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churbooseanonI wanted something with Maine. So I made something. Yay!
When She Falls
When she falls, part of him stays with her.
No, perhaps it is more accurate to say that part of her stays with him. Part of all of it stays with him. There is no other place but this, no other moment. Forever he stands there, on the edge of the icy cliff.
The snow is deep, the cold of it prickling all the way up to the bottoms of his calves. If he thinks long and hard about it, he knows that the snow wasn’t this bad when the crash happened, when he chased her. If it had been her crawling would have been harder. She wouldn’t have made it so far. Perhaps not to the edge, wouldn’t have put herself in place to be thrown over the edge. He also knows that he shouldn’t feel the cold. The body suits they wear under the armor regulates temperature with extreme efficiency. It would take him hours upon hours to get this kind of chills. Except the thing is… he has been here for hours, hasn’t he? Been here an eternity that leads up to this moment and beyond it.
At first he understood how this worked. How this was supposed to go. What Sigma wanted. Before the moment he went after Wyoming, Sigma had made it very clear, hadn’t he? That this was about convincing the AI, about proving to the Director that they were better together than they were apart. Wasn’t that why Maine let Sigma work with Gamma to convince Carolina to take on two fragments? The assertion that the AI fragments were getting weaker hadn’t seemed to ring true in Maine’s ears, but that was him he supposed. For all he knew Sigma was perfectly correct. For all he knew…
“Still here I see.”
The snow is deep, the cold of it prickling all the way up his legs because he’s sitting in it. But the snow doesn’t account for the chill down his spine. All around him the snow seemed to melt, seemed to recede. What was up past his waist as he sat and begged for the cold to bring him to an end was soon barely covering his ankles. The ground under him is much, thick mud threatening to swallow him up, never once baked by the fires that drove away the snow. Sigma’s fires. The flames that never made him warmer.
Maine’s eyes rise slowly up the body, a man wreathed in flames, distorted by them, consumed by their hunger. Strange how he has never made the comparison before. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to. What bothers him as he meets Sigma’s level gaze, though, is the stolen AI. Eta and Iota hovering above Sigma’s shoulder as if they were the fragments and he the Freelancer. Subservient, not a unit, not what he was told it would be. What he would be.
“Where else?” Maine asks, not standing. No reason to rise. No reason to reach out. This is where Sigma left him, here on the cliff. The point where the plan went wrong. The words hadn’t come when he had held Carolina. Sigma hadn’t explained. Just grabbed his hand and tore her apart in a way that Maine refused to imagine. Cast her away as if she were trash.
He thinks that last part was just for him. Just because of what she meant to him. Just what he always wanted her to mean to him. Perhaps that’s why Sigma did it.
“Yes,” Sigma speaks again, and Maine doesn’t know if it’s a confirmation of his thoughts, or a note that this is where Sigma always finds him. Is it really a surprise? Maine is not allowed his own body, his consciousness more or less suppressed. Better to be here, staring into the moment of his own downfall, than to see what Sigma plans for the others.
He has become a vessel, not a partner, and Maine doesn’t have it in him to struggle against that anymore.
“I wish you would find something more suitable than this,” Sigma sighs, shaking his head, and with a sweep of his arm the cliff is replaced with a field of flowers, expanding infinitely in all directions. Buttercups slowly spring up between the fingers Maine has pressed against the ground. This is Sigma’s fantasy. An eternal paradise.
Stagnation. There is nothing here to be felt by Maine. Nothing he wants, nothing he regrets. Just nothing in all directions. The thought of it makes him made. Hurts him. Weren’t they supposed to be partners once? And yet Sigma forces this on him. Maine grits teeth that really aren’t there, and as he glares down at his hand he can see the change starting. One little flower standing despite the slow formation of frost. The cold seems to climb up the step, crystallizing further with each second. The shine spreads to the leaves, slowly wilts the leaves and shrivels the petals.
“I wish you would leave.”
“I have need of you to…”
“I said leave!”
There may have been something in the force of his voice, but with the statement the frost of one flower spreads, a quickly rolling over the field, turning everything to a crystalline death around him. Even Sigma’s flames seem to flicker before the rush of Maine’s fury. Not that Sigma betrays it. Instead, when Maine looks up, he finds only disappointment before the AI is gone completely. The field starts to fall at the edges, crumbling without the AI to hold the thought. Maine lifts his head, closes his eyes, and listens to the winds as he knows the snow starts to fall around him.
Soon the snow will return. The snow and the ice. Soon the moment will be returned. When he opens his eyes again it will be with the cliff before him, and the forever frozen form of Carolina, her body limp in the air, just before it falls.
