jin character piece #9

[bipolyjack]

 

It hurts, even in the dream.

Jin clenches their teeth, but the impact of the jolt stick knocks a grunt out of them anyway. The broad-shouldered woman has been at it for a while, white ceramic armor plates protecting her chest and knees, a visor over her face. Every time Ben or Sue Ann flags in their attacks, glances towards the window separating their lab and Jin’s, the stick connects again, sending another brutal bolt of electricity through Jin’s body.

In the dream, as in life, the nanobots do nothing in this moment to soften the blows. They are inert, useless, and Jin’s limbs tremble with the catastrophic effort of staying upright on their knees. They tried to remain standing at first, but that only lasted so long.

Circling Sue Ann with a hand outstretched, steel orbs flashing around him, Ben’s eyes flicker to Jin for half an instant. The woman with the jolt stick doesn’t see, but Jin does. The fear in that flick of a look. Before coming here, Jin has never, never seen Ben afraid.

The pause lasts long enough to warrant another blow to Jin’s back, and they arch helplessly, pain ripping through them. And then, in dream fashion, they are abruptly on their stomach in Ben’s bed, head turned to one side, watching him through lazy half-lidded eyes as he steps out of his clothes, trailing a perfunctory hand over their bare shoulder. And then they’re kneeling over him on the floor of the Nutritech lab, blood on their knuckles, on his face, and their muscle-swollen hand is around his neck, bearing down. And then they’re kissing him in a dark corner of someone’s basement, and he tastes like beer and cigarettes, and his teeth are catching at their lower lip, on the edge of painful. And then they’re on the beach, Jin’s fist still thick with muscle, Ben lying in the shallows, wet hair in his eyes, wheezing. And then they’re in a skeletal concrete frame of a building with open air behind them and Jin is drawing him in with a hand cupped to the back of his head. And then they’re arguing in raised voices, fists clenched, facing each other across a NutriTech lab, because Jin wants to leave and Ben wants to stay and neither of them really have a choice.

“Jin?”

Fuck off, snarls dream Jin as two NutriTech lab techs march in and haul them and Ben away from each other. Jin clamps down on the arm of one and only then jolts awake, breathing hard, woozy with morphine and gripping a surprised Soul by the wrist. Oh. That’s right. AEGIS medbay. Stitches. “Huh - what,” they say through slow-moving lips, and let go of Soul’s arm. A moment later, squinting blearily without their glasses, they make out the long shape of Ben in the doorway. “What’s going on?”