Lotus Ink

How it happened, how broken you were, it did not matter. You were gone, eyes dull and lips grey with the void of a promise unfulfilled:

"I'll wait for you," you'd told him. "When it's done, we'll leave here together."

The last time Heisenberg smiled was when you'd spoken next: "We'll find a new home somewhere, Karl. And we could - I'd like to get married."

He'd spluttered at the time - Karl Heisenberg, the Iron Steed, Lord of Metal and commander of an army of the undead prepared to rise to battle, was flustered.

"Wh-whatever you want, Buttercup, we'll do it. As soon as we're outta here." He'd kissed you, but his mind was already on the battle ahead. "...Now go. Hide. I'll find you when it's over."

Now, he lifted you in his arms. Gently.

Your body left behind a macabre shadow; a hue of red stained the ground where you'd fallen.

Crimson, not quite starting to brown.

It meant you'd died not long before Heisenberg found you.

It meant that he had hope.

"C'mon, Buttercup." His voice rang flat through the silence of the decimated village. "We're not done yet."

He stormed towards the Heisenberg Factory. In his wake, the village tore itself apart as every piece of metal that once held it together dragged along - following an overwhelming pull of magnetic power.

It was all Heisenberg could do not to fall apart, not to give in to rage and grief and let his body mutate again. He held on to stone-faced denial while carrying you, while realizing how cold you truly were. How quiet. How gone.

"-No." The factory's gates crumpled out of the way. Powerlines sparked overhead. "You're not gone, baby. Not if I can help it."

The metal fortress peeled open before its master; Heisenberg tore a furious path to the nearest operating room with no regard for the wreckage of his ancestral home. None of it mattered any longer - not the historic facilities that had amassed the Heisenberg family's wealth, nor his own innovations for production of Soldaten. They were obsolete, ghosts of a past he was eager to let die with Mother Miranda.

Karl Heisenberg thought of the future and laid you carefully upon an operating table.

He remembered your smile and the warmth of your touch while carving you open.

"Easy, now," he murmured. "This won't take long. I'll fix this. Then we'll leave." The sharp snap of a rib, and another, before he plunged a knife deeper into your chest cavity. Crimson stained his gloves, his coat.

Once upon a time, you'd laughed to yourself and held your hands up, palms out. "Karl Heisenberg, don't you dare!"

Clad head-to-toe in blood-slick P.P.E., Heisenberg had held a glistening heart towards you. He'd cast the smarmiest grin your way while standing over a corpse halfway to becoming a Soldat Zwei.

He'd crooned your name over the hum of factory ambience. "Don't you get it? You hold my heart!" He'd squeezed the organ a bit too hard in his awkwardness, and blood spouted out of the arteries. "-I'm being fucking romantic!"

"This is disgusting!" you'd shrieked, while he chased you across the room.

Your laughter had echoed through the factory.

He would make sure that it echoed again.

Karl Heisenberg looked at you, now hours after the first cut was made, and reviewed his work: Chest cavity emptied out. Your heart carefully preserved in a sealed flask. Meta-albumin pumped into your veins, replacing blood lost. A reactor installed where your heart and lungs once functioned. And a piece of his own Cadou was nestled inside the reactor, a budding of life and power to be imbued into your dormant body. It was knit with a sampling from your own heart. Experimental to be sure, but he was counting on the Cadou to bond with your flesh and sustain you in the way his own gift did. To preserve your mastery over yourself.

He didn't want another Soldat. He wanted you, body and self and memories all.

And he would get you back, whatever it took. There was no freedom in a life without you.

He'd realized that, not so long ago, when the two of you were sitting atop the roof of the Heisenberg Factory and watching the stars. He'd never stargazed before - much less while wrapped in a blanket and holding someone dear to him at his side.

"I'm happy," you'd murmured.

"Huh?" Heisenberg glanced away from the expanse of glittering light and saw something more wondrous: You laying your head upon his chest, wrapping him in a fierce hug, and smiling dreamily.

How his heartbeat had thundered.

"I'm happy," you repeated. "With you. However long it takes to try to leave here, I... don't really mind." Your fingers had bunched in his shirt. "As long as I get to be with you, it's all right."

It was one of the few times that Lord Heisenberg's eyes welled with unbidden tears.

"Yeah," he'd choked out. "Well-" he'd sniffed, "that's too bad. Because I'm getting you out of here." He'd cleared his throat. "So drink in this view, Buttercup. We won't be here much longer."

You'd made some dismissive sound and just nuzzled harder into his chest. Heisenberg stared up at the stars and wondered where in the universe you had come from and how, of all people and places on this planet, you had wound up here. With him. Happy.

Two people truly happy with each other. It made Heisenberg feel like nothing else in the world mattered.

That was an odd feeling, for someone who had lived in bitter hatred for decades.

It was wonderful.

It should have been enough.

"I'm sorry," he said now, looking at your ashen body outfitted with metal. "You were enough. I - you..." His voice echoed raw among dead machinery and brick walls. "I should have held onto you," he said your name. "I never should have let you go. I just..." Heisenberg touched your hand -icy, stiff, wrong, gone- "...I wanted the world for you. -For us." He crossed the room to an industrial power switch. "I made you a part of my mission to destroy Mother Miranda." His fingers closed around the lever, his touch trembling. "But you... are my mission." He watched your dark Cadou reactor, the absence of a rise and fall to your chest. "...I promise that I'm not going to fail you ever again."

