The end of the month promised its paperwork in every job, profession, classroom. He seldom expected something so ruthlessly benign in the Negaverse's repertoire -- when names and faces and fates and experiences and ideas ended up only so much gristle between the teeth. But there he sat, before a report as thick as his wrist, paging through a backlog of reported energy quotas. It felt like a lieutenant's work -- like a scandal fit for someone who knew nothing of leadership. It felt like a punishment.
Perhaps he was being punished for not quashing Sinope earlier.
Faustite straightened on his stony bench. Black eyes clawed blearily across the room -- sifting over the worn smoothness of many years' feet, the vaulted ceilings with their gaudy points, the ancient bookshelves sporting tomes too old to read. His attention fell to the many other tables about, just as old and chiseled as the table before him. Not marble, not granite, no stone so elegant as travertine. Slate, maybe, for its cheap availability. But Faustite spent so little time on geology beyond what was needed for naming agents.
His attention found the log again. Listlessly he paged through it, watching inked name after inked name flutter by like so many impotent butterflies. Was this all he was meant for, now, as so much damaged goods? He sighed and his hand came to a curl against his temple. Smoke billowed in answer to his unasked question.
If Noctua had any shame left, she would feel it now. General Churchill, for she refused to learn his name, had just finished berating her for not meeting standards. This was her ritual each week since Cinnabar had gone missing. Power up maybe twice on nights when sleep actively evaded her, piss about until the sun came up, and do everything in her power to miss quota. And then, when the reports came in, get harassed by her inept general. Weeks ago she might have made a snide comment about ineptitude begetting ineptitude, but all it ever did was warrant her a slap. And while the softness of his doughy hands did nothing to cause her pain, she still hated it. So she stood, passive and silent, while he raged about how this reflected on him. Her fellow senshi said nothing in her defense, nor did she expect them to. This was the only time they saw one another, after all. This weekly meeting to go over numbers. They weren’t a team. They were a collection.
And Noctua grew tired of being a bauble.
She was more than just a thing to sit on a shelf and perform menial tasks. She was a powerful tool to be used to attain goals and reach higher altitudes. Cinnabar would have tempered her. Molded her. Used her. Cinnabar would have wielded her like a saber, and Noctua would cut down anyone she asked. Cinnabar would have… she would have…
It didn’t matter what Cinnabar would have done. She had gone missing, and there was little hope of finding her. No matter how many questions she asked, no matter how many sleeves she tugged on. Brick walls faced her at every turn and she wasn’t strong enough to find the answers that she wanted. At least not yet. And she was never going to be strong enough so long as she kept toiling under a man who didn’t care.
Noctua would have devoted more thought to her misery if a small sound hadn’t cut through it. Something light hitting the stone to her left. She turned cool blue eyes to locate the source of the sound and found something altogether more interesting. The raw force of his power hit Noctua square in the chest, weaker still than Cinnabar’s had been, but exhilarating in its own right. The tangle of her nerves tightened and screamed for her to run but… She honestly didn’t care enough to do so. Her brain had been rubbed so raw having been run on so little recuperative sleep that emotions often lagged several minutes behind and by the time they caught up, it didn’t matter anymore. So she stooped to retrieve the pen and padded soundlessly over to Faustite, extending the utensil to him with a casual greeting.
“Nephilim.”
He looked up for the greeting, though he knew by tone and by peculiarity who spoke to him. And she looked every bit as unchanged as him -- sunken eyes, ringed with the dull, grey dunes of sleeplessness, a tattered set of pajamas in place of an officer's uniform, hair spilling for miles. The whole of her looked as disheveled as her ragged voice implied. She was Noctua, Senshi of Insomnia, heir to a sphere meant to punish overwork and inefficiency. Se was the godchild of guilt.
And she offered him his pen back. "We find each other at strange times." He accepted the ballpoint, which fit awkwardly against his too-long nails, and retired it to the inward spine of the book. The tuck where pages lost their usefulness -- much like senshi slipping between cracks.
"Sit." His occupied hand motioned to the opposite bench. Her composure provided a rare opportunity to expunge all the callous little frays to the cord of their volatile relationship. All the words said, damages committed, lives raked away and spat back in mulish defiance. Would she remember each of their instances, or was it all left to the hazy wash of sleepless nights? Faustite wondered.
But he did not wonder long. A daggered finger pressed idly to his cheek, just under the cut of still-adolescent cheekbone. "You look bored. We aren't so different, you and I."
Noctua did as she was told for the first time in months and took a delicate seat next to Faustite, perching like a little bird with her knees tucked up under her chin. Why was a question that she would meditate over later, when she sat twisted and bent on the floor of her bedroom and the smoke of her incense curled around her. For now, she let it happen, leaving enough space between them to allow for shifting and personal comfort. She found that she didn’t even mind the tickle in her throat brought on by the exhaust of his body.
