Chapter Text
You land. It’s an impact that would shatter another troll’s bones, but you roll the strain off your ankles and translate it into motion, leaving behind the roof and the sound of approaching drones. They reverberate in your sound canals, hollowing out a place in your pusher cavity and despite the whirring of engines, you allow it to stay. It is welcome, the should-be fear; as familiar as the weight of the gun on your shoulder.
But it does not burn as freshly as it once did.
The beginning of a hobby is hard to pin. What series of events conspired to make the thrill of something just so? What fault of personality did you have that made a single slip the dawning of something greater? It is fate surely. This is what you were meant to be, and you never had hope of being something different.
Months in the past.
It’s an accident. An accident of fate, an accident of hands. You are fiddling with Widow’s Kiss, the newest present from your lusus, checking over each exoskeleton to see how it works. It is an appropriate gift for someone of your blood status. There is no reason not to let you play with your new toy unattended at the edges of the closest landweller town.
You aim down the sights, seeing trolls flitting between their hives and the winding streets beneath. To practice, you trail them in your scope. It is fascinating how the smallest change in your arms sends your view blocks away.
But your targets move too fast for you, and when your unpracticed hands try to follow them through the warped glass, you end up overshooting and clumsily trying to focus back. They bore and frustrate you, and your sightline wanders until it spies a lone troll picking at the beach, sorting through debris washed and submerged in muck. He’s slow, plodding, easy to keep the faint dot on his head. You follow him, and mouth the word bang.
Your pantomime, as it turns out, is too good.
The Kiss presses its lips against his temple and says goodnight, and he collapses before the sound even reaches your ears. Heads on the street look up at the sound of gunfire, but most move on within a few seconds, and no one is there no notice as you fall backwards in your cross-legged position, deafened and disoriented as your back hits gravel. There is no one to see as you rise, rubbing the violet ring around your eye, and stare across a beach that’s turned into a misshapen haze. You freeze. Your heart is pounding, ice in your veins that leaves you immobilized as terror creeps into you even though you don’t yet knew why. It takes all your will power—clenching one hand and then the other—to break from your daze and scramble to the edge, craning your neck to catch a glimpse at the now distant shore. You don’t pick up Widow’s Kiss to look. You act it like it might bite you. Instead, you slide down the side of the East Alternian Comic shop you climbed at the beginning of the night, nearly falling off entirely more than thrice, and find that the journey back is so much harder than the journey to. Years in the future, you will think this very profound.
The run takes eternity and more. With slipping, jittery strutpods, you finally stand in front of him, sand sticking to his clothes as russet washes over dampened particles and draws him in to his own viscous cocoon. You are two sweeps old and don’t quite understand what makes things stop ticking but even you can comprehend that this boy won’t be getting back up. His head is no longer a head and this isn’t like when you break a toy and it must be fixed. You realize, intrinsically at the very least, that you have done something wrong.
And so, you do what all guilty wigglers do. You run hiveward.
You retreat to the hive in the lake with the empty rooms stretched tall to catch the morning light. Your lusus wraps her neck around you as you sit in your recuperacoon with your knees to your forehead, but even the gentle honks that are usually so comforting do nothing for the aching maw in your stomach. Fear, but fear of what? You don’t know shame yet, don’t have perspective. All you know is it hurts and you want the bad feelings to stop.
He’s not going to stand anymore. Will his friends be mad? Will they come looking for you?
Will anyone care?
The answer to the last one is, of course, no. A rustblood dies and there are no repercussions. No one knows it was you, they wouldn’t care if they did—the list of justifications goes on. You never learn if anyone ever picked up his body or told his lusus, and for a while, you keep it that way. Ignorance a flimsy comfort.
But it gnaws at you. Gnaws and gnaws but, the thing that’s chewing, the thing with teeth on your insides, it no longer feels like shame. It morphs, blossoming its putrid petals, transforming until it becomes exuberant and is this: the realization that you got away with it.
This is of course due to no effort on your part, and merely the effect of violet in your arteries and the russet in his. But, to a mind so small and who has just experienced her first taste of thrill, it doesn’t seem that way.
Weeks in the future.
This time, you have a target. One could argue against your character that you were able to come to this decision with such ease, to do things because you want to and no reason more, but if there was someone who would make that case, they don’t live on this planet. The bronzeblood lives close to the beach—already you are beginning to repeat yourself, an amateur mistake, but forgivable considering an amateur is what you are. You watch him leave his home, falling into the groundwork of a routine that you will tamp out into technique wipes down the line. Observe, trail.
Eliminate.
This time, when the body falls to the ground, you don’t hurt yourself with the kickback. Your arms still shake for hours though, and you sit in that same spot, staring at the dead troll a few feet from his hive. You’ve never felt like this before but by the Empress, you’d do anything to feel like it again.
Months in the future.
When the buzz doesn’t stay with you as long at it used to, in a fit of rabid denial you decide that this is because you do not have enough of a challenge. You’ve been hunting the rust colors exclusively, only daring to stray into olive territory within the past wipe. It doesn’t satisfy you the way it used to, the “murder-high” as the church would say is cheating you out of what should be a perfectly beautiful death. But your desensitization can’t be the culprit, no, it’s because there is no fear anymore now that you know that you won’t be caught even if you swing your rifle around in broad moonlight. It has to be the challenge, that must be it.
