my teeth are pressed against the pavement

⠀⠀⠀ carrd ╱  prompts ⠀⠀⠀ 7 threads ╱ 3 starters ╱ 0 prompts

“You’re on the FBI’s list?”

It’s not scepticism that draws their brow down, but the kind of mathematical confusion of coming to the end of an equation and finding x = 2x. 621’s focus shifts inwards, flat red iris making a dozen minute movements as they navigate their HUD to pull up their feed of interesting persons and the cash value attached to them.

A moment passes. Two.

The bakery owner’s got angry eyes.

Not just a regular angry, but the kind of bone-deep, fucked-by-the-world angry 621 thinks you can only find on the giving-or-receiving end of personal violence. They don’t ask— asking stopped being their job a while ago. They’re just here for the sweets.

“Jordi Chin is a regular now?” he asks, incredulity barely contained by the bribery of freshly-baked melonpan. He tears a single limb off the green-shelled turtle and chews on it and this new information in turn.

They feel Wrench’s eyes on QUIXOTIC like eyes on their own skin.

The last time they sortied out, they’d noticed a thirty-millisecond delay in their FCS that hadn’t been there a week ago. When system diagnostics hadn’t shown anything unusual, they figured it had to be an issue with the hardware itself, and so hauled the whole surfboard-sized component out into the hangar, cracking it open to expose the delicate printed circuits to the world.

Capacitors the size of soda cans. Chipsets the size of 621’s hand, each one a highly complex computer in their own right. They're not sure exactly which part Wrench is interested in, just that he certainly is, in that way their half-mechanical brain makes them decently sure about most things happening in their peripheral. The Coral grafted to their neurons reasons a hundred times faster than their human brain can. They trust the inherited intuition.

It’s the back of the café, James up on a small stepladder to drop the mangled shells of some old server equipment into the locked electronics disposal they keep. He’s hips-bent, torso lodged in the snarl of metal and wire, navigating by phone light because the halogen bulb above the back door provides more noise than light.

When he leans back up, Danny is there. The light of his phone paints his face in pallid horror-thriller brilliance.

He should be ready for it.

He isn’t.

He spooks. The tense of his shoulders and snap-to the shadowy figure that resolves is pathetic enough, but the inhale? The unmistakable, hissing-soft gasp?

He adjusts his glasses, misaligned from the time he spent in the bin. Of course. Nervous twitches? Who has those? Not James-fucking-Park.

The holding cell of… wherever this is, what might qualify as a base’s mess if it wasn’t so SHITTY and also CLEARLY HAUNTED, isn’t actually so bad, now that they’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s SHITTY and also CLEARLY HAUNTED. They keep vitacow on hand, at least. Or, 621 can usually find themselves a small square carton of the melon-soy drink, emblazoned with that same CHEERFUL, ROUND cow that triggers their cuteness aggression without fail. It's always chilled too, despite the temperature of the place being just-below-ambient and the fact that they haven't seen a working fridge.

They try not to think about it. If they think too long about the thermodynamics of this place, or how they get from A to B, or anything about the dream logic the other realm operates on, the Coral starts to hiss and their brain starts growing spikes inside their skull. That’s not great.

Come to think of it, they're not sure they aren't dreaming.

That's not great, either.

“… and I said, ‘The unit test worked?’ I’M THE UNIT, AND I’M NOT WORKING!” They huff, rocking themselves lazily on the back legs of the too-small chair, elongated Belter arm hanging so far down that their mechanical knuckles scrape the ground on every push. “This is why nobody gets to touch my augmentation.”

they meet and the relationship progresses from "how dare he (talk to me)" to "how dare he (make infuriatingly valid criticisms of my mindset)" to "how dare he (not kiss me already)" because emotional vulnerability and sharpening yourself on someone else's big sexy brain is one of the most chef's kiss ways to grow into a relationship

because they view life and fate as cyclical, their views of their prophetic visions differs from traditional interpretations: visions are memories, remembering what happened before and will happen again.

and while they choose to devote their time to helping others cross the threshold of life and death peacefully, they’re well aware of their most fearsome and destructive powers. those powers that chill, fear, and sap life away; those powers that evoke the frigid god of endings, rymrgand. and like rymrgand, death follows them— it’s not uncommon for them to be seen as a bad omen, since where death goes, rue follows shortly behind. it’s also why, though they’re not quick to violence, they can’t technically be called a pacifist: associating with rymrgand, rue feels a duty to occasionally act as the agent of death itself.

the differences between the two gods, and how rue aims to emulate them, is something pillars itself puts best:

young students are often confused by berath and rymrgand's seemingly overlapping roles in holding dominion over death. berath oversees the cycle of life, death, and rebirth; rymrgand oversees the cold, destructive act of death itself - this difference is often difficult for novices to appreciate until they've lost a loved one and endured the absence for a time - it is berath that determines we will be reborn just as certainly as we will die, but rymrgand is the executioner's axe - rymrgand shows us that all life ends in stillness.