"Gerald?"
A voice through the shabby metal door.
...Is it morning already? I should have kept track of the time.
He pulls himself off the desk chair. The handbook is still open in front of him at a page he stopped taking in some hours ago. His neck has locked at an angle.
"What is it, Lisa?"
He puts a hand against the side of his own head and presses, because there has been a voice in there since he woke up and it has stopped saying only the one word.
"It's time for work. Haah... what would you do without me?"
She's putting a bright face on it. He can hear her doing it. Then the pause, and the shift:
"Are you still caught up on what happened yesterday...?"
Annoying.
...
Wait, what.
No. I don't think that. I don't think that at all.
If I'd been faster yesterday, if I hadn't been standing in an elevator like an idiot while Yuri got—
It wouldn't have mattered. And you know that.
You aren't fit to be a captain.
Gerald scratches at the side of his face and his breathing goes up a gear.
The silence stretches long enough that Lisa gives up on it.
"...I guess I'll see you around, Gerald."
Her footsteps go off down the corridor.
She shouldn't even be here at all.
Fuck you.
He gets his uniform on with his hands shaking and goes out through the door hard enough to bang it off the wall.
— — —
A few clerks in maroon give him looks on the way down.
Probably because I overreacted a bit yesterday.
Whatever. What's done is done.
He doesn't stop at the break room. He goes straight to the armory, opens his locker, and takes down the navy suit and the mace.
Penitence sits in his hand like it always does. Cross-head, the skulls set into the middle of it, the red thorns wound tight around them.
There's something new on the shelf.
A pistol. White, bone-white, ceramic-looking with a spray of dark red across the slide like something burst against it and dried there.
Gerald picks it up.
Justice doesn't rest.
The voice comes up much louder with the thing in his hand, and it is not the small polite one from the feather behind his ear. It's the same one, grown.
Neither should you.
You must correct them before it's too late.
...Yeah.
The way the clerks were looking at me on the way down here. Maybe they don't understand what it takes to carry responsibility for—
Gerald slaps himself across the face hard enough that his ears ring.
Careful.
Careful.
He holsters the pistol on his off side and stands there for a second with both hands flat on the locker shelf.
My head is starting to feel... crowded. That's the word. Crowded.
I don't know how much more of this I can hold.
Beep. Beep.
[UTILIZE CAUTION. COMMENCE ATTACHMENT WORK: O-01-67.]
He goes.
— — —
He takes the long way past the containment spine, because his legs go that way before he decides anything.
O-02-56.
There's a viewport in the door. Gerald looks through it.
The perch is still bolted where it was bolted, and there is nothing on it, because the thing in the room does not fit on it anymore. It's standing on the floor with its back to him. Grey and white, the wings folded and enormous, talons the length of his fingers spread on the concrete, and a head that has stopped being a bird's head in any way he can put words to.
The red is still there. In the middle of the chest, five lobes, exactly where it always was.
It turns and looks at him.
And behind its head, faintly, there is a ring.
...
I did that.
I don't know how. But nobody else has been in that room.
He walks away before it can decide anything about him.
"Yo. Kid. You alright?"
Mao kicks off the wall he's leaning against and comes over carefully, cigarette down to the filter, shaggy pale hair falling in his eyes.
Am I alright.
"Yeah. On my way to work the new Abnormality."
Mao looks at the dark indentations under Gerald's eyes and his own expression does something.
"Say, uh. Why weren't ya at break this mornin'?" He tries for lightness. "Was gonna tell ya about the booze I managed to sneak in last night."
"I didn't have time." It comes out flat and it keeps going flat. "I have more important things to do as captain now."
Mao's face empties.
He takes half a step back.
"Oh. Er. Sorry. Didn't know that."
He scratches the back of his head and looks somewhere else.
"Well. Guess come by my room if ya wanna hang."
Gerald nods once and turns his head toward the next thing on his list, and walks.
— — —
(Pov: Mao)
The hell's going on with the kid.
Mao watches him go down the corridor and doesn't like the way he's walking.
He's startin' to remind me of how he was back when he was a clerk.
Creepily robotic. That's the only way to put it.
Haah. Whatever. Ain't my battle to fight.
"Hey. You know Gerald, right?"
He turns around. White hair, red eyes, plaster on her cheek, red ribbon holding the tail up. She's got her hands behind her back and she's tapping one foot.
Huh. It's that girl he's always hangin' around with.
"Yeah. What about it."
He takes a pull on a cigarette that's basically finished.
"Do you know what's going on with him lately? He seems a lot more distant than usual."
Shit. Hell if I know.
