Archive of Our Own ^beta

The bars on the border between D-Corp’s Nest and Backstreets are run down and rotten, as is the trash spilling out of the back alleyways and into the streets. Gregor nudges his mask higher up on his face with his shoulder, his only useful hand stuffed in an oversized rubber glove, before he slings the bag full of garbage on his back into the nearest disposal unit. The machine counts its weight, and after a few seconds, dispenses a handful of notes and coins. As he struggles to take off his glove, he has the luxury of staring into the half-boarded windows of a bar he once frequented. The price of a beer is more than the money he finds in his fist. 

“Hey, you!”

Before Gregor can process what’s happening, the momentum of his bug arm thrust towards his perceived assailant has brought him around to face an unassuming man standing just behind him. Gregor struggles — he hadn’t even heard him approach — as his claw directed at the man’s throat pulses and strains against his torn jacket sleeve.

“Oi!” Gregor demands. “Are you crazy?”

Strangely enough, the man doesn’t seem too surprised, instead staring at him with his hands in his pockets and an eyebrow raised, barely out of his arm’s range. He taps his foot for a brief moment, the sound of well-kept leather against mossy concrete resonating in the alleyway. Just before Gregor’s about to ask him what the hell his problem is, his face finally turns to one of mild surprise. “Ohh! I know you.”

An ingenuine satisfaction rises on the man’s face as he relaxes onto his heels, his apparent complete lack of self-preservation completely and utterly baffling as Gregor hesitantly lowers his arm. He speaks in a similar drawl to Gregor himself, though, and as he looks closer, they appear to be around the same age too. “Do we know each other?”

“You’re uh… you were the kid on all the posters and stuff back in the war. On G-Corp’s side. We met each other once.”

Gregor takes a proper look at the bizarre man standing across from his as his arm settles down by his side. There is absolutely nothing that stands out about him, wearing perhaps the plainest black suit Gregor has ever seen, his hair styled in the most average, short-cut hairstyle in the world. If Gregor were to see this man tomorrow, he’s not sure he would even notice him. “Ah… good to see you again?”

The man sighs. “Yeah, you wouldn’t recognise me. It’s alright. Roland, Charles Office.”

He holds out his right arm for a handshake. Gregor stares at him blankly, before gesturing to his own, very unshakable, very inhuman right arm. 

“Oh, uh. Sorry,” he fumbles, switching hands. Gregor takes it in his human hand and shakes it.

“Gregor,” he responds.

Roland lets go of his hand and shoves his hands back in his pockets. He tilts his head towards the bar. “Hey, wanna grab a drink together?”

“Too expensive,” Gregor replies curtly.

“It’s on me.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Man…” Roland sighs and rifles through his pockets. “Care for a smoke, at least?”

The offer makes Gregor crack a smile. Maybe this guy isn’t too bad after all.

The brand Roland offers to him is fancier than the ones Gregor has in his back pocket, but still on the cheaper end of what most people smoke in the Nest. They take a seat on the curb just outside the pub; Gregor can’t help but feel a little ridiculous, still in his work apron covered in garbage and in well worn-out jeans and a hoodie he’s been wearing since he was about twenty, sitting next to a man in what appears to be a custom tailored suit. It doesn’t matter, though. Any shred of dignity he had was lost long ago. He lights his own cigarette first, before passing the box back to Roland. “How’ve you been?” Gregor asks out of sheer courtesy.

“Pretty good, I won’t lie.” Roland leans back. And then, unexpectedly, a small, genuine smile, one rarely ever seen in the City, crosses his face. “I got married last week.”

Gregor whistles and claps him on the shoulder. “And you’re hangin’ around bars like this all by yourself? Won’t the missus be mad?”

The smile on his face widens, and Gregor can’t help but envy how irrepressible it seems. “Nah, she’s also out working. We’re tryna cash in on one of those Nest Migration priority permits.”

“You can afford those?”

“Barely.” Roland leans forward again and looks out to the street. “Backstreets-Nest migration is cheaper if you’re married first.”

“Didn’t realise you weren’t from around here. How’d you get Nest entry?”

“Fixer visa. I’m just in D-Corp for about two more jobs, and Angelica’s got one more in W-Corp.” Angelica — that must be his wife. “Then we’re looking to apply for Nest K citizenship."

