i have to put down the knife.
Word Count: 3962

Umber's disappearance could've been anything. Maybe he took a vacation, or he decided to live off the land for a while, or he went on some super covert mission for the Negaverse, or he just decided to leave or something. Ochre had dreamed up all sorts of explanations in the time since Umber vanished, each one getting more elaborate and impossible than the next, but each could be satisfying in their own way. In every fantasy, Umber lived. Even if he and Ochre wouldn't speak again for years, he was off doing something. Usually his own thing. Then, maybe, someday, they'd see each other again.

Then Ochre could donkey punch him for being an a*****e, like any good brother would do. But that required Umber to be alive. That required Shale to still exist.

But Shale wasn't the third person in the apartment that he shared with Porsha, and Schörl's deductions hadn't been so optimistic. There wouldn't be another reunion with Umber after years spent on a special Negaverse mission. There wouldn't be a reunion at all.

In all that time he had, that year and some change, Ochre thought about the ways Umber could've died too. He had a decidedly dangerous job in the Negaverse to go with his decidedly dangerous pastime. Well, way of life, really. Anybody could get accidentally shot when hunting deer or trapping rabbits. Anybody could get mauled by a bear, or gored by an elk. Maybe he fell from up high on some distant cliff face he was scouring. Or maybe he was brought down by a group of senshi. Maybe he was caught in that explosion Ochre heard about when Labyrinthite went looking for Witzend recruits. Maybe it was something else entirely, like untreated pneumonia or a car accident or unswallowed food or one of those weird electrical storm things that stopped runners' hearts in a hot minute. Each of these sucked more than the last, each of these felt unfair, but they were survivable. Sometimes bad things just happened to people.

So Ochre saved up his grief and waited for the truth. If anyone could find out, one of the ex-SpecOps members could. Schörl was the pick for having known Umber and dealt with some of his recruits. Usually people found Umber to be kind of an a*****e, so he half-expected her to turn down the request. She probably had better, more ambitious things to do. Maybe even painting her nails seemed more amenable. But she accepted, Ochre and Xenotime provided what they could, and then they waited. Schörl didn't disappoint in coming up with an answer.

But Schörl delivered a truth worse than any he'd ever considered: Umber was killed by one of his subordinates. That subordinate ate his starseed, probably as a civilian, probably unaware that it was even Umber. That death, that wasted death, was a mindless accident. Friendly fire. That dumb, thoughtless mistake robbed Ochre of any chance to talk to his brother again, to spend hours together in the woods, to hunt senshi together, to talk about all the things they missed from their old home, and foremost, it robbed him of the chance to learn what really happened to Umber in those eight months he couldn't remember anymore.

One dumb mistake and an entire person disappeared from Ochre's life. It wasn't a senshi, or a knight, or a car, or a disease that took his brother from him, but an officer. An ally, even -- a subordinate. Umber's own subordinate.

The thought of it galled him, left a sour taste that he had to keep swallowing on his way through Negaspace. His thick braids trailed on the floor in a muffled hiss, always dragging him back, making him mind his step. Each muffled footfall led him around and down and from one hall to the next, sometimes in lamplight and sometimes in that foreboding cast from the crystals, until he reached the halls where the generals worked. There, the ceilings got taller and the doors spaced further apart. The numbers read a little more legibly beneath their years of wear. Down and down and down those numbers went, just like his mood.

Then he found it -- 119. He waited outside, breath caught, eyes open but watching nothing at all. His hair stopped its hiss and Ochre thought, just for a moment, that anyone could hear his existence there. They could hear it in the negative space. In the Citadel quiet, people could count his heartbeats through heavy wood doors and stone walls. But he hadn't heard anyone voice an objection. No one was wondering who loitered outside their door. The runner rugs saved him from making too much noise, Ochre guessed.

For a while, he heard nothing but his own quiet breaths. Nothing but the old settle of an ancient building, where sometimes it groaned under its own weight and stretched like it just woke up. Sometimes he heard the squeak of a youma, or a sonorous conversation further down the hall, but nothing nearer. It was all just… Quiet. Just space for him to fill with his thoughts.

Thoughts about Umber occupied that space. The days they spent together in the forest, the hunts Shale would go on, the times they would cook together. He remembered how Shale complained about city life, how it was all loud and noisy and people didn't leave well enough alone, but Slate thought it was charming. But he couldn't explain how he found it charming, or what charming was exactly, just that he enjoyed being so close to so many strangers and not having to worry about wood-burning stoves or killing and skinning dinner or doing house maintenance. Shale thought it was ridiculous. He thought there was something better, more spiritual about hunting their food. The same went for their opponents -- if Umber and Ochre could hunt down their adversaries, then they were halfway to ending the war.

