Falling Like Stars

(2:3:2)

“We’re not doing enough,” Dais growled, glaring out the window of the clinic kitchen as if the gloomy, light rain outside was personally offending him.

Brei finished plating the unpalatable-looking goop for old Mrs. Ehna, picking up the tray with a frustrated shrug of her own. “I know, but it is something.”

“You know we only have two Hunter’s Paxts left?” He shoved himself up off the wall, following her as she headed out on her route. “And the voids-damned Ripple’s done nothing? They let us do a little constructing, a little playing around with scalelets. Three. Paxt cycles. Before the end. We’re sitting here, and the Unity is one slip away from getting pushed all the way to our borders, and they’re having parties—”

“You should give that speech to Seih,” she cut him off. “I’d take up an Air-enhanced sword in a moment and head up there myself if it would help at all, but most of the population, me included, have no idea how to use one and would die immediately. The only way I could see us making a real difference is if we can convince the Ripple to send out Divinations. Which Seih is working on.”

For a moment he went silent, his footsteps padding after her as she made her way down the corridor. Mrs. Ehna was further towards the walk-in rooms at the front. Other doors were either open or closed, and mostly filled with the elderly.

“You know what we should do? We should just kill them all. They’re useless anyway.”

She turned sharply. He’d only hissed it under his breath, but there were Divinations within these walls, and the front rooms they spent most of their time in were barely a few steps away. “Don’t talk about things like that. What’s gotten into you?”

His lip twisted, a finger tracing along his arm almost unconsciously. “They tortured us, Brei. They tried to make us talk to get every last Constructor into their dungeons. They don’t care about doing anything, they just want to control everyone who won’t dance along with their tune.”

She stared at him, his eyes meeting hers evenly, simmering with anger and haunted by things he shouldn’t have been subjected to. “I—”

A noise caught her ear, a whisper of something familiar that snapped her attention around in a moment. Was that—?

A hint of lavender passed in and out of sight in a flash past the corner, and she thrust her tray at Dais, hissing at him, “Give this to Mrs. Ehna— she’s just in this room. We can talk about this later. Hopefully with someone who knows therapy.”

“What—?”

She strode off, breaking into a half-jog as soon as she passed into the front clinic. What was Winds doing here? Had he been injured again? She hadn’t seen him around in so long—hadn’t talked to him in weeks—and now here he was, back at the hospital. That damned Domini—

She rounded the corner into the space they typically used for Divination adjustment. And felt the breath she caught nearly head down the wrong way.

A dull-eyed Divination with a wild head of lavender hair sat listlessly on the bench, the dimmed gold—more hazel, it was so washed-out—gaze meeting hers past the tool poking at the centre of his bare chest, pseudo-flesh and metal bone sliding back to reveal his soulcore.

Oh no. Oh no no.

For a frozen moment she stood there, gripping at the doorframe hard enough her knuckles went white. This wasn’t a repair.

But he doesn’t— he doesn’t deserve this.

In an instant, the shock sparked, stuttered, and burned into an anger clenching at the back of her throat, digging her nails into the wood doorjamb. Why wouldn’t these idiots she had to look after stop getting themselves into messes like this?

“Doctor Morehn!” She stepped into the room, interrupting him just as he went to remove the entry panel on the soulcore, a frown turning on her. “Are you doing a soulcore wipe?”

“Yes, his master requested it just this morning. It would have been nice if he’d scheduled it beforehand, but I can’t deny a Domini like Hafest.” The man straightened, Winds remaining placidly unmoving on the bench, his gaze locked on her but unreadable.

“I’ve never done one before,” she commented, eyeing the Divination with a hopefully-passable curious look. “My tutors were discussing how to do it just the other day.”

He raised both bushy eyebrows at her. “You’d like to do it?”

“I know you’re busy with a few other patients.” The end of the world seemed to have more than its fair share of people doing stupid things. “I’d like to try my hand at it.”

“Well then.” He handed the tool to her, already moving to step past. “I’d monitor you, but if you could manage to fumble a simple wipe, I doubt you’d be in the top of the class.”

“Thank you, sir.” She smiled at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll have him fixed and out the door before first break.”

“First break.” He snorted, disappearing out the door, his mutter trailing behind him. “Wouldn’t know what that is.”

The moment he was gone, she whipped around to glare at the idiot in front of her. “What happened?”

Her heart threatened to strangle up in her chest at the sheer tiredness in his empty expression as he tipped his head to look up at her from under that messy fringe. Divinations shouldn’t be able to look like that.

When he said nothing, she gritted her teeth, stepping forward and tapping at his chest with the driver, its touch prompting metal and flesh to cover the blank surface of his soulcore. “Pull your tunic back up. Did he hurt you?”

Winds made no move to follow her instructions, gazing so blankly at her that for a moment she was afraid he’d already been wiped, somehow. Then his gaze dropped, drifting away from hers until it was hidden beneath his hair, a set to his mouth that said everything.

