Jared took in a sharp, aching breath.
“Whu-what?”
“Jensen found him, wounded. Burned. Scared the crap out of him. He ran away; he was fucking seven, hell, who wouldn’t? This- Sam, he told the attending to find Jensen and tell him...he- It’s on tape.” Jo Two tapped the screen and another window opened. That same face, but...not. Bandaged, swollen, blackness creeping from the edges of the burn wrap, a trach tube and wires and blood seeping through. One eye, no hair... Horrible.
But he was talking, halting and careful, his voice ruined by smoke and fire, slurred with drugs.
”Hey, Je-en.” A series of short, panting breaths, and someone hovering in the background, their voice concerned, urgent. ”I’sss’oo...kay. Jen. Not..maa-ad at...oo. You...take th’con f’me, kay? ‘Til I...guh...ge’ bet...ter….” A wash of lights, a scream of monitors, and Jo Two closed the window.
“Fuck, fuck, fucking hell,” Jared muttered, and stormed out.
And came back, half an hour later, because he had to be there for Jensen. Had to be.
The ‘storm’ was already on him, the fever making Jensen’s eyes glassy and his skin flushed, the color hectic against the grey pallor that had slowly taken over during the last three weeks. He blinked in confusion at the drinking wand Jared was holding, and then back up at Jared.
“I th-thought...thought you….”
“I’m right here, Jens...Jen. I’m here. You need to drink this, okay?”
Jensen looked at the wand again and turned his head a little, disregarding it. His lips were dry and split, old blood and new staining the cracks in the skin. “I don’t...want it.”
“Damnit,” Jared muttered, and hooked it back into its clip on the tank a little too hard, his hand shaking. “Jensen-”
“I gotta...g-go,” Jensen muttered, moving in a strange, slow-motion way, as if he were swimming through syrup. “I need t-to...find Jin-Jinx. Mu..Morgan’ll...know, I need - need t-to-”
“They’re not here, Jensen. They’re - they’re on the ship. They’re gone.”
Jensen blinked again, slow, and then, to Jared’s horror, a tear slipped from the corner of his eye and trickled down, running away into the tangled hair at Jensen’s temple.
“But they...can’t leave m-me. They- I’m an ArchANGEL. I’m Quemeul.” Jensen sobbed in a breath, one thin hand coming up to wipe at his eyes. “They can’t just...leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Jared said, and Jensen put his arm over his face and turned away, tuning Jared out. After a little while, Jared got up and left, too keyed up to sit, too pissed, and too scared. He had to move - do something - so he went to get food for the Jo boys and Doc and himself; just walked the concourse for little while, trying to get his mind to stop racing and his muscles to unknot. Too much information. The tapes of Sam - his life and his dreams, his death - playing on a loop in his head, words almost two hundred years old; and all Doc’s new stuff, about the ‘net and the ‘storm’ and everything that could follow, everything they were hoping for. All of it riding on a drug-addicted, ex-felon, ex-ANGEL who was clinging to life and sanity by the thinnest of fraying threads.
He walked until his feet hurt and his legs felt like lead, until his head was pounding and his mouth was dry, food forgotten, just movemovemove until he could stop thinking for a while. And then he headed back down.
When he got there, the room was a shambles, Jo One had a black eye, and Jensen was gone.
Part <a href="http://tabaqui.dreamwidth.org/182846.html</a>ten.
I'm a terrible person for making this take so long, but i'm so happy that people are sticking with it. I'm slooooowly writing charity auction fics, as well, haven't forgotten those!
And again, and as always, thank you,
darkhavens for the beta! And Snow for the once-over and approval. :)Also at AO3.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. ‘Kubla Kahn’ - by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“It’s been three weeks,” Jared said, and Doc just looked at him, her hair askew under a pair of safety goggles, her lab coat crumpled and three sizes too large. The scanner glasses caught the glare of her computer screens, blue-white rectangles that for a moment obscured her eyes, making her seem blind.
“You guys said- You said you knew what was going on with him. You said you could fix it, that he could fix…. That this was going to be our ticket out of the Company.”
Doc stared at him a moment longer and then sighed, her narrow shoulders slumping. “We can. He can. And we will. It’s just...not that easy. It’s pretty damn hard, really.”
Jared rubbed his hand back through his hair, huffing and Doc rolled her eyes.
“Look, okay….” She sat up a little straighter on the stool she was perched on, her elbow knocking into a rack of tubes, making them chime faintly against each other. She grimaced and pushed them a little further away, out of the line of fire. “Right now, his ‘net is working, which it shouldn’t be. When they muster Angels out, they do a purge, and they inject this...kill virus. It turns off the ‘net. The net’s a living thing, it’s not a machine, it’s not circuity, it’s not even nanobots, or, it is, but...it’s organic, and it grows. If the Company never made those kill-switches and checks and the virus, your ‘net would grow through your whole body. It would replace some things, it would just become...you.”