“Oh, that’s a good Nest.” Gregor nods. He remembers looking at the price of the cross-nest migration fees to K-corp, where he caught a glimpse of the Backstreet-Nest price. It was about thirty times higher, and the very thought of such a high number made his stomach churn. “W-Corp’s pretty dangerous. I don’t know too many people all too eager to take a job out there. She a Fixer too?”

Roland lets out a cryptic laugh. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“Do I know her?”

“The Black Silence.”

As terrible as his life is, Gregor’s rather grateful that he’d never been in a situation terrible enough to call in a Color Fixer. He’s heard stories about the relatively new Color, and how the air around them would be devoid of all sound except for slashing weapons — he’s had his hearing blown out a handful of times during the war and he can’t imagine how that wouldn’t drive anyone mad. “What about ‘em?”

Roland, however, seems awfully pleased. “My wife. My wife is the Black Silence.”

The cigarette falls out of Gregor’s mouth — he fumbles with it and accidentally catches it on the burning side, where he drops it again and it falls to the ground. He stares at the man next to him with his mouth agape. “You’re joking.”

“Nope.” Roland’s leg bounces as he lets out another laugh and runs his fingers through his hair. “Sorry. It’s the first time I’ve said that out loud. I’m a little excited.”

“Good for you, man.” The cigarette Roland offered him is already covered in an amorphous black mold on the floor. Gregor lights one of his own — going back to cheaper cigarettes after having a taste of the more expensive brands is always annoying, the chemical, bitter taste extra displeasing on his tongue. “Isn’t it a little strange? You’re married to the Black Silence and you’re still living in the Backstreets. There’s still magazines and shit with my face in them and I’m making ends meet as a trash collector.” He sighs. “Lot of us gave our all for that damn war and now we’re left hung out to dry.”

“That’s just how the City is,” Roland says. “Dog eat dog world.” He can tell Gregor’s gone bitter, and Gregor knows he’s spoiled the mood. He just doesn’t have the energy to do anything about it. Roland clears his throat. “There’s something my wife likes to say — that’s that and this is this.”

“That’s that and this is this,” Gregor repeats. “Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?”

Roland lets out a noise of agreement. “Nothing we can change about the past. Not like we can bring anyone back from the dead or undo the war. And a lot of shit we can’t change about the present. So, why worry about it?” The cigarette in Roland’s hand has almost burnt down to its halfway mark. He smiles again and looks over at Gregor, as if he were telling him the greatest secret known to mankind. “That’s advice from the Black Silence, by the way.”

Gregor scoffs. “Yes, who is your wife, from what I’ve heard.”

“Yep. My wife, who I am married to, who is also the Black Silence,” Roland laughs. He brings his half-finished cigarette halfway to his mouth — he can’t stop smiling — before he sets it down and snuffs it out on the concrete instead. “I’m getting too sappy about it. Sorry. I get how annoying it is.”

“Mm,” Gregor hums around the cigarette still in his mouth, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “It’s alright.”

“You know, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I hated seeing your face during the war. You looked so... happy.”

The blunt admission makes Gregor snort. “I don’t blame you. I hated it too. I think I hate it more than anyone in the City. Every day I’d look at that smug asshole and wonder, ‘what’s he got to smile about?’”

The last embers of Roland’s cigarette die out and leave a hole in the grime on the pavement as he grunts in agreement. “I uh. I was jealous of you. I thought, man, that guy, he’s a Nest-dweller, he’s got crazy augmentations. And according to some legends, I heard you were basically immortal, and I sorta assumed, there’s no way his life sucks as bad as mine!" Roland chuckles, gaze falling onto Gregor again. "But, when I signed up for the war...” He flexes his fingers, as if recalling the action of holding a weapon. Gregor looks up to meet Roland’s gaze, but he’s not looking at him. Instead, he’s staring at the tattoo branded on Gregor’s forearm, so large as to be seen halfway across the battlefield by the entirety of G-Corp. “...the war against L-Corp...”

Gregor’s eyes widen. 

