Your fists are making contact with the glass of your cryoregeneration chamber before you can fully process where you are. Your memories of this are blurry, a little frantic, an act of desperation upon feeling viscosity all around you, inside your engines, coating your very protoform like an uncomfortable mixture of wax, water, and motoroil. And though you do not need to breathe (there are no lungs for the viscous liquid to invade), you still feel like you are suffocating.
Your next memory is simple. The floor you fall to is dirty and has been unused for quite some time. (a beeping makes itself known.) There are no medical beds within the room you find yourself in-- A room you know had once been used by the medical staff, because you had seen it once, a long time ago, when someone had come to check your pulse and make sure you still remembered your name.
(You don't remember this. It is a faded, fake memory handed to you by the machine that fed your spark and kept you alive for 1 year.
Though you don't remember that, either.
The beeping becomes louder, incessant. You cannot fully hear it.)
The room has been meticulously emptied of anything that might have once made it identifiable as an active emergency room, with no machines or beds or chambers beyond your own. Had you not broken out, you might have found the gentle accumulation of dust on the glass of your viscous prison.
You shake your head, cough, throw up. Your insides feel like a burning fire, licking its way from your tanks all the way up your throat and out your intake. You are idly aware that if you ignite now, the whole room will catch on fire.
The beeping turns continuous, now one single sound. Something akin to a pulse monitor-- but you do not hear it.
What you see is a pair of pedes of someone you might later recognize as Shadow Weaver-- a medic that had stayed behind to ensure you had someone to wake up to, if you ever did wake up. You recall thinking, distantly, that he had perhaps only used him as an excuse to escape the war.
The next string of events is even more confusing, things that are retold to you days later, when your hearing has been fixed and you have thrown up what was left of the cryoregenerative liquid from your tanks. Shadow Weaver had carried you to the next available shuttle --The planet, you think, had been abandoned months prior. The war cannot (will not) stop because of one single soldier.-- and taken you to the nearest active base, where you had been promptly been tubed and put through rigorous testing to ensure your full recovery.
( Your legs are tricky. They rebuild them from scratch. Shadow Weaver does not spare a moment's time to let you know it is not perfect. Your feeling receptors too damaged, the protoform underneath beyond saving. When he touches your leg, you feel it like the prickle of a thorn. When they give you walking lessons weeks later, you feel your old legs in pieces and you cannot muffle the scream. )
Months later, when you walk at an angle and are forced to use a cane, they still send you back to war. Because of course they do-- why else spend a year with you in a coma? Why spend tiring months teaching you how to walk again, dealing with your phantom pains and your memory loss and the midnight nightmares of a mission you cannot fucking remember if not to send the Good Little Soldier back to war?
(You find you cannot blame them. You cannot remember the last two years of the war-- and you find you cannot bring yourself to want to learn.
You step back in line with a modified cane in your hands and legs you wish you could rip off.)
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