"Nope. Ain't got a clue."
Lisa pinches the bridge of her nose and looks up and down the corridor.
"Hey. Do you think you could give him this for me?"
She holds out a black cassette tape. Somebody's written on the white strip in careful handwriting.
[Classical]
People still listen to this rubbish? The noise gives me a migraine. Too formal for me.
"Yeah. Guess I could hand him this."
He turns it over in his fingers, and, knowing exactly what he's doing adds:
"Maybe this'll cheer your boyfriend up."
Lisa goes red to the ears and crosses her arms.
"D-dating is strictly forbidden during working hours. Besides, me and Gerald have no such relationship."
"Is that so."
She turns her nose up.
"Yep. It's only natural to follow company procedure."
Mao crosses his arms and takes one last pull.
"What if those company procedures weren't in place." He blows the smoke sideways. "Would you still say the same thing?"
Lisa's face gets a shade redder, and she doubles down anyway.
"As I said. Me and Gerald have no such relationship."
"Keep your thoughts to yourself anyway, grandpa."
...
Grandpa.
Mao's face twists into fury and he raises a fist into the air.
"Grandpa, huh. I'll show you what this grandpa can do—!"
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
"Angela. Give me a report on Gerald's status."
"Overall mind is decreasing in sharp spikes and then stabilizing." She reads it without inflection. "His physique is optimal."
The manager flips cameras trying to keep up with a man moving through the Control Team spine at a pace that keeps outrunning the cuts.
"Do you think this is because of the two E.G.O weapons in his possession?"
Angela watches the flickering screens with a neutral face.
"Quite possibly. Although his mind was already fluctuating before he entered the armory this morning."
The manager reads back a few of the notes he's left himself and starts chewing the side of his thumbnail.
I really hope I'm wrong about this one.
Angela tilts her head to read the personal document open beside the camera feed.
"Manager. It is wise to plan ahead. But worrying will not achieve anything."
He grits his teeth and looks up at her.
"I'm sorry that some of us are just human. And have to deal with things like emotions."
...
Angela's eyelids twitch, so slightly that a camera would not have caught it.
She recovers.
"Energy output continues to rise, Manager. The high echelon is watching you."
"Great."
"Our founder, A, is among them." A beat. "In time, he may express interest in meeting you in person. If that happens, you will be able to make your dreams come true."
The manager keeps writing.
"You admire him, I take it."
"Of course. Though to be fair, he is the one who created me." She looks at the screens rather than at him. "He is also an enigmatic person. I imagine there are very few who could truly understand him."
"In fact, to truly understand anyone is difficult."
The pen stops.
"Will the day come," Angela says, "that I understand you completely?"
The manager does not answer that, because he does not have an answer, and because the agent on screen three has just walked into a containment unit and the feed has gone to static.
"...I will be taking my leave."
The sound of her heels gets further away, and then the office is quiet.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
The document by the door of O-01-67 is thin, because the thing behind it arrived yesterday.
An animate doll. Enjoys playing pranks on people.
That's it. That's the whole managerial note.
Gerald reads it twice, decides it has told him nothing, and opens the door.
She's standing in the middle of the room with her back to him, twitching very slightly at irregular intervals, working at something in her hands.
She's about four feet tall. Crimson dress with white lace at the hem and the cuffs, a red bonnet pinned into a dark bob, and a gold bell hanging at each side of her head on a ribbon.
She is, on any reasonable assessment, a little girl.
"Can you speak?"
Her head turns a hundred and eighty degrees.
The rest of her follows a half-second later.
"Hey! You look sad!" Red eyes, wide and delighted. "Wanna play dress up?"
...
What.
I mean. I guess it's something I should have expected.
She does look like a kid.
"Sure," Gerald says. "Why not."
She claps her hands and both bells go at once.
"Yaaay! It's been so long since I've been able to play with people!"
A needle and thread appear in her hands from a place that is not anywhere.
"What's your name?"
She starts weaving a strip of fabric. "I'm just A Wee Witch! Nothing all that special. Teehee~"
Right.
"So, uh. What are you making there?"
Gerald leans slightly, and sees that she has already finished three black egg-shaped things and set them aside.
"Hey! No peeking!"
She twists away, makes a series of noises he does not want described, and turns back holding a heart.
It's dark red and it's the size of a fist and there are black orbs suspended inside it, moving.
"Tada! It's for you~"
Gerald takes it. It vibrates in his palm, and then lifts out of his hand and rises to hover a foot above his head, where it stays.
"That's to show my friendship with you!"