“I didn’t expect to actually have to fight you. To be honest, I didn’t expect you to be actually fighting at all — Fifty-men dead to G-Corp’s star soldier! — I thought it was all lip service.” Roland smiles at Gregor, who only stares back with stunned silence. The number makes him sick to his stomach. Fifty lives taken by his own hand, reduced down to nothing more than a single number to be sensationalised in a headline. Bile rises in his throat, which he swallows — at least the vile, acrid taste keeps him grounded to his senses. Roland continues on without a care in the world. “But, no. You nearly took off my head.”

“I did?” Gregor asks — his voice breaks, and he begins to cough, the terrible taste of cigarette smoke and vomit filling his nose and throat. He struggles to recall it happening; he struggles to recall most of the war, and he would prefer to keep much of it that way.

“Mmhm. Can’t forget being thrown into battle against a hundred bug-people. You took me off guard after I killed one of your guys...” Gregor winces. “...but then I cut off your arm before you could lop my head off. And I was getting ready to cut off your head next, but then your arm grew back and I thought: No way am I dealing with that! I fucking hate bugs!” Roland laughs as if he was recalling a funny memory between old friends, and not the story of them nearly killing each other. It’s something Gregor has seen about a million times in the City, that persistent smile of someone who has no other expressions they can bear to show the outside world. A part of Gregor wishes he could have it too, but a different part of him doesn’t have the energy for it. The smile on Roland’s face begins to fade, and he clears his throat. “And I didn’t really think about it at the time, but afterwards I sort of realised we’re all in the same shithole together, you know? Either of us could’ve died in that moment, and well… nobody would’ve really cared. We would’ve been just another number in the death tolls at the end.”

A pressing memory looms in the back of Gregor’s mind, so blurry yet so daunting, the image of hundreds of dead soldier’s bodies blurring together. Who did Roland kill, if it was one of his own? Why can’t he remember any of their names or faces? Fifty. Fifty people killed. Could he remember a single one of their faces? All that comes back are dismembered bodies and decapitated heads. He does his best to suppress these images, or else he might actually throw up. “I don’t even remember that happening. I still don’t know what I was fighting for. But, uh. No hard feelings, I guess. It’s all in the past now. That’s that and this is this, right?”

“Yeah. That’s that and this is this.” He wears a look of contemplation on his face for a moment, and he looks Gregor up and down. “How about you? Arm serving you well?”

Gregor doesn’t respond.

“Ah. Sorry. Touchy subject?”

“Sorta. All it’s good for is combat. Not one on one combat or assassination, but just hacking and slashing. War combat. Nobody’s looking for that kind of thing anymore, and there’s not a lot of jobs for guys with just one arm in the Nest.” 

Roland nods. “Everyone’s got prosthetics nowadays. Hell, even I got an augmentation after losing my leg once or twice. Must be tough, huh?”

“Mhm. I sorta want one of those newer models, the kind that lets you feel things with it.” He hits the claw of his arm against the road, where it makes a dense tapping noise, picking up moss and mold as he does so. It’s dirty. “I can’t get rid of it, though. Trust me, I tried. It just keeps growing back. It keeps me tethered to...”

“The war?”

“Uh, sure. That, I suppose.” He tries to kick off the grime, only to realise his shoe is far dirtier than his arm, and he’s only smeared more dirt over it. “The doctor who gave it to me insisted it was a ‘gift'. Usually you can reject a gift, you know?”

Roland taps his foot again — a nervous habit, perhaps — and places his chin on his hand. “I thought Director Hermann did the operation on you? ‘The Genius Mother and Undefeatable Son’, or something.”

“Mmhm.” The bitter taste lingers on Gregor’s tongue, and the cigarette has almost burnt down to his fingers. He lets the smoke sit for a while before slowly releasing it, before snuffing out the smouldering remains of his cigarette on his insectile arm. Roland watches as it goes out, the wisps of smoke still lingering in the air around them. “She ruined my life.”

It’s clear the conversation has turned sour, but after a brief lull of silence, Roland gets that smile on his face again; the real one he had when he brought up his wife for the first time. “We’re trying for a baby. W-Corp is the last job Angelica has before she retires for a while.”

Gregor has no idea why the next words come out of his mouth, to a man he just met, and, from what he can tell, who is currently far stronger and could easily overpower him if he so much as pissed him off. The words slip out anyways. “And what makes you think your kid won’t suffer too?”