And if Ochre could track his brother's killer, then he was halfway to getting revenge. He heard a stir inside the office, slow and gradual, like someone coming out of thought. Cloth rustled over wood, then a chair creaked, a body shifted. Something light touched paper, maybe a pen. Then came an unmistakably human sigh.

Ochre drew a long breath and clenched his hands. Slowly he spread his fingers apart. He drew another breath, held it for five seconds, then let it out softly enough that he could hear the other person's shifting over it. He reached for the old knob. Grasped it. Held it steady in his hand when he wondered just how many years of deferred maintenance might add up to giving him away. But when he turned that knob, when he applied just a little pressure with his hand on the jamb to unstick the portal, he didn't hear a creak.

He didn't hear much of anything, not even a startle. Ochre pushed on, sidled through the door, let his braids drawl through as he made his way into the room. He wasn't expecting the sparseness, nor the number of books, nor the ever-empty table that looked set up for tea. It was like a person lived there -- no, like a person passed through there, like sometimes they stopped by to take a note or pour themselves a drink, and all the rest of the time, the office just sat empty. It was sort of a sad, lonely, liminal space. Like the owner never spent enough time in there to really justify decorating it.

The owner never spent enough time. Wrapped in a gilded cage, all those passions went to waste. Left the body like so much smoke, taking up space and atmosphere as dead dreams did. What the owner spent instead was urgency, paid in word and action, as if burning out all the body's substance into absence. A chased existence, one so harried by need to that the owner hadn't learned what was needed or why. But the owner knew the need to move.

To create. To outpace. Schörl drew her trap around em as she drew brass around eir gut, as she drew pipes through eir back, and no clever play could outpace the cleverest in her domain. Twice Faustite's age, Schörl would suffer no petty scheming that she could read out of eir face. As ey sat, tensed, back artificially straight, Faustite stared down the brusque words composing eir journal entry. The evaluation was curt, crude and inelegant; its payoff brutal. No time was left to waste on thinking, on plotting, on staring idly at all the paths ey could take. Better that ey hold a meeting tomorrow and cement the lot of it.

"Hey," a soft voice called. Faustite looked up,

and Ochre punched it in the mouth. It, the thing that stood on stage and told them about youma superiority, the thing that ate Umber, the thing that bled black all over Ochre's knuckles like an immoral stain. It didn't ever really apologize for that. For anything.

Faustite recoiled in that suspended moment. Hands retreated over the injury and ey spoke through a black curtain. The corners of eir mouth creased, barely visible. "Bold."

Ochre stared at it, hands balled, heart pounding. He felt sweat break on his brow as he floundered for something witty to say. "You killed my brother." Hands on the desk, Ochre rounded it slowly. His gaze never left the fire in the thing's eyes. "You ate his starseed. Did you even care? I mean, I know you didn't know, but… You should apologize, you know? That was messed up."

"You must be Ochre." Faustite spoke into cupped hands, leaning ever forward with eir words. "There's something you should know. That soul in your chest? It tastes as good as anyone's. Metallia's chaos -- it doesn't embitter our starseeds. Doesn't poison them. Doesn't stop us from tasting them. Your brother's was delicious."

Ochre lunged for those thin wrists, those brother-killing wrists, and caught them. He wrenched them toward himself, surprised at how little the general resisted. Then black exploded into his face with a deafening ring, hot and caustic, chasing down nose and throat like it wanted to push his way into him. Ochre coughed, struggled to step backward, bumped the desk with his hip, coughed again, squeezed his eyes shut. Every breath felt like fire while the rest of the room sounded a mile away. Faustite spoke near him -- even as Ochre retreated downward, trying to slip under the smoke, Faustite held fast and Ochre felt its too-hot breath on his ear.

Faustite's mouth dripped the words. "Listen and remember. Your brother pulled me into the Negaverse with a blade at my throat. He trained me, bloodied me, broke my bones and taught me that a human life is just a cheap box of band-aids. He spat a starseed into my mouth, made me swallow it. Unzipped one of my arteries and sent me into the street to pull the life out of a good samaritan -- just to make me a good soldier. He hated that I had weaknesses. Moral compunctions.

"Your enemies won't wait. They won't listen to you. Their job is to kill you. If you're weak, you're just an easy kill." Faustite smiled.

Ochre jerked and Faustite kept him close, eir firelight wicking across vague shapes of his ear and hair. Such boisterousness for one that wrenched and coughed so liberally. "It gets worse. I found his journal, read his notes. He planned this, broke me over and over and over so he could cram enough souls into me to warp my body. He thought parahumans made better officers.