The little doll makes a delicate face, of a kind that wants very badly to be praised.
"...Good job, little witch."
Her smile goes wider and she starts walking circles around him, taking measurements with her hands.
"Uhm."
"Almost finished...!"
She tugs at his sleeve and whines.
"Can you sit down! I can't reach!"
Gerald obliges, because refusing has not once in this building been the safe option, and sits.
She shuffles around behind him. Her hands settle on the back of his neck.
"Alright! Time to play dress up!"
"You'll be perfect when I'm done. Just... don't move too much, kay~?"
He has a bad feeling about this.
There's no bloodlust coming off her. That's the problem. There is nothing coming off her at all except delight.
"Alright, that's—"
Everything below his neck stops belonging to him.
"AHHHHRGGG—"
"Oops! Did that hurt~? Silly me. I always forget where the nerves are!"
The needle keeps going. He can feel it, not pain exactly, something wrong at a level under pain. As she works something into the skin along his shoulders that is organic and moves and is nonetheless fabric.
"Witch. That hurts. Stop, or I'm going to get angry."
"Oh, don't whine about it. I'm almost done."
"You'll be the perfect friend!"
...
Fine.
Gerald stops trying to move his body, and pushes into the suit instead.
— — —
It's the nowhere with the light in it.
He's standing, or the equivalent. The light is a long way off and directly overhead.
And there's something new in the space with it, a red beak, hanging in the middle of nothing, closed.
Gerald speaks first. It's better that way.
"Listen. I need to understand you. Both of you."
...
For what purpose?
"Preferably so I don't die this loop. I can feel my head getting worse every time it happens." He looks at his clean hands. "I'm not sure I can carry this by myself."
The beak opens.
Then show them no mercy.
Use violence for justice.
There would be no order without a few sacrifices.
"I don't know." Gerald keeps his voice level. "Violence isn't the answer to every question."
"What happens when I run into something that doesn't need it? Am I going to be strong enough to make the right call, or am I just going to be strong?"
The light expands until it fills everything, and the warmth comes with it.
Ultimately it is your choice.
Neither I nor this small one can dictate how you act.
We are simply the ones who provide you the tools to carry your decisions.
The space begins to dim as the voice fades out.
You should give yourself more credit.
You have been at this longer than you probably remember.
...
What.
The beak drifts closer as the white goes.
Achieve your own justice by any means necessary.
There is no such thing as a wrong choice, so long as you fully believe in your decision.
And they're both gone, and he is alone in it.
Sigh.
That was pretty insightful, actually.
I have follow-up questions about the second-to-last thing.
— — —
Back in the containment unit, Gerald is covered from the ankles up in strips of different colored fabric, and the fabric is moving with a pulse.
He is not fully covered. He very shortly would have been.
The little witch is working away at his chest in broad happy strokes of the needle.
And then his eyes come open.
The navy suit starts changing under her hands. The fabric goes solid and pales and rises, plate, articulated, European in a way Gerald could not have named, until what she is stitching into is armor, and the armor is joined to his skin, and it moves him.
His body refuses. The armor overrules it.
He takes Penitence off his hip and skids backward across the floor away from her.
"What!? Why would you do thaaat?"
Her lip goes. She starts sniffing.
"You were so close to being the perfect friend!"
Gerald reaches back and takes hold of the black thread at the nape of his neck and pulls it out.
Blood goes down his collar. More comes up his throat and into his mouth. He speaks through it evenly.
"That's no way to treat a friend. Friendship is about mutual respect."
The doll's face crumples, snot running.
"I tried that! And in the end they all just LEAVE ME!"
"None of them stay..."
She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist and her arm extends. extends, far past where an arm ends, toward his face.
"That's why I need you..."
The crying stops. The frown turns up at the corners into something with nothing behind it.
"...to stay still."
The heart above his head splits open.
What comes out of it is the size of a car. A black body crammed edge to edge with mismatched eyes, a ring of teeth underneath, and eight legs that are each a different color, red, green, violet, gold, like somebody colored them in without looking.
It comes down on him with the intent of taking his upper half.
Penitence flows into the blade on the way up and catches it across the teeth.
The little witch throws both arms wide. There are more hearts in her hands, six or seven, and they are all cracking open.
Gerald draws the pistol off his hip with his left hand, puts the barrel into the nearest cluster of eyes, and empties seven rounds into it at contact range.
It drops.
Another comes in from his blind side and gets its teeth into his shoulder. He pistol-whips it into the wall.
"Stop hurting my friends!"
The doll's fists are shaking. Both bells are ringing.
Gerald narrows his eyes and watches how she stands.