His statement drew her eyes to him, considering him and his sentiment for a long quiet moment. Her first instinct was to deny his correlation, but something wired her jaw shut. Her eyes inspected the softness of his face and she realized for the first time that this half-man was no man at all. Most likely he was barely younger than she was, and yet he had been cleaved in half, hollowed out with uncaring claws, and hastily sutured back together to brave the battle field that neither of them could really see.
Perhaps they weren’t as different as she had insisted they were…
“What makes you say that,” she asked despite her own silent revelations. “Is it because our dried voices, when whispered together, are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry glass?” Maybe he had different ideas on their congruence, but what harm could it do to offer her own? And what harm was there in civility now? Perhaps, in looking at him again, this was exactly what Faustite and she needed. Some measure of humanity in this thoughtless and cold war machine. Some glimmer that there was meaning or at the very least… warmth. It felt like they had fought wars against one another and against the world.
Deflated. That was the word Noctua grasped for. They both felt deflated. Like the hot air they had both been filled with in the beginning had gone out of both of them and all they had left were the rags on their backs. So what use was there in cruelty now when they had bathed so completely in it already?
“Or do you see something else in us?”
Faustite shook his head mutely. Black wefts, like smoke, waved their tortuous fingers at the ground. "Men are always looking for meaning, like it's the only commodity they can trade. Like a sound with a reason behind it, a voice, exonerates them. That meaning-making leaves them drunk and stupid." It leaves them like Heliodor, he knew, who hunted meaning in the arms of others. What Noctua spoke of was their rote worthlessness as numbers in the rank-and-file, as the anonymous hands and mouths and knees on which people like Schörl ground their cigarettes. But even that missed the romance of that namelessness — that rare freedom.
"You're always fighting the world with a rancor that won't extinguish. Like you made your meaning in postmodern recklessness. But the Negaverse isn't interested." Faustite tapped the butt of his pen smartly against its page. Soon, one of his feet slid restlessly across the tile. He felt slow, sluggish, like his own insufferable presence wrapped about him and choked him treacherously. Like Sinope had gotten into him somehow, and slicked down the lot of his inner workings with sticky syrup.
But there — that was their point of relation. That unspoken ire.
"You know what it's like to want to kill someone, don't you? Like so much sand in the bones, slowly cooking to glass. That type of feeling that eats and eats and eats until you're brittle and used up. Until you're like those old housewives with their matched kerchiefs and their tardive dyskinesia and their perpetually tea-stained smocks. We're both heading that way." Faustite shut the book with sure hands and cared not to remove the pen from the middle of its spine.
"But we have a future despite that. In spite of it. Wee still have dreams, however dark, however uncertain."
And in that strange sleep, what dreams may come? Noctua didn’t have dreams. Only nightmares. Living shades in the corners of her vision that, if left unchecked, would come to life and consume her. What use had she for perpetual terror lurking just beyond her sight? Even now the tendrils of Faustite’s smoke curled like wicked hands grasping for purchase as though they might free themselves of their prison and join her shades. They twisted around her ankles and wrists and Noctua could almost feel them clawing at her.
She ignored them. Or tried to. Betrayed only by the rolling of one ankle and the itching of one wrist. As though to ensure that there was truly nothing there. It’s all in your head. It’s all in your head. It’s all in your head. Her mother, father, doctor’s voice all echoing in time. She reached out and pinched a small allowance of Faustite’s uniform between two bony fingers, rubbing the fabric a few times between the pads, feeling the grain to anchor herself in the here and now. And then she drew her hand back and wrapped it back around one knobby knee like nothing happened.
“I thought I had killed someone once,” Noctua confessed. “And then a man with markings on his face taught me how to really kill. I doubt the child that I suffocated in the forest was really dead after all.” But both of those instances, the child senshi in the woods and the man in the alley… they had all been passionate and sudden. Wildfires that raged around her and vanished as soon as they had come. This sensation that Faustite spoke of was longer, slower suffering, and toxic.
And to be perfectly plain, Noctua wanted no part of that.
“We’re tools,” she reminded him gently, not so much as flinching at the sudden sound of the book closing. “Tools to be used and broken and wasted.” And left behind. “What future is there in that? My General sits, a pile of nothing, in an overstuffed armchair at fifty years old. Says he started at fifteen. Is that what we have to look forward to? Complacency?”
That made Noctua flinch. Maybe that was why she felt the sting of Cinnabar’s abandonment so fiercely. Maybe that was why she raged so against the uselessness of her superior now. She was afraid of deteriorating into uselessness. Of reaching a glass ceiling and being unable to break through. Did Faustite see a future beyond that barrier? Something more?