Karl Heisenberg threw the switch. Braced himself for the rush of voltage, the rain of sparks, the familiar jerking of limbs. The return of life to a once inert body.

It always worked. He had perfected this craft. You were going to be his final masterpiece.

But nothing happened.

The Heisenberg Factory, broken and dormant, made mockery of the vain scientist. With dread, he realized that the war had rendered his facilities non-functional. The operating room was more suited as a coffin for his love than its resurrection.

For now.

Heisenberg was not one to accept defeat. He was furious, to be sure, but that fueled him. He would have his victory. He would have you back. And so he worked - nonstop. For the next few days, Heisenberg traveled to the Moreau Reservoir to bring the last standing water wheel back online. He built a slapdash power line leading to the factory and down to the operating room where you lay. Nights were spent by your side, toiling diligently to reverse the signs of decay. He injected more meta-albumin into your veins; equipped your limbs and fingers with hinge-jointed braces to aid with postmortem stiffness. None of his efforts returned the hale blush to your ashen skin or the fullness of your soft flesh from its sunken state.

Yet Heisenberg did not give up. Having successfully restored power to the operating room, he finally flipped the switch again.

Volts surged into your body, danced across every nerve, sent sparks fountaining from the metal ports of Heisenberg's augmentations.

And your fingers... twitched.

It took every ounce of willpower in the Lord of Metal not to run to your side and grasp your hand. The voltage was unsafe, even for him. And this was no time for risks.

The Cadou reactor implanted as your machine-heart hummed, blossomed with orange light - ignited.

Your eyelids slid open - dull, glazed pupils stared unseeing at cobwebs and steel beams overhead.

Your lips parted...

"Come on," Heisenberg breathed. "Come back to me, Buttercup..."

A raspy exhale exited your throat in a toneless sigh. Your chest caved down... and did not rise again.

The voltage stopped. Your hand ceased moving.

The operating room stank of burnt hair and ozone.

Heisenberg stood frozen. A rush of cold dread washed from his face down to his toes, left him numb. "-No." He ran to your side and observed your vacant half-open eyes, your gaping mouth. He clasped your lifeless hand. "NO."

Dread flipped to rage - Heisenberg hauled your body into his arms with such force that cords and wires ripped out of your altered flesh. He let them fall askew and pulled down the ceiling to form a stairway of steel beams. Immediately he was out of the factory and back in his ruined purgatory. The village was entirely silent. Only the wind and a far-off howling wolf accompanied his storming bootsteps towards the mountains.

Heisenberg approached a fissure in the earth formed by the explosive death-blossom of Mother Miranda's merge with the Megamycete. He dropped to the ground inside - cradling your head out of instinct. And he followed lifeless black mycelia down, down, down.

The Megamycete was a curious thing indeed. Heisenberg had never known it existed until Mother Miranda razed the village with it. Now he knew it to be the source of his very own Cadou, and his ferromagnetic power.

It was still largely an enigma to Heisenberg when he entered a cavernous underground space. Distant moonlight weakly illuminated the space since the earth had been rent open. He was able to barely make out the slick stone floor and dripping stalagmites.

And a massive, grotesque, curiously fetal organism suspended in the center of it all.

The fungal root thrummed with a weak pulse, but pulse it did - Heisenberg felt it. His Cadou squirmed with steady waves of energy, set his nerves on edge, incited him to reach out with an inkling of his power.

He flicked his fingers and fanned them out. The metal braces broke off of your body and skittered over stone and shadow, propelled by a shockwave of his Cadou's power.

The Megamycete moved.

Heisenberg's brows raised. "So... you are still alive." He paced towards the fungal root, feeling its heartbeat thunder in his Cadou as he drew close. "I suppose I should thank you for my... gift." He stopped short of the patter of organic fluids dripping from the root, and held you tightly. Protectively. "-But here's the deal. I want her back. And you... you need food, don't you."

Heisenberg inhaled - braced himself - and expelled a surge of power with such force that sweat beaded upon his brow. He planted his feet and reached out with his ferromagnetism with wanton greed, with a manic, powerful pull -

Heisenberg clawed one hand, and the earth shredded.

Soldaten burst through the cavern walls and swarmed towards the Megamycete. Uniformed agents of the B.S.A.A. were dragged, stiff and mangled and long-dead all, by the metal in their clothing and gear.

The fungal root squirmed, thrummed - reached. A crimson-black tendril extended from the foetal organism and snatched up corpse after corpse, absorbing them into its mass, until the tendril itself thickened and pulsed into the ground. Heisenberg felt a twitch of power in his own Cadou and understood the Megamycete to have fed and grown.

For the first time in days, Karl Heisenberg cracked a slight, moon-sliver smile. "Seems like we could be useful to each other. That's good." He gazed down at your stiffened form. "-Because I'll do whatever it takes. She will live again."

He looked into your dulled eyes, remembering how joyfully they once sparkled. How a simple glance, a passing smile, for him, shook Heisenberg to his core.

And when Heisenberg looked back at the Megamycete, he could have sworn you were reflected inside its glistening mass: Watching him. Smiling. Hopeful.

Were you an illusion? A manifestation? Or a happy memory?

He extended a hand to the reflection. Reached for you.

And the Megamycete took hold.