Roland doesn’t get mad, though. He just smiles. “I dunno. I got this feeling that maybe something will change one day. I used to read all these books as a kid about kids born into Nests with parents, in a house just for their family, and I thought it was all fiction.” Roland rises from his place on the floor and dusts off his pants. “I guess I just want to make it a reality.”

He offers his left hand out to Gregor, who takes it with ease. When he’s pulled himself up, Roland smiles at him and shakes his hand. “Great chat, mister. See you around.”

Gregor hardly gets an answer in before Roland turns away, and seemingly disappears into the crowd.

Gregor eats straight out of a can for the fifth meal this week. It’s a completely average night after work again, where he eats just enough not to go hungry before passing out in front of the television. There’s a pounding at the door. He ignores it and keeps eating, and turns up the sound in attempts to drown it out. The pounding continues. Distantly, he can hear the voice of his downstairs neighbour yelling at whoever it is to cut it out. It’s starting to get annoying, as the knocking vibrates the thin walls, the window panes shaking in their frames; a cup on the edge of his sink topples over and crashes into the basin. After a long sigh, he decides that he’ll deal with it tomorrow morning.

The door rips from its hinges.

He flinches, waiting for the loud crash as the door splinters to the floor in two pieces, yet an overpowering, deafening silence envelops his small apartment. “Oi!” Gregor yells, standing from his seat. His voice is lost to the air the moment it leaves his mouth, and his ears feel like they’re about to explode. “The hell’s your problem?”

Before he knows what’s happening, the intruder is running at him, closing the distance in almost an instant, and Gregor’s arm is drawing back, poised to kill, before it thrusts forward and-

A sword materialises from nowhere and slices it clean off.

“Ghrk!” Gregor stumbles, pain rippling through his entire body as his arm flops and writhes on the floor. His body tightens up; he can’t move, he can’t breathe, and his mind begins to fill with blood and gore and smoke as his body reacts to a memory he can’t even recall. He’s grabbed by the front of his jacket and raised off the ground by force. His assailant, a man in a black suit, with a mask covering his entire face, starts yelling at him.

“Hermann. Where is she?!”

His useless body won’t let him speak, weak and so much more frail than it used to be, and that mask, that damn mask is so familiar yet imperceivable at the same time, the voice of the intruder ringing a distant memory that he can’t exactly place. He’s still desperately trying to regain his voice after the pain of having his arm cut off, just before an all-too familiar writhing ripples through his body as the muscles in his right shoulder begin to ache and distort.

“ANSWER ME!”

Gregor gasps for air. “I don’t know- I don’t know!”

“Liar!” the man screams, a fuming rage dripping off his every word. “Letters, calls, a general location, you have to know something!”

“I haven’t-” Gregor suppresses the bile building in his throat as a hard shell begins forming around the raw flesh spilling out of his arm. “-spoken to her in years, I swear, I want nothing to do with her!”

“You’re her family-”

“She’s not my family,” Gregor spits. “I don’t want her anywhere near me ever again. I want her dead.”

The man stares at him, and Gregor can’t do anything except stare into the dark expanse of the mask. Neither of them move, except for the stub of Gregor’s arm hanging limp by his side, twisting into its final shape as if it had never been cut off in the first place. The silence in his ears is deafening as he waits for the man to calculate his next move.

Finally, he speaks. “If I find out you’re lying to me, you’re dead. Got that?”

Gregor is thrown to the ground — with the wind knocked out of his lungs, he skids across dirty tile, the pain of a fractured rib searing through his side as the sound of his heartbeat suddenly resounds in his ears again. The sword dematerialises, and the man leaves through the now empty door frame.

It’s not like this is an uncommon occurrence in the City. Still, Gregor can't find it within him to get off the floor. He curls into a ball and stares at the dismembered arm next to him, and wonders how much it could sell it for.

The pain won’t subside. A part of him wishes that when he closes his eyes, they would never open again.

After a minute or so, though, he unfortunately finds his eyes opening up to the sight of the slowly rotting remains of his arm. He slowly counts to ten, and allows himself to simply lay on the floor for the duration of the count. When he reaches ten, he wills his body to move again. "That's that..." he rises from the floor, the joints in his knees aching as they press into tile, his misbalanced arm weighing his body down and almost making him fall again, "...and this is this." The door still needs cleaning up, after all. He starts with the cup in the sink instead.