He sidesteps a lunge and puts the blade through the body of the one that missed, and it scrambles on the floor trying to get its legs under it.
The rest come in a blind rush, hoping one of them connects.
He goes over the top of them, he is inches from her, close enough to see the stitching on the bonnet, and a spider closes on his leg and throws him into the wall.
"Ugh—"
He gets the pistol up, expecting the follow-up.
...
It doesn't come.
The two remaining spiders have placed themselves between him and the doll, and they are slamming their legs against the floor, trying to frighten him off.
Gerald lowers the gun.
"Haah." He gets his back against the wall and stays down. "Please. Just stop. I'm not trying to hurt them anymore."
One of them lunges for his throat anyway, and he catches it one-handed and holds it, and doesn't do anything else.
The doll is sobbing without any control over it at all.
"You ruined everything! I just wanted to make you happy...!"
And between the sobs, the spiders start weakening. The legs come down slower. Something goes out of them and they begin, visibly, to become objects again.
Her head droops.
"I... I just wanted to be happy again."
Gerald holsters both weapons.
He walks over and puts his hand on top of her head, between the bells, and rubs.
She flinches. Then she doesn't. The crying stops.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
She looks up. His face has a stern thing on it and something else underneath, and he raises a finger and flicks her forehead.
"Ouch."
"...So. You're not mad at me?"
"Of course I'm mad at you." Gerald crouches down to her level. "But I forgive you."
Her expression twists, not following.
"I don't think you understand what a friend is."
He wipes the wet off her cheek with his thumb and brushes the dust off the lace at her hem, which has been on the floor of a containment unit for a day and a night.
"Friends look out for each other."
Her fists close.
"Mine never did that."
"Then those weren't your friends."
"...W-what?"
She looks down at her own hands, which are trembling, and then back up at him.
"Are... are you my friend, then...?"
Gerald nods, and stands.
"Yes. I'm your friend."
And all around the room, the threading on the great spiders begins to unwind, and they come apart at the seams and drop into piles of colored fabric.
He clears his throat and kicks a length of string aside.
"Let's start this over. My name is Gerald." He puts a hand out, ridiculously, at her height. "What's yours?"
She looks at the hand.
"...Laetitia."
"It's been a pleasure meeting you, Laetitia."
The LC-230 on his wrist flashes green.
[WORK COMPLETE.]
"I'll come and visit you later. Okay?"
Laetitia panics immediately and grabs a fistful of his sleeve.
"What? Why are you leaving, can't we play a bit longer?"
"I've got responsibilities." He detaches the fingers gently, one at a time. "Don't worry. I'll visit. Often."
She lets go and lowers her head.
"...Fine. But you better promise."
"I promise."
He gets out into the corridor and leans against the wall with his eyes shut briefly.
He looks down at his hands. The plate has gone. The navy suit is back, with a hole in the shoulder and blood down the collar.
...Doesn't matter. Keep going.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
Whoa.
From what I was seeing, a restart was inevitable.
The manager sits back and looks at the frozen frame with a hand over his mouth.
I want to know what happened halfway through. His mind went under thirty percent. Thirty. And then it came back up.
And seriously, what the hell was that armor.
"Angela. Does any of this look normal to you?"
Angela is standing very still, looking at the screen.
"No." A pause. "Not at all."
...Huh.
Wonder what she's thinking.
He cycles through the other feeds. Two agents are struggling badly with their assignments and one has been sitting in a main room for eleven minutes with her head in her hands, and none of it comes anywhere close to what this one man does as a matter of routine.
Really. Who is he?
"Angela. Gerald's only been with this company seven days. Correct?"
There is a brief hesitation. It's small.
"Yes. This would be his seventh day here, in unmodified time."
Unmodified.
The manager nods slowly and files that word away with the rest of them.
"That aside. The cameras inside the containment units have been acting up. It's impeding my ability to manage this facility efficiently."
He picks up his coffee.
"Do you know anything about that?"
Angela takes, as always, the professional stance.
"Manager. It is my job to report anything abnormal occurring outside your supervision. It is also your job to tell me anything odd you encounter."
She looks at him for slightly too long.
"I cannot assist with things you do not tell me."
The manager pinches the bridge of his nose and drinks, and finds the cup empty.
"Whatever. Go make me some more coffee."
He winces at himself.
"...Please."
Angela nods, and goes to the machine.
The manager turns back to his desk. To the yellow folder that has been sitting on the corner of it since day five, which he has now read four times, and which he has not mentioned to her once.
"Is it time yet?"
.
.
.
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