“Yeah, okay. So - you said his ‘net isn’t off. The virus or whatever didn’t work. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, it’s damaged. Badly. It came back online when he did. He tried to kill himself when he was mustering out - twice, at least. And he almost managed it. They had to put him in a coma, blast him with immunosuppressors and generation bacteria and pretty much everything they could throw at him. Because his ‘net was down. It went...dormant. Suspended, kind of like him.”
Doc put a hand up to rub at her head and got her fingers tangled in the goggles. She slid them off and tossed them down, ran her fingers back through her hair, scrubbing hard, like she was trying to scrub her brain awake. “But then he’d come back - they’d wake him up - and his ‘net would wake up, too. And the kill-virus, it’s still in there. It’s damaged from all the resets, it got fragmented by the comas and the generation bacteria, but it’s still there, just...waiting. And every time his ‘net heals itself to a certain level of...of…. “ - Doc waved her hand around - “of sentience, it runs head-on into the kill-virus, and it goes back down. That’s why Jensen keeps swinging between kind-of okay and really, really bad.”
“Okay, so, so what now? What are you-? How can you-?”
“Jared, “ Doc said, and Jared stopped, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “His ‘net’s too entwined in him to ever get it out, and it’s changed him. He’s generating it now. The kill-virus is just too good - it targets exactly the right spots, every time, it’s designed to do what it’s doing. So we have to kill all of it. And all the bits of the ‘net it’s infected. Everything.”
“But - you’ll kill Jensen.”
“No - no, we won’t. We can keep him alive, and he’ll regenerate the net. We’ve seen it happen, in his blood, in tissue samples. It works. It’s just the virus is too good; it’s sneaky and it’s fast. So we have to make him sick.”
“He’s already sick! He’s dying from all-” Jared flung his hands up, furious. “From all this crap you’re putting him through! Have you looked at him lately? How is making him more sick going to help?”
“I know it seems crazy!” Doc snapped, and then sighed, rubbing at her eyes for a moment, under the scanner glasses. “ We basically have to take him back to zero. It’s called a cytokine storm. We flood his system with cytotoxic cells - machrophages - which will eat every bit of the kill-switch, and the infected ‘net - everything. Then we shut it down, and he regenerates the ‘net. Only this time, it doesn’t have any kill-switch in it; it doesn’t have anything the company put in there to stop it. All that crap is gone and he’s got a clean ‘net. And once we’ve got a clean sample…. We can send it into anybody. They put cancer in the ‘net, all kinds of shit, different stuff for different people, experimenting, just…playing.” Doc stopped again, a furious, disgusted scowl twisting her features.
And Jared understood that, understood her fury at having this thing inside her that someone had deliberately crippled - poisoned. Just to keep it to themselves. Just for the greed of it.
“They’re trying to find...anything to keep it from doing what it’s capable of. Anything so they can hold all the cards. Angels nets are the closest to pure to begin with, they just build in addictions and trip wires and all that...conditioning shit. They’re getting close to their idea of perfect people. Perfect fucking dolls they can program. They got so close, with the Angels, the ArchAngels. We just need the pure stuff - the building blocks - and Jensen has them.”
Jared turned his shoulder to Doc, looking through the observation window at where Jensen lay, sleeping restlessly, so pale, and so thin, now - burned down to whipcord and bone. “I’m scared you’re going to kill him, Doc. He’s so- He’s so sick. And he doesn’t...he doesn’t even understand what’s going on, what you...what we are doing. He doesn’t even know.” Jensen’s gaunt, pleading face, the pathetic little bundle of junk he wouldn’t let out of his sight - it hurt every time Jared thought about. That that was all he had, all he was. Junkie dreams and junkie comfort, to hold a darkness as wide and as deep as the abyssal eternity they flew through.
“I know,” Doc said, soft. But Jared could hear the core of steel in her voice, the resolution. “I don’t think he’s clearly understood...anything...since he was a kid, Jared. After what happened on the Glorianna... He never really recovered from that. He’s never really been given choices. Even now - the ‘net, what they did - he can’t escape it. If we let him go right now, he’d go back to the drugs, and he’d be dead in a month. Sooner. It takes so much out of him, to regenerate. He can’t survive it much longer.”
Jared wiped furiously at his eyes and looked away from Jensen, reaching for that same core that he knew he himself had; the core that had propelled him off distant Kin-Gin, and into the company. The drive to live, above all else. “I know. I know. I just wish...it didn’t have to be so fucked up.”
“Hey, Jared.” Jo Two in the doorway, blinking in the light, back from some run or other, a smudge of what might be blood on his cheek. He held up a tiny titanium data tape, blue-silver glint. “Got something you might wanna see.”