"But he never thought I would like it." Faustite spoke so close that ey felt Ochre's outer helix against eir bloody lips. "He wanted to make a monster of me, and all it took was his life." Ey drew a breath, licked the black, sampled the way salt and copper settled in the air. "I bet you taste just like him."

The smog thinned and Ochre found breath again. He could think, he could feel the sweltering heat and the sweat on his skin and the lips against his ear. He could feel his anger, too, and how it rose with each word it said. He could feel how much he hated every defamation. But he couldn't call Faustite wrong.

He couldn't let it continue, either. Ochre wrenched against the hands on his wrists, opened his fingers, and aimed his palm toward Faustite's looming crucible. "You weren't the first." With the last word, a white wisp shot from his hand.

It struck, and the chill dwindled Faustite's flame. Bitter cold erupted bone-deep, spreading from spine to legs, from spine to fingertips, where chill bored out eir bones and throbbed flesh. Eir grip dropped, the hollow of eir speech now dawning on em for how much it damned em. The threat laid, Ochre had more ammunition. More fodder for Schörl's designs to label em a general-eater, a threat to the ranks. Better a youma than something caught between man and monster. Better made wholly subservient than left to have a shred of will. Ey breathed staccato quick while rivulets thinned and congealed into stalactites clutching eir chin.

Ochre coughed the last of the smoke from his lungs, scooted away numbly with the heels of his shoes. He had time -- enough time to clear his lungs with a few good breaths. Enough time to rub the tears out of his eyes with his sleeves. The ringing would fade where Faustite's words wouldn't.

"You weren't the first," he repeated, as he rubbed the last of the tears from his eyes and cleared the last of the smoke from his lungs. Ochre shifted to get to his feet, but a metal heel stepped on one of his braids and pinned it, pinned him, with his head jerked back at an angle. Ochre winced. "That was me."

Hands closed on his collar and lifted him up. Ochre watched impassive fire while he clutched at those hands, all black and warped from too many lives eaten. He kicked uselessly and hit metal, pulling a yelp out of him. Ochre felt more sweat, more heat, their closeness so intolerably sweltering that each breath hurt and his arms grew tired trying to hold Faustite at bay. "I dunno if you know what it's like to be a brother, but I do -- and I know what it's like to be a brother to Umber. He didn't care about people in a usual way, not even me. But you know what? I lived with that."

He felt the desk shove into his back. It hurt, it throbbed afterward, and a teacup fell to the floor with a crash. Papers crumpled under his shoulders when he tried to wriggle away from the sooty general. "But what about you, did you live with it? Did you even try? I bet you got hurt enough times and you bought into his plans. You still swallowed those starseeds. You went out looking for them."

Faustite didn't relent. Those hands rose to his throat. Ochre wrenched at them, pulled their pressure from his windpipe enough to keep speaking. "You're the one who made his plans come true. I know, because I did the same thing. We could've gone to someone and asked for help. You could've gotten a transfer, I could've left home. We were only as helpless as we let ourselves be. I liked my brother, I looked up to him, but he hurt me. And now? Now he can't answer for that. He can't answer for what he did to you, either."

Faustite's thin hands failed to overtake eir aggressor. He kept speaking, kept spitting words like the cheap wastes of breath they were. Better to suck all the oxygen out of the room, better to burn it straight out of the source. For what could he say with his lungs charred open? Let him have his throat. Faustite shifted, pressed diaphragm to diaphragm. Cloth and bitter flesh were backwashes the general could stand in trade for his silence.

Ochre thrashed against the sudden sear. He bit his tongue and stifled the impetus to scream about it. It was like he could taste everything that Faustite was, and feel how it felt with that fire in its stomach. His hands pressed together beyond Faustite's wrists. Drawing breath against the smoke and pain, he spoke again. "You don't get it, do you? Killing him didn't protect you. He can't come back and repent in the next life. You ate your chance at justice for both of us. And you know what's next? You're gonna become all the people that hurt you."

"Then becoming you will balance him out." Faustite's fingers gathered like a hand in sheets. They trespassed the closeness of lovers, betrayed the mundaneness of skin on skin for the single star hanging in a broken sky. Eir mouth creased into a wretched, concentrated frown. What is this impulse in me to worship & crucify anyone who leaves me --

Ice jutted through Faustite's form after a set of hook-like wisps wrenched its arms back and defaced its balance into some weird, contorted thing. That ethereal block froze as solid as the desk. And when Ochre sat up, woozy and dizzy, stiff and sweaty and breathless and crusted over with cooking skin, he pushed himself to his feet. His heart pounding like a war drum, he reached beyond magic ice toward that frozen fire. The whole of it was wild and hateful, with the general frozen in such a way to look both boyish and agelessly resentful -- like it loathed indiscriminately, even itself.

