Word Count: 2265
”Ochre.” The voice sounded painfully far, and steeped in a thick murk.
The redhead groaned, head pounding from paltry sleep, and roused himself into an upright position. The room swam. He wondered if he incurred some kind of sickness from being exposed to the world for the first time in weeks. The train left him battered and bruised, with Umber turning out much the same, but the hunter often weathered such injuries better than he. When bleary eyes came to focus, he spotted the mottled splotches tracing his brother’s exposed stomach and arms. Inwardly he wished the train’s retaliation snapped Umber’s neck and left him for dead - as Ochre long knew that hearing his voice so often heralded misfortune.
Umber reached the bars themselves and knelt beside them, his face mere inches from their draining surface. “Ochre,” he spoke again. His voice was not soft.
“I heard you the first time.” The redhead scrubbed at his eyes blearily, and found no relief from the clouding of sleep. His head pounded steadily with the beat of his heart. Eyes only focused enough for recognition of the man he once called brother, and his pulse quickened with distaste for that prospect. Ochre found it nigh impossible to retaliate against his brother with ire. For ages, as he stewed in his cell, he considered it due to lineage and familial ties, but as he was slowly exposed to the differing officers and their respective punishments, he realized it had little to do with shared biology. Ochre found no reason to hate his brother for his actions, though he attributed full responsibility to Umber. He found no particular mercy for him, either - as easy as it might’ve been to give the Negaverse agents a free pass for playing slave to the machine, he considered it a conscious effort.
But to detest his brother, to scathe him for his actions, involved a level of petulant recompense that Ochre found more detrimental to his inner sensibilities. Hating him - hating any of them - only incurred further disservice to himself.
So he swallowed his instinctive loathing when he spoke. “What is it?”
“It’s time to test theories.” When Umber pulled the satchel from his hip, he sifted the contents for the neatly folded notebook paper containing his notes. Opening it, he looked over the assigned starseeds and their numbers, their weights, their colors. Guesswork led him to try starseeds of a particular color first. The collection from the operation offered an array of greens, blues, and yellows with which he could work. He would try the blues first, and study his brother for any marked difference. It occurred to him long ago that he lacked a control group for this study, but he found it easy enough to construct one with the next beleaguered traitor to find his way into shackles here. For now, he would test if eating starseeds - or blue starseeds - would placate an officer or compel servitude.
Opening the cell demanded little effort. An old, rusted key in an old, rusted lock and an old, rusted turn left the door groaning open on its assailed hinges. Ochre did not rise - he rather cowered toward the corner of the room, where he dislodged more dust from the corner of the small space. Eyes darted for the door and he considered making an escape of it, with the door standing open like that, but he knew the passages were long and the corridors wound in impossible directions and his brother would most assuredly catch him before then. He couldn’t possibly discern the exit, and for all he knew, there was no exit.
But that surge in his chest that compelled him forward died as soon as the gate shut with a heavy clatter. All potential escape plans suffered an untimely death.
Suspicion urged Ochre to speak, and hopefully encourage his brother to do the same. “So, what about this theory? And how are you going to test it? I mean, I have a right to know if you’re gonna do something to me, right?”
“Wrong.” Umber approached while saying nothing more.
“What, did the Negaverse stop believing in human rights? Even if they did, I’m still your brother - doesn’t that mean I should get a heads u-”
“That preface was your heads up.” Umber’s tone maintained an easy coolness to it. His hand sought Ochre’s chest, to which his brother responded by grasping his wrist with both hands, but Umber’s second hand at his shoulder reinforced the grip. He felt the pull away from the gaping hole over Ochre’s starseed - and Umber smiled inwardly, knowing that the redhead thought that Umber intended to steal his soul. A quick brush of force carried the pair across the small cell to the bars that guarded it, and Umber pinned his brother against it with both forearms bracing against Ochre’s chest. There they remained a moment, at eye level, with the hunter staring into naked fear.
Ochre felt the draining as soon as contact was made with the bars. His back ached greatly from the impact, but furthermore, he felt immediately exhausted beyond the earlier measure. All strength to fight back ebbed quickly, until his hands dropped off like rotten leaves from his brother’s wrist. Fear soon followed, as the last adrenaline left his body. Soon Ochre could manage little more than staying conscious - a frightful drop in a short time, if he managed the energy for becoming unnerved.
He couldn’t. Ochre found no voice with which to speak. There was little to say, regardless - Umber’s gaze spoke of determination, which often ended in dead animals. This time, he supposed, it ended with dead relatives. What was the difference to him anymore?
“You’ve heard of energy draining someone to death. You’ve seen it happen by your own hand. Think, for a minute, what will happen to you if you do nothing.” Umber paused only briefly. “I am going to give you starseeds. You will eat them, or you will die. Those are your choices.”
This is all for you.
But Ochre provided no response - he hardly looked like he could comprehend a simple sentence with the way he slipped toward unconsciousness. Umber felt his own fear drive quicken him, and he sifted through the satchel on his side for the first blue starseed he could manage. A surfeit of colors surfaced, and he scrounged past them brusquely, but more of those same violets, oranges and pinks surfaced. He was running out of time - in seconds, Ochre’s health would fade out and his arm would clutch little more than a husk of the brother he intended to repurpose. He found the greens. Another few breaths, and he would find little reason to continue his research. Finally he caught hold of an ultramarine, number nine he remembered, and pressed the gem to his brother’s mouth with his thumb.