“Maybe it’s different for the sons of angels. Those of us from the stars have little to look forward to, I think.”
Once. Only once. Faustite could not count on his black hands, on his black toes, the number of lives taken now. Every time he tasted the better part of a memory, the black on his skin grew. Was it punishment or simple cause and effect? What was the difference between a spoiled fruit and a ripe one?
"Youma are tools," he corrected. "We make our own lives. Your general made his. My general made hers." One sat fat and wasted while the other livened by sucking the life out of everyone around her. One reached fifty and commanded a disaffected girl and the other reached her thirties on coffee, whiskey and pipe tobacco. On innocence reaped like so many ripened tomatoes.
Faustite tugged the ink-laden book closer to himself. "If you want complacency, become a youma." A finger traced the front where engraved lettering spelled its simple truths -- LEDGER it read, in bolded blackletter, with all the flourish of german engineering. The leather lost its smell long ago, but the inked pages still fermented a library's worth. "It's all politics. What we are, where we go, how we behave. Half our duties have use. The rest are filler -- time sinks to occupy hungry minds. So much scrap tossed our way to gnaw -- to sharpen our teeth. It keeps them.
"'I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.'" The tapered tip of his nail slipped down from the book's edge. "I'm going to be a general someday. If I survive it."
His gaze fell to his nail -- black, sleek, thick with whatever black ran in his veins. "Then I own my own leash. I do what I will. Do you want that kind of freedom? Are you more than a quota mule, Dreamer?" He wondered, in looking to her overwrought nerves and her impossibly small body, if she had any capacity for ambition. If she wanted anything more than dreamless sleep, whether by bed or by death. Maybe that was her only desire.
But even one desire was good enough.
Do you want that kind of freedom?
The question was so simple, and the answer leaped unbidden to her lips though the same unseen force clenched her jaw so hard it threatened to grind her teeth to stubs. Why? Why did the answer scream to a halt at her teeth and refuse to move further? To be given life? Noctua turned her gaze away from Faustite and traced the scars on the stone table before them. Was he offering that freedom? Did she dare take it if he did? Did she dare presume if he didn’t? And what would happen if she took it and it led her down a path to destruction as it had for him? Worse. What if it led to glory and she failed to follow?
Noctua pulled her legs in tighter and chewed on her lips until they bled, finally answering, “Of course I want freedom. Doesn’t every slave? Even my general, useless though he is, still dreams of glory. The only difference is that he looks to his past, not his future.” She took a deep and shaking breath, casting Faustite a sidelong glance before she spoke again.
“I hear whispers about a senshi like me, but the cracks on her skin spider web across her whole body. Power leaks from those fissures like it leaks from your pores. Like it leaked from Cinnabar’s pores… When people talk about her, though they don’t know her name or what she looks like, there is equal measure of fear and respect. Even the officers. That’s what I want. To meet her. To be like her.”
Or his present. So many generals devolved into those caricatures. That trend held true for every single general met, including one of the Sovereigns. Soon, it would be his turn to pass on the rest of his humanity -- however much remained.
When she accounted for this senshi, however, Faustite paused. His gaze found the too-small hands as they pushed through stone cracks, through years of work and rework. She spoke of someone so overloaded with chaos energy that it fractured her body. Was it, then, the glue binding the splintered flits of her body together? To hear of someone whose impossible existence was due to chaos holding them together -- what a counterpoint. Thick lashes laid low over his eyes. He knew of none like that.
But anyone could be found. The Negaverse kept inexhaustible logs on all its officers, senshi and agent alike. Every quota missed, every starseed taken, every rank earned, every subordinate had, every disciplinary action taken, every disciplinary action received each went into those records with a succinct pride. The Information branch worked tirelessly at it. If there existed any senshi like her description, then that senshi would be in the database. Any account of what happened to her would follow.
"We'll find your senshi." Or the ghost she left behind. His black gaze slid to her. His hand left the table entirely -- left the book, the edge, the pointless fidgeting that ever befell him. In the air it hung until a second pen formed in his hand. "Then you'll be free."
We’ll find your senshi.
Did Faustite realize what he had said? There was no command. No “I” nor “You.” Her fingers stilled on the table before her and she inspected his face, trying to find any vestige of cruelty. He remained passive as before, and even his voice belied nothing. But he didn’t sound put upon, so that was something. Leadership. It was leadership. Noctua finally turned her gaze from him and returned to her lazy mapping of stone grain and loosened the piano wire from her jaw.
“Why are you helping me,” she asked without thinking, not even realizing that the question was burgeoning within her. But there it was, stealing life with her voice.
“We haven’t exactly been bosom friends so far. Why bother?”