But especially Ochre, he noted, as those flame eyes twitched to follow his every movement. It felt unnerving, watching those eyes. What was in that ice could not move or speak or spit words at him as easily as it spat soot, but it could stare at him in a way that made Ochre wish it could speak. The speech was easier. But Ochre weathered his way to the upper hand -- burnt, choked, and bruised, his uniform half-fused to skin over his stomach, he stood on the precipice to victory. He could end this. He could take his justice for his brother and his qualms against his brother, both from this torchlit monster. He could shut those eyes off for good.

So he reached. The ice parted easily for him, owing to the creature's belly-fire. Then he found the too-hot vest, the too-hot skin, the too-hot bone, and beneath it all, the emptiness surrounding its warped life. He grabbed at that starseed and it shook so feverishly in his hand that he felt his bones try to rattle open. But he closed his fingers around it, pulled it through the melting ice, and opened his hand to look at it.

It was the wrong shape. All jagged and sunken into itself, the starseed wasn't the familiar prism Ochre was used to. It looked more to him like a star in the process of bursting. It looked like it was dying, like it started dying even before it left the general's chest.

Then came a metallic, meaty thud as the magic released its victim. The room fell dark as fire no longer coated it in light. Ochre now stood alone in the violet dim, holding treachery in his hand.

Ochre gazed at it with distance in his eyes. Was this what his brother's looked like? Was this what his would look like if he ate other people's lives like Faustite did? Did it hurt that general to live with something so spiny in its chest?

This thing, this pit of metal and fire -- it used to be a kid. Ochre never knew Faustite before it became what it was now, but he remembered well enough what Schörl and the others said during that seminar. Things like Faustite, they suffered a trauma. Now they were stuck that way, somewhere between youma and not. There wasn't a way to fix it except by leaving the Negaverse. And if they didn't want to do that, then… Best case scenario, they were stuck that way. Worst case scenario, they slowly became youma. Full youma.

If he kept that starseed, this used-to-be-kid wouldn't become a youma. It wouldn't become anything but dead. It wouldn't learn that what it did was wrong, or feel bad about it, or learn to treat people better. It wouldn't learn anything. As Ochre crouched over the smoke-spewing thing, as he looked at the black pits where the eyes were, he realized this wasn't justice at all. This wasn't revenge. This wasn't any different than Faustite grilling him until he couldn't stand up straight. This just spread tragedy and fed its profits to the Negaverse.

The Negaverse, the same entity that raised up and put down his brother. The same organization that ended lives and fed them to a sentience that none of them had seen before. It took people and made them into things like Faustite, and then when people like Ochre got fed up with the cost and did something about it, they just spread more hurt.

This thing was a human once. It probably had family like Ochre did. Maybe some of that family was in the Negaverse. It was Schörl's subordinate and it had subordinates of its own. One of them probably liked it, for some reason, and that one would come after Ochre for the same reasons that Ochre came after Faustite. Then, eventually, someone else would overtake Ochre and hold his starseed in their hands. Then what? All it did was prove Umber right.

And Ochre didn't want Umber to be right.

As he straightened up and held his hand downward, Ochre decided that Faustite was living its punishment. That taking its starseed was an interruption -- an easy way out. Maybe someday, this once-human would realize it brooded and endured and suffered enough, and would purify to become a kid again. For a while, Ochre held that possibility in his hands. Then the weariness flooded back in, hand in hand with the pain, and Chaos urged him to eat it. To complete the circle, to experience what Faustite had in ending Umber. But a life wasn't just a cheap box of band-aids.

So he dropped that seed, and before it touched ground, he vanished from the space.

Fire boiled over eir grate and smothered cool darkness in its orange blaze. The youma general drew a sooty breath, roused to the ache of a hard day's labor, to an empty room with no perpetrator and no evidence of eir assault. No glacial remains puddled on the floor, no hair but for its burnt scent mixed with flesh on the air. Faustite latched arms around eir stool, then hauled emself upright. There, on the desk, was nothing but scattered paperwork. A few smoldering scraps of black uniform remained until they, too, disappeared. Faustite drew a few more breaths, eir palm pressed over the hurt in eir chest.

Then ey kicked the stool aside. Swept an arm across the desk and disposed of its contents. As papers fluttered to the floor, as ink spilled, as passion still burned bright in eir gut, ey upended the desk in a heave of frustration. Then ey closed eir eyes and tried, with every wick of thought, to wrench Ochre back through space to that very room. Seconds passed with no answer.

Once the last paper settled, that office sat silent. Empty but for Faustite. Ey pealed out eir anger against that quiet.