Jades. Jades, you think. So difficult, so out of reach. You consider briefly on succumbing to poison, to creeping into the cavern with hidden blades, but as soon as the thought crosses your thinkpan it revolts in disgust. You are not an assassin, no matter how much the films may try to glam the occupation. You are a gun. You are death herself. You are more than the results.
The jade problem persists. It is after many tries, many notes passed and cryptic messages sent through Skorge that you manage to lure one out of her burrow with promises of a rare print of a Magical Commander Yukino Vol32. Her blood is so beautiful as it splatters a nearby storefront.
Doing it again and again becomes a sport. You begin to talk with some mercenaries, finding that they already have their own intricate network that involves luring people where they’ll be at their weakest. They are confused at first; who would gain grudges against a jade, after all? But when they meet you in person, the fact that you are barely more than a wiggler is made moot by the flaring gills along your neck.
They help you get your jades. And, in a twist of irony, destroy you as well. Because as soon as things become easy, as soon as you’ve racked as many jades as olives, the thrill dies, and you are back at the beginning.
Consequences, that’s what you desperately think. There must be a real threat of danger, and then the deaths will meansomething.
Teals you try, and their blood dries quicker than the jades. Ceruleans, blues, clowns, the bodies pile up and you feel nothing, which brings you to the now as you flee the scene of your latest homicide. The church will no doubt be delighted in your latest show of violence, helping along members to their dark reward, but the drones hardly see it that way. You don’t know if that, when they catch you, they will not simply see the violet sign tucked under your disguise and let you go. You pretend they won’t, that the pursuit behind you will end in your death if you are caught. It is the only thing that makes you feel alive.
It is when you are at your hive, three hours returned, slamming your desk in frustration desperately trying to figure an augmentation that will allow Widow’s Kiss to fire underwater that you realize something.
The light off your immaculate barrel reflects something, something bright pink as it flits outside your window and over your private lake. You wander aimlessly over.
It is the drones, of course. They’re abuzz in the air, as they always are, visible from you home as you press your face against the glass. You are the only seadweller you know that has a home above the waves, though you are still surrounded by water on all sides. This is a view that many of your kind are not used to. You spend so much time despairing over trolls, but it was not them you have been looking to impress. No, no not the drones either; you could shoot at drones all day and experience nothing (and you have, when you feel your practice needed to be sharpened.) So then it is not the drones, but what they represent.
You practically stumble your way to the grand hall as the epiphany hits you, and oh how wild you must look when you finally stand in the massive archway that serves as its door. There. You look upon it, the object you have forgotten. It is where it has always been, standing watch over the blessed pool that serves as your recuperation, matron and tyrant in equal measures.
The massive painting of the Empress gazes down at you, her teeth pricked into a smile.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? This is your trajectory, what you have been aiming for all along. You have been climbing the ladder but it has all been a distraction, she is the ultimate reward, the final tests for your skills. After all, what greater kill than that of the troll who will not die?
The realization humbles you, leaving you knee deep in sopor slime as you stare upwards into those glorious eyes and try not to cry. Your hands come to rest over your blood pusher, your tiny little vascular bladder beating in rapid flits. There is no need to suppress what has come over you. You have finally found something to do right.
Years in the future.
Violets float around you, their movement long stopped but their bodies still providing the surrounding saltwater with new fluid. They sway like seaweed, leaking lavender into the light stained water as you tilt you head upwards to stare directly into this planet’s sun, the motion a long held habit that has morphed into an anchor. Zarya treads beside you, visibly uncomfortable with your inertness, but it is not your job to make the Aspirant feel comfortable. It’s not anyone’s job actually, which is probably why she spends so much time polishing herself past the point of ineffectiveness. The majority of the kills belong to you, a fact that bodes poorly for an aspiring Heiress—that is what her leery followers would think, anyway, but you are of the opinion that it reflects more on you than it does on her.
You stare up into the most powerful energy source in the solar system, legs spinning idly, and you say, “I want to kill Her.”
“Er…who?” she asks, because although she is no fool, Zarya is still bafflingly slow.
“The Empress. When the time comes, you will let me have the right.”
She hesitates. After all, no ascension is complete if the challenger does not rip the enthroned one from the chair herself. There little more illegitimate in the eyes of the Empire than a adulterous job.
But, like you have said, Zarya is no fool. She will not deny you this now, not while you swim surrounded by the corpses you have made. She nods, a movement caught in the corner of your lookstubs. “Very will. You may have the claim.”
Your gills release bubbles that could have been inside you for a thousand years. “Good.”
Maybe the promise is empty, maybe she is already planning on how to quietly get rid of you. That would be the wise thing for her to do, after all, what you would do. You have revealed your hand, sown the seeds of doubt shown that you are far too dangerous to keep around—but for the moment you don’t care. You feel you are one step closer. You are coming for your promised reward.