Even though she didn’t realize that she was curious, Noctua still found herself very interested in the answer. It crossed her mind fleetingly that he was offering so that he could sabotage her but… that didn’t strike her as true. She didn’t know much about Faustite, but subterfuge didn’t seem like his style to her. Either that or he was very good at hiding such proclivities.
Faustite blinked at her, held his eyes shut for a little longer than a moment. "You're looking for a trick. That's good." It's more than he said of Heliodor, who toiled too terribly over himself and none at all of the world around him. That senshi was lost to his own self-obsessions, where in some silvery otherworld he was loved and cherished for simply being. The Adonis, god-given only to himself.
But Noctua was whip-smart, aware. She saw the world for the old romances now bled into technology. She saw into those dewey interstices of the people about her, of people in relation to one another, where feeling seeded and grew. She understood the value in the circuit of the sea, that hewed away all ege to sea glass.
Faustite opened the pen to its broad tablet display. Once set on the table, hands danced over its smooth interface. "You'll understand why I do what I do. You'll help me achieve it." Back straight, shoulders back, Faustite remained attentive to the scroll of names and dates. Smoke poured softly from the pipes at his back, twisting into meaningless patterns before crawling invisible fingers over the ceiling. Finally his hands came to idle. Lips pursed as he touched one of the names.
What was displayed was not what he expected, though he expected very little about the description he was given. A haunting lifelessness stared at the nothing of the camera, blonde hair cast into dreads from a long-ago social impetus. Her clothes hung off her like a dress on a hanger. Some misbegotten attempt was made to conceal the rest of what made her a her, even as spidering cracks and black glue remastered her image into Metallia's perfect doll. What he saw, then, was the Negaverse's rendition of a ghost. Not the internet's, not historical culture's, but the Negaverse's.
"Ascendant General Alkaid," he murmured after a short pause.
Never sign anything you haven't read. Never shake without know the terms. Read the fine print. Everything that Noctua had been taught came screaming back to her, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Not that she was given any chance to object. Faustite worked on his own in silence, sifting through files without telling her what he was doing. It wasn’t until she saw the face of the senshi she had heard about that he spoke, naming her. And in that moment the price that needed to be paid fell away to nothingness
“Ascended General,” Noctua parotted. Not Sailor. Not Senshi. A General. A child of the Negaverse proper.
The cracks that spider webbed across her flesh may have spelled out a familiar existence for Faustite, but for Noctua it meant something else. A brand, a claim laid bare on her skin. She belonged the Chaos, and the Chaos belonged to her. Her eyes belied nothing of emotion, not joy, nor rage, nor fatigue. In her eyes reflected nothingness. Sweet, blessed nothingness. Noctua reached out to touch the screen, delicate touches ghosting along the surface. It took a moment for Noctua to return to herself. She pressed her finger to the screen and began to scroll down, pale eyes glancing over the screen to take in as much as she could about what happened.
Which was precious little.
Noctua could feel the glee from finding a face and a name rush from her in an instant. Desperate for something, anything, she scrolled back up to the top of the page and this time read more carefully. Still nothing. Just her growth progression, Commanding Officer, eventual Subordinate Officers, and quotas.
“Once day she wasn’t and then the next… she was… how is that possible?”
And would finding out be worth the bill that would come due?
While Noctua surged forth as if, for the first time in waking memory, she felt truly alive, Faustite reclined against one arm. He braced himself against his side of the bench and watched spidersilk hands touch and brush and pull and pinch for information never granted. A smile, mirthless, joined his boyish features to the chaos that dominated him. 'The database is woefully outdated. It is unlikely you will find what you are looking for there, or that it will be accurate if you do find it.' She was right.
"The Negaverse thrives on secrets." Alkaid was one of them. Alkaid was one of the best-kept secrets, for no others reached her rank. She was the sole ascendant general in all their ranks, with none before her and none after. A very lonely existence, he imagined. If she felt loneliness anymore within that fractured shell.
He knew rarity, however. Partially-youmafied agents numbered to a handful according to Database files. Those who were kept to themselves as if clinging to their own uniqueness -- coddling it like a bad justification. Noctua wanted to join a life like that, perhaps only to be unfettered by her job and family and lifestyle. She would do as she wanted and her power would join Metallia's unambiguously. Useful in its own way, perhaps.
And he denied no swell in his breast, no thrall in the fetid stickiness of soot, when she wanted that life for herself. It wasn't friendship, no -- that word was meant for people. For humans with human goals and human intentions.
"We'll find out. There's always a story. Nothing hides forever." He reclaimed his communicator to zoom in on Alkaid's face, then swapped to her earlier iterations where she was whole. Where someone stared back at them on the cold, glaring screen.
It is I who am inane. Faustite snorted, interested.
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