#verica

pule arrives at the apartment and, instead of a dead office filled with blood and viscera, sees the same but with an unknown figure still standing in there. unknown, but familiar enough - he works on the warframe project, after all, he's caught some glances of the final products of what he enables.

what he doesn't know is why there is one in the apartment, and also, where the actual resident of the apartment is. because in a situation where something horrifying has just happened in a location where your loved one was known to be, you kind of want to know that, and he desperately wants to shout his name and go to turn all the carpets upside down.

however, there's still this strange warframe in the office. and pule is going into hysterics because what the actual fuck. and the warframe spots him, and- seems about as afraid of him as he is of it. it's covered in blood and guts, and pule faintly wonders why it chose the damn apartment for its fight, and why it seems fucking afraid of him, some nobody human nerd.

it moves around - pule is frozen to the fucking floor and can only look - with the gait of a newly-born deer not quite used to its limbs yet. the one thing it seems to know better than its own fucking body is the layout of the fucking office. fucking how.

it wipes its hands on a glasses-wiping cloth jay keeps in the drawer. it grabs a paper pad and a pencil from another. and it writes:

it's me. i'm sorry.

and pule... well, he has no choice but to suddenly believe it - him - and all of the worst rumours about the Old War and the soldiers fighting it.

please help me, jay writes.

pule knows what happens to warframes that aren't guided carefully into their new reality. he knows that the biology doesn't line up quite right yet, he knows the procedures.

he hates performing them on his friend.

---

verica is in about the same state when she finds out. they - well, pule, because jay can't speak anymore - call her, and she abandons the tour immediately, is home less than a full day later.

together, they grieve, all three of them.

---

jay's favourite students are lost. pule meets them in the hallways, has to field their painful questions with answers he knows are false but any others would end him (if not the students, too) up in at least the same fate as his friend if not worse. and yet, he thinks it's probably better they think him dead than know him alive the way he is.

---

it's not like the other way is any less bad - jay is as anxious about his students as they are about him, and he's guilt-ridden for leaving them behind like this, without explanation, without substitute, without guidance. pule can never seem to remember enough about how the students are doing to satisfy his friend.

they get a replacement professor eventually. not all of the students make it through the exams. jay is distraught.

---

verica quit music and has gone - well, pule would say full conspiracy-theorist, except all three of them have gone head-first down the same rabbit hole. she's underground, organising, resisting, and pule and jay are so worried for her. she says she'll be fine, but the fire in her eyes and the pain when she looks at jay when he's not looking back doesn't tell pule that there's a lot of self-preservation left in there anymore.

pule doesn't know what to do. his own work has become... well, it didn't change. but now he knows. and that makes it all so much worse.

he wonders which parts of how his friend now lives - if you can call it alive, which jay sometimes very vehemently denies - were directly influenced by his changes to the strain. it's a thought he can never hold for long.

but he stays. because this is deimos and these are the orokin and the rent is fucking stupid, especially when you need a larger-than-usual apartment for one person and one warframe-in-hiding.

and because like this, he's still in the warframe project, and he can still make differences, right at the heart of everything that made their lives turn so rotten. differences like feeding verica information, like leaving a few bits of the strain intact that protect the warframes' senses of self through the process of 'stabilizing' them.

---

the one thing jay loves is that his theorems were all true.

---

eventually, pule and verica decide they've done all they can in their current positions. the warframe project is getting ramped up, which tells pule - along with the information from verica's network - all he needs to know about the progression of the old war. a good side effect is that the security has become lax.

he instructs jay in what he will need to do, despite the clear distress it puts him in, because there is no other way. he makes sure the apartment is safe, that he and verica both have an alibi and no one will look for them for a few days, that the neighbours suddenly find themselves in possession of so much more money and a cheap travel flyer and have conveniently gone on vacation.

it's not like they'll need it anymore anyway. no warframe has a bank account.

he steals the samples.

---