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. . . harvest . . .

The word -- spoken and repeated again -- ever-so-faintly rattled something loose in his head. It wasn't quite the feeling of remembering, but the feeling that there was something he should remember, something that harvest had struck a chord with. Maybe not a new memory, but -- something like one. Quartz stared at the fragile little life floating on his palm, listening to Schörl's explanation and wondering if his mind was going to provide him with any further answers.

He was tired in a bone-deep way, which didn't help, and trying to focus on the lesson -- but the feeling of almost-memory was so rare, so landmark, that Quartz was on the point of interrupting his teacher to mention it, to ask her what she made of it --

Except that he became lost in the words put it into your mouth and the meaning of what she was telling him to do.

Quartz immediately tried to jerk his head to the side to see Schörl's face. "No!" he pealed, in disbelief as much as alarm, almost dropping the starseed.

This was the sort of thing you tended to know was a waste of breath as soon as you said it, and that you hoped was no worse than that, as repercussions went.

The man was already going to die. Quartz had understood that from the beginning. It was just that the cannibalism had come as a horrifying surprise.

Quartz trembled at the force of her movement, the sight of the starseed, the feel of Schörl's tongue along the sensitive outer shell of his ear. Fear may've been a constant companion, but that didn't fail to render some situations more viscerally alarming than others. Any time she was close enough to breathe on him, close enough to -- any time she was close enough for the possibilities of what she might be up to to be unpredictably infinite. Any time she was close enough to smell his terror of her. Any time he'd ******** something up, or opened his mouth and let some unwise, unamenable answer leave it. Any time he failed to be sweet and pliant and tractable when he knew better.

He didn't need to be reprimanded twice. There had been enough corrections in the past for him to know with great certainty that raising the stakes with Schörl was not in his best interest.

He wasn't a human being who belonged to himself. The latitude of refusing unpleasant orders was a privilege granted to some favorites -- not a right, and certainly not his right. Quartz was a murderer now . . . so why not a cannibal, too? Surely he'd already committed the worse of the two offenses.

"Of course, General," he made himself wheeze, nostrils flaring with effort of trying to make his body obey his mind's commands.

Put the starseed in your mouth.

Don't throw up.

Bite down.

Don't throw up.

Swallow.

Don't gag. Keep it down. Don't throw up.

Once it was cracked and swallowed, he clamped a hand over his mouth to ensure he couldn't retch any of it back up and have to try again. His fingers dug hard into his skin, his thumb leaving a stinging impression where it pressed against the abraded flesh on the side of his face he'd purposely scraped up earlier.

It hurt. His other arm curled around his midsection, meant to steady the disturbed protests of his stomach, didn't help either.

It didn't matter. None of those feelings helped, none of them anchored him. They faded away -- the stinging of all his nicks and scrapes dissolved into memory. Quartz felt nothing at all except eerily, noncorporeally <******** amazing.

It was so disturbing that he wanted to cry. Except -- he felt too good to cry. He felt like he had died and, against all reason, gone to heaven.

Alcohol made him feel soft and sleepy and numb. This made him feel desperately, electrically awake. It felt so right and so good that he would've given almost anything to make it stop. He never wanted to do it again.

The injuries he'd done to himself were gone as thoroughly as if they'd never been. His sweat had cooled, and he felt energized and fresh as a teenager.

His mind was buzzing, incoherent, distant. He wished it would slow down or stop -- it was making him restless. He was frightened, still, but the fear was different now. It was hard to say for sure how he felt.

"How many is too many?" he asked, because the response was unusually vague, for her. Then, in rapid-fire succession: "Or isn't it documented? Do some people enjoy it? Do you?"

'So far as I'm currently aware, there's been no formal experimentations.'

Even in his buzzing state -- or maybe especially because of it -- this struck Quartz as sort of idly interesting. Not on the face of it, because, being real, he had no interest whatsoever in running youma drug experiments on human beings (even ones he disliked) . . . but sort of interesting as a data point in the always difficult to discern connect-the-dots portrait of his gaoler herself.

What holds you back, Mengele? he wondered. You, the same person who murdered a bartender in a crowded venue just for mixing a piss-poor drink. Certainly it's not because you think the Negaverse is such a font of realized potential . . . if it were up to you, I imagine most of the useless ones would've long since been repurposed into shock troops and gone to further your research by now. After all, if I can look at so many of them and see hopelessly flawed products, what must they look like through the ******** monocle by which you view the world? Which of them stops looking like an engine and starts looking like gasoline and scrap metal?

Are your superiors that much more talented than you? Are you that intimidated?