“Please, Winds, tell me what happened.” She knelt down, putting as much gentleness into her voice as she could summon, reaching out to lift his chin.

He leaned ever-so-subtly away from her, his voice coming out as dead as his eyes. “I disobeyed my master. I am to have my personality erased via a soulcore wipe.”

“Why would you do that? You know he’d order you wiped if you ever disobeyed him—”

“It was my decision.” His voice was soft enough she barely heard it. “I don’t want free will. I don’t want to know my existence is futile. Please erase it.”

She struggled to even open her mouth. “You... are a voids-damned fool of a blackened twig shrivelled by the cold chasm winds. You want to be turned into an emotionless husk?”

He closed his eyes. “It’s not permanent. Soul channels always reform, eventually. I will retain my memories, but not my will to disobey.”

“You still won’t be the same. It’ll take years.” She dropped her hands into her lap, squeezing her hands together to stop her nails digging into her palms. “Why not keep going? Why not fight? You don’t deserve to be erased. Why do you want to? I know you want free-will. I know you want to be free—”

“I can’t.”

She nearly flinched back, stunned.

He subsided with a soft exhale. “You’re fighting to survive, for your future. I have no reason to fight. I have nothing to fight for.”

Resting a hand on his knee, she scowled at him. “Of course you do. You can fight for your future, a future where you can be free. You can even fight for you friends, like me. You can fight from the inside so that one day, when the time’s right, you can throw it in Hafest’s face and join me and Seih instead. We’ll adopt you.”

His head twitched up, and he stared at her. “What?”

She patted at his knee, smiling. “We’ll steal you away. Hide you in a basement somewhere.”

Eyes flickering, he searched her face, his own almost threatening to twist. Despair and confusion battled through his expression. “You can’t. I am bound to him. He’s— he’s my master.”

“And you have free will, so you can choose who your master is.”

His head dropped again, his entire frame tightening around his fisted hands. “It isn’t that simple.”

“Yes it is. Your soul isn’t bound to him, even if you were designed to follow his commands.”

“I....” His voice almost trembled. “I don’t want this struggle.”

“You know—” she reached out, and this time he didn’t pull away— “we get a lot of people coming through here who think that. People who tried to take their own lives because they couldn’t see the point in letting it drag on. But they all forgot one thing. They still had family and friends to live for. Of course, there were those who did die, but, well... maybe they didn’t have anyone. You do. And I’m not letting you go and blank yourself.”

She could have sworn he huffed a soft, near-silent laugh—a sad, melancholy, bewildered thing, as fragile as the hint of his smile. The wetness that seeped to her fingers, though, that was unmistakeable.

She nearly twitched them away, startled. He was... could he...? In the back of her mind she kicked herself for letting her engineering side seep in but— she’d never imagined Divinations could be designed to cry.

“Yes,” he answered her unspoken question softly, his finger quietly reaching up and pulling away with a droplet balanced perfectly on its tip. “We were meant to mimic humanity. Lovingly crafted. Never meant to express it.”

Ugh. Alright, that was it. He was too damn sad and he was starting to make her tear up, herself. Felled Divination needed a hug, and she didn’t care if it was against construct protocol. Rounds accepted them happily because he had no brains; Winds could accept them because he had a heart.

He stiffened when she wrapped her arms around him, but she didn’t care. She pulled him in firmly, ignoring the quiet sound of confusion that almost came out as a meep. You can’t have him, Hafest. He’s too cute for your diabolical evil schemes. He was also surprisingly warm, not that she’d ever hugged a Divination before, or seen one cry, or watched one have an existential crisis....

She let out a long sigh, rubbing his bare back gently with her knuckle. “Promise me you won’t get yourself reset, alright?”

“Why are you doing this?” His voice was almost a rasp.

“Because you’re an idiot.” She closed her eyes. “And that makes you about as human as you’ll ever need to be, and I don’t want you to lose that.”

Pulling away, she patted his cheeks like Seih’s mother always did to anyone and everyone, and smiled at the faint hint of a real glow in his eyes as he blinked like a poor confused felid up at her. “There you are. That’s my Winds.”

“I.... You aren’t my master....”

She’d probably broken him a little bit. Letting out a light laugh, she turned and hunted through the tools they had on hand, rummaging through drawers. “No, but I’m your friend, and one day I’ll spirit you away. Now—” finally finding what she was after, she turned and smirked at him, clipping the scissors at the air “—although I hate to do it because you look much better with a natural head of hair, we need to make sure Hafest thinks you’re returning as a perfect little angel. How does a haircut sound?”

For a long, long moment he just gazed silently at her, searching her face, his still-dull-but-slightly-brighter eyes flicking to the pair of scissors and back again.

And finally, the gold began to creep back in, the slightest ghost of a still-sad smile lifting his face. “It sounds good.

“...Thank you. Brei.”