The flowers - those damned little purple bastards - how had they spread so fast? He remembers some of it, in fragments - text on a phone screen, a cold knot of dread in his stomach, crawling horror at a comment bitten off almost too late. That must have been when the flowers started, pops of colour spreading like a disease over his skin and he locked his jaw against the chest-searing urge to speak speak confess.
He can’t. It’ll all fall apart again, if people know - it’ll be back to the fearful glances, the flinches at his every movement: that stuttering, shaky, bone-deep fear of Him that tainted every person in Fabletown, once they were reminded. Once they saw, again.
(Pain and rage and red and neon in an alleyway, and she’s frozen with it, staring at him, at the blood, at the way the pathetic little insects finally break under his claws, and she was the one who had never been scared, not that first night or any other, but here in the rain it’s there in the whites of her eyes -)
He deserves it, of course he deserves it, but it’s been such a relief - like a balm on a burn he hadn’t realized was there - just to be nobody here, to be simply a person and not a nightmare whispered about in the darkness. He’d gotten acclimatized (gotten selfish) to something he’d never known he could have, and now the words to bring it all crashing down are burning from the effort to keep them in.
He grunts with the effort to lever himself up - when did he fall? Are those paws or claws or hands, scrabbling on the grass in front of him? - and fails, falls, lies there trying to pant through a clenched jaw.
He just has to outlast it. Just wait it out, and no one will have to know.
A puff of steam against the cold. This one’s pathetic.
“Are you where these flowers are coming from...?”
Who finds him is someone of the opposite--someone who’s lost well-earned and relished infamy. A robot with it’s own will and a demi-god complex who’s only worth is derived from being a more destructive force than anything it could meet.
Scolding from his own so-called ‘father’ is even taken with pride; what would such a stupid and petty man know about what it takes to be the greatest warrior? What place does he have to pick problems with what he built?
Bass, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing Dr. Wily has ever built. So far.
Weakness is what he is now, and he loathes it more than anything. Even back home...he still couldn’t beat who he was built to be better than. Who he was better than. Inconceivable...
There’s a soul inside of him, that’s what stirs these emotions so.
Overblown arrogance that covers insecurity.
The lack of nasal passages doesn’t stop the creeping of pollen, but what grows underneath his armor and inside his joints is something different. It’s gone unnoticed so far--unnatural Lichen, crawling outward.
All Bass knows of, that whatever this is, it has to be some sort of organic virus. So he crouches down, observing the man below him with indifference. Assuming himself immune.
“You can’t even answer me, can you?”