Does it gall you that for all your machinations, all your careful thought and precision -- for all your diamond-edged talent -- no matter how high you sit, there are inferior people sitting higher than you still?

Or are you just biding your time?

It was still not enough to see her fully for whatever she was -- not enough to bring the picture into focus, yet. He lived with her, and still, even long exposure couldn't make her vulnerable. She was impenetrable: a General at every moment. Committed. She gave no answers she didn't want to give.

"It was supposed to intimidate me," he said, to acknowledge he'd understood her answer. "At the club, when you moved your hand into my strike. That was meant to disturb me . . . only I didn't know enough to understand."

'You've killed him!!'

He hadn't understood. Hadn't believed. Quartz supposed that lessened the guilt, a little.

Just -- not enough to offset the weight of the dead man's nametag pinned to his shirt. Plastic had never felt so heavy.

"Your orders, General," he assented quietly, pushing back to his feet. Her threat was still right at the top of his mind -- another starseed for every refusal, for every purposeful delay. He went back to the edge of the rooftop again, looking to line up his hop down to the fire escape. Trying to figure out, as quickly as possible, how he was going to isolate just one other person to murder next.

(God.)

He looked back, only briefly -- but not from hesitation; he looked back (trying not to let his gaze fall on the dead security officer, Dunn) instead with a clarification.

"Am I actually stronger -- " he put the question to Schörl, " -- or is that all in my head?"

The last thing he needed was to start owing his General more starseeds because he'd gotten high and tried to start punching holes in the door of a bank safe or something.

Quartz did not have a plan when he jumped off the roof.

Although, in the general course of things, he wasn't exactly a big fan of rushing into danger without a plan, the operative part of that sentence was really more that he wasn't a big fan of rushing into danger, period. Danger was never where he wanted to be. Not having a plan was unfortunately pretty commonplace, in that regard. Life and Stroud seldom afforded him the luxury.

He thudded heavily down the fire escape, metal stairs groaning against their anchorage as Quartz descended. Some part of him supposed he worried about the metal giving out -- but then, he imagined that if that occured, Schörl would still expect him to figure out a way to solve that problem before he went splat in the alleyway below.

Quartz, as it turned out, however, never even made it to street level.

About three floors down, he passed by a window where a woman was standing, staring upward as he descended. Probably the noise had drawn her attention. She spotted him through the glass, appeared to give a huge gasp, and then clutched a hand tight around the front of her shirt, over her heart.

She looked to be a septuagenarian or so. Her home was full of doilies and little curio objects, and peppered here and there with overfed cats. There were mothballs on the windowsill that caught shards of glass as Quartz lifted one gold boot and unceremoniously kicked the window in.

He'd decided on a few pertinent facts. One, that she'd seen him, and it was probably best that few people see him committing suspicious acts of fire escape climbing near a murder scene if possible. Two, that she was old and probably lived alone (not counting the cats, who did not seem to be Mauvians). Three, that she was already apparently having a heart attack.

Schörl had not set any particular requirements as to the starseed he brought back, as long as it was a live one. This meant that an old lady on the verge of death, while potentially not the juiciest starseed (he wasn't all too certain how that worked, but it was possible her battery was low), still counted.

It was a little easier this time, though not as easy as he would've liked. She didn't struggle -- she just stumbled backwards onto the couch, staring with a gaping fishmouth, making him all too aware of how despicable he was. It took him a few seconds before he'd negotiated the starseed safely out of her chest. He imagined he could smell her harsh perfume on it.

Quartz didn't bring Schörl back any souvenirs -- he wasn't keen on the possibility of wearing them, or seeing them around on a daily basis -- just scurried and hopped his way back up to the rooftop when he was done, then retrieved the starseed from his pants pocket and held it out for her approval.

"As you ordered, General," he said crisply. Hopefully there'd be no eating this time.

Unconditional approval from Schörl was a rare and difficult thing to earn -- Quartz found it, for the most part, foreign to his own experience. She had the highest possible standards, and Quartz was hindered in meeting them by the limitations of his own lingering moral qualms. He supposed the part of him that was conditioned to crave her approval hadn't yet managed to fully smother the part that found this all disturbing.

Well, in time, it would happen. She always seemed certain of it -- and that made him certain of it, in turn. In time, if he waited. Someday there'd be nothing left. Beautiful and perfect in Metallia's service.

Today, at least he was done. She'd set the syllabus for their next lesson, and given him a homework assignment to busy him in the meantime. There were no more murders to be committed.

Quartz reached out to put his hand in Schörl's, and longed for the ordered silence of Stroud's flat, for the four walls and ceiling of the only place he knew as home.