The starseed found no resistance. In fact, Umber needed to press his brother’s jaw upward to crack it, for all the strength had ebbed from even the most rudimentary of muscle structures. He felt the resistance, then soon heared the evidence that the starseed gave way beneath bone. He expected to see something in his brother’s countenance.
And he did - Ochre’s field of vision narrowed to pinpricks, but with the sordid soul stuffed into his mouth and soon broken against his will, an impossibly invigorating flood of energy swept through him unlike any revelation experienced previously. For the first time in the many months spent in this cesspit, he felt suddenly and blisteringly alive. He felt the very tips of his fingers down to every fiber in his toes, and suddenly the world dilated into a perfect framework that displayed every complex truth in all its clarion simplicity without a whim on his part. He felt, in that moment, that he could truly struggle against his brother and win despite the Negaverses favor standing on Umber’s side.
Yet simultaneously he felt a queasy wrenching in his gut, as the uneven shards swallowed in a retching gulp. He could not easily stomach such a vile intensity, but the heroic burst that came forth held enough opulent energy to quell his will’s objection. Both slender hands darted for his brother’s wrists again and Ochre set to work prying away what fingers he could manage. “Why the ******** would you do that to me?” He cried against the wrists, half in horror and half in incredulity. Fingers scraped to the point of littering jagged, bloodied marks down the backs of Umber’s hands, but the hunter weathered it well.
Surface wounds, he knew. Lacerations. Cicatrices.
But Umber held steadfast. He pinned knee to stomach and weathered the redhead’s meager onslaught, remaining stoic through the repeated let me gos and the please stops. He waited until the last don’t do this fell from pale lips, and the energy drain curse over the cell bars started to make a dent in the excess energy. “Do you remember when I was explaining to you the tenets of hunting? We sat on the porch that night, eating candied chestnuts.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Ochre still struggled and clawed and writhed against Umber’s hold.
“I told you that the first tenet of hunting is that everything wants to survive. Any living creature, intelligent or not, will change itself to survive.” His arms held steadfast; the pain burned dully, but he felt small rivulets of blood trickle down his wrists. At times, he found them indistinguishable from his tattoos. He regretted never summoning his weapons to guard his hands. “I’ve shown you before. Do you remember? The coyote’s bloody leg left in the bear trap, and the trail of blood leading back into the forest.”
“That wasn’t a change at all-”
“Yes it was,” he interrupted. “A physical one. But how often does any man or woman find a situation that has them cutting off a hand, a foot? We change mentally. We leave behind the feelings we have for loved ones when they move on, when they leave us, because we face extinction otherwise. We harden ourselves to move on. We abandon old ideals so we can still keep surviving. It’s why treason exists. It’s why people defect into the Negaverse. It’s why they leave the Negaverse.”
Ochre’s heart swelled for a moment. Irrational hope took hold in that brief time, and urged him to consider that his brother might actually help him escape. Umber could teleport, he knew, which meant the pair could leave Negaspace without incident with another officer. But as he opened mouth to speak, as he fought the creeping exhaustion to say something, say anything to encourage the act that he sought, another calloused thumb met his upper lip as another starseed was forced behind teeth. Ochre nearly choked on the intrusion, and leaned forward to bite at the thumb that invited it. He caught little more than skin that slipped easily from between bone.
Next he tried to spit the unwanted soul, to return it beyond himself and outside of the body that he barely managed control of. He remembered so keenly the grandiose boost that came with the first starseed, the first human life ended between teeth, and the urge to crack the second harrowed him. Willpower still held the upper hand firmly, and Ochre froze in that position with teeth clenched and a certain obstinance against fulfilling Umber’s wishes while he still possessed energy.
This blatant show of insubordination ended shortly. The bars stole away more of his life force, leaving Ochre weak and unable to maintain the strength needed to lock his jaw. Once Umber recognized it, he manipulated his brother’s mandible much the same as before - and to similar effect. As he pushed the jaw upward, Umber watched Ochre’s pupils dilate to nearly swallow his irises, And all his muscles tensed in similar fashion. Energy dispelled much of the exhaustion read from his face and restored a countenance that looked more recognizable to the older of the pair. Curiously, his brother started to gag - an outward sign that Umber did not witness on the first starseed. Mentally he catalogued it alongside the marginally less severe reaction to the starseed.
With the jarring, fleeting, too-intense energy jittering his muscles and bones, Ochre responded at a pace that felt fast to the point of instability. “Just stop. Just get me out of here. Just let me go and that’ll give me a better chance of survival than keeping me here. You want me to live, right? Then let me go find somewhere else to be. Let me change, Shale. Please!” Nausea wrenched at him in great torrents and he stifled another dry heave. Hands found wrists once again and simply held them, squeezed in a grip that he hoped communicated his desperate desire to leave the Negaverse behind.
“No,” Umber answered simply. “You misunderstand. This isn’t about your survival.” He searched the satchel for a third starseed while he waited out the brief surge of the second starseed. Ochre’s strength ebbed almost entirely by the time he dug it out of the bottom of his leather bag. Afterward he pressed the slate blue starseed to his brother’s lips and pushed it beyond the teeth that tried to bar its path.
“It’s about mine.”