They got it up and running on one of Doc’s scan processor computers, super-fast and elegant in its construction - way more computer than they needed, but nobody cared. It was the personnel file for the Glorianna, the one that listed the original crew. Jared had seen that before - a string of names and identity numbers, dates and dry facts. But this - this had pictures, and movies, goodbye messages, and the last words of the men and women who never expected to see their families or Old Earth again. Jo Two skipped through them, fingers swooping across the hologram keyboard, then stopped and hit ‘play’.
And Jared’s face...was on the screen. It was a younger Jared, one that had never been locked into an exoskeleton and fed through a tube, never felt his body losing cohesion and autonomy one nerve-cell at a time. He was a little thinner, hair a bit shorter, but it was the same grin, the same eyes, and Jared felt his heart stutter and then pound, fit to break his ribs. Sam Winchester printed underneath, with birth date and rank and job - PseudoWomb technician - and a string of designations, of degrees and ranks earned.
But Jared ignored it all to watch his doppelganger talk: saying hello, saying goodbye, laying out his hopes and dreams and fears in eight and a half hurried, stuttering minutes. He looked terrified, and elated, and sad, and Jared couldn’t breathe.
“It says he died. Whatever did the main damage to the ship, the fire? He was caught in it. He- He died from his burns the same day. It says his last words were about...Jensen,” Jo Two said, and Jared took in a sharp, aching breath.
“Whu-what?”
“Jensen found him, wounded. Burned. Scared the crap out of him. He ran away; he was fucking seven, hell, who wouldn’t? This- Sam, he told the attending to find Jensen and tell him...he- It’s on tape.” Jo Two tapped the screen and another window opened. That same face, but...not. Bandaged, swollen, blackness creeping from the edges of the burn wrap, a trach tube and wires and blood seeping through. One eye, no hair... Horrible.
But he was talking, halting and careful, his voice ruined by smoke and fire, slurred with drugs.
”Hey, Je-en.” A series of short, panting breaths, and someone hovering in the background, their voice concerned, urgent. ”I’sss’oo...kay. Jen. Not..maa-ad at...oo. You...take th’con f’me, kay? ‘Til I...guh...ge’ bet...ter….” A wash of lights, a scream of monitors, and Jo Two closed the window.
“Fuck, fuck, fucking hell,” Jared muttered, and stormed out.
And came back, half an hour later, because he had to be there for Jensen. Had to be.
The ‘storm’ was already on him, the fever making Jensen’s eyes glassy and his skin flushed, the color hectic against the grey pallor that had slowly taken over during the last three weeks. He blinked in confusion at the drinking wand Jared was holding, and then back up at Jared.
“I th-thought...thought you….”
“I’m right here, Jens...Jen. I’m here. You need to drink this, okay?”
Jensen looked at the wand again and turned his head a little, disregarding it. His lips were dry and split, old blood and new staining the cracks in the skin. “I don’t...want it.”
“Damnit,” Jared muttered, and hooked it back into its clip on the tank a little too hard, his hand shaking. “Jensen-”
“I gotta...g-go,” Jensen muttered, moving in a strange, slow-motion way, as if he were swimming through syrup. “I need t-to...find Jin-Jinx. Mu..Morgan’ll...know, I need - need t-to-”
“They’re not here, Jensen. They’re - they’re on the ship. They’re gone.”
Jensen blinked again, slow, and then, to Jared’s horror, a tear slipped from the corner of his eye and trickled down, running away into the tangled hair at Jensen’s temple.
“But they...can’t leave m-me. They- I’m an ArchANGEL. I’m Quemeul.” Jensen sobbed in a breath, one thin hand coming up to wipe at his eyes. “They can’t just...leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Jared said, and Jensen put his arm over his face and turned away, tuning Jared out. After a little while, Jared got up and left, too keyed up to sit, too pissed, and too scared. He had to move - do something - so he went to get food for the Jo boys and Doc and himself; just walked the concourse for little while, trying to get his mind to stop racing and his muscles to unknot. Too much information. The tapes of Sam - his life and his dreams, his death - playing on a loop in his head, words almost two hundred years old; and all Doc’s new stuff, about the ‘net and the ‘storm’ and everything that could follow, everything they were hoping for. All of it riding on a drug-addicted, ex-felon, ex-ANGEL who was clinging to life and sanity by the thinnest of fraying threads.
He walked until his feet hurt and his legs felt like lead, until his head was pounding and his mouth was dry, food forgotten, just movemovemove until he could stop thinking for a while. And then he headed back down.
When he got there, the room was a shambles, Jo One had a black eye, and Jensen was gone.
Part <a href="http://tabaqui.dreamwidth.org/182846.html</a>ten.
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