jin character piece #13
Feb. 4th, 2019 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bipolyjackThe image of Ben and the weird flickering robot cuts to black. A little static clings to Jin’s fingers as they take their hand off the screen. Their head hurts. Through the observation room’s wide one-way window, they can see Jess and Sue Ann facing off with the wire-armature-looking S1N unit, Sue Ann’s toothy mouth wide open in a roar.
“Happy now?” says Polaris over the speakers.
Fucking no. Jin swore they’d never come back here and now almost everyone they care about is trapped here with them, all because Benoit fucking Mercier had to go and get himself got by Belle like a fucking loser. Happy now, asshole?
“Yeah,” says Jin, and turns away from the bank of computers and the observation window, away from the battle Polaris won’t let them fight in the room below. “Thank you. Genuinely.”
An almost surprised pause on Polaris’s end, and then the voice says, with a hopeful note, “So you’ll sit tight?”
“Yeah, yep. You betcha.”
Jin raises both arms, intending to smash a hole in the floor, and their body kind of - well, hmm, there’s not really a good word for what it does. Explodes, maybe? Explodes, and they fill the observation room up to the ceiling, a churning pillar of flesh, before smashing down not only through the floor but through the floor below that, and the floor below that.
It feels, hmm. Weird. Not the same type of weird as when the nanobots shore up their muscles and move around under their skin - or, well, exactly that same type of weird, but times like one thousand. Jin doesn’t really have arms and legs in this moment, they sort of abstractly realize as they pick a direction at random and crash through wall after wall, not thinking super hard about where they’re going or how they’re going there. The mass of flesh and nanobots they’ve become just kind of goes, and it occurs to Jin that Polaris doesn’t seem to be holding the reins anymore. It’s just them and the bots. Serves you right, motherfucker, getting between me and what I fucking came here for, Jin thinks, and a pair of heavy metal doors buckles and shrieks and goes flying under the unrelenting onslaught of their body and they’re in a testing chamber, maybe the one they’ve been getting their ass kicked in these past few days, maybe a different one, they all look the fucking same, whatever, who cares which one, Jin’s gotten their ass kicked in all of them. It’s nice to stretch all the way out, it’s like they’ve been hunching over in the low-ceilinged cells and hallways and now they can get up to their - holy shit, is this their full height, they’re fucking tall now - their full height in the couple of seconds it takes them to cross the concrete floor and barrel through the wall on the other side.
Sterile white corridor. God fucking dammit, they all look the same. Through another couple of walls. No personnel in sight, luckily, or Jin would be fucking trampling them. Whole place must be on alert, or in lockdown, or whatever the protocol is in your garden variety secret illegal medical experiment center. Operating theater. Jin doesn’t intentionally smash up the surgery table and the steel cabinets full of strange vials of whatever-the-fuck, but that stuff’s in their way, so. On the other side of that wall is a storage freezer full of metal wire-rack shelves, rows and rows of lidded petri dishes and clear plastic bags of bio-materials, neatly labeled. It’s all shattered on the floor in a second. Jin doesn’t feel the cold. Their head hurts, maybe, or maybe it just feels real fucking weird to be aware of their own shoulder muscles crushed up against their cheeks and temples as they move. Or, well, what they think are their cheeks and temples, it’s tough to tell which part of their body is which. Is their head still shaped like a head? It’s a miracle their glasses are still clinging doggedly to the face they can’t tell if they have.
More cells. They’re small, and Jin mows through them without pausing. The video feed showed some kind of lab, with a console in the middle. Jin’s going to find it. If they take the building down with them in the process, dope. Nothing but pluses.
On a whim, Jin hangs a right, through the back wall of a cell and then out and along a hallway, ripping up floor and ceiling tiles, and then there’s another thick set of doors crumpling under their - well, fists, theoretically, but the bulbous, writhing, club-like appendages they keep glimpsing out in front of them can only be called fists in the loosest possible sense - and this is it, this is the lab. Walls lined with mystery machinery, the freestanding console in the middle, and beyond that, the S1N unit with the flickering face, and beyond that, Ben with his wrists in restraints, looking like shit. Both robot and human are staring at Jin with varying degrees of comprehension.
Jin’s body shrinks, not evenly but in fits and gulps, bulging ripples of muscle sort of swallowing back into themselves until Jin is more the size they expect to be when the nanobots take over, which is still big, but like reasonable human big. Kind of. They’ve still got a good several inches on Ben and the robot as they approach, on their own legs, wow it’s cool to have legs again, even though the nanobots are doing a worse job than usual of keeping them from stumbling. Jin’s head is pounding, and it feels like every individual muscle in their body just got real friendly with a meat tenderizer. There’s no way they should still be standing right now, the bots are so depleted, but they keep their feet as they draw up even with the S1N unit and say hoarsely, “Outta my fucking way.”
“Jin?” That’s Ben, and even though Jin is still pissed at him, it’s good to hear his voice. He didn’t say anything on the video feed, and Jin was afraid for a second that Polaris had taken his speech from him somehow. Not that the world would be worse for a silent Ben. But still.
“I cannot allow you to pass,” says the robot.
Jin cocks a weighty fist. Their vision is starting to glaze. “Motherfucker, do I look like I’m playing? I will knock your ass into next fucking week. Move it.”
The robot’s features shift and change as it tilts its face at them, looking them up and down, and Jin wonders if this is the thing they thought was Ben, that looked like Ben and sounded like Ben and fought harder and better than Ben ever did or could, the thing they’ve been throwing themself against in the testing chamber like a dumbass every day since they woke up here. If so, Jin knows damn well it can wipe the floor with them. They don’t have another super-nanobot charge in them right now, god, fuck, their head hurts so bad, but impossibly, they feel their shoulders getting broader as they stare the thing down, swaying a little on their aching wobbly legs. “Move.”
The S1N unit steps to the side, its movements strange and clipped, like an old cartoon.
Jin’s body promptly deflates the rest of the way, and only then do they notice that their t-shirt and shorts are hanging off them in strips, the fabric stretched membrane-thin, torn and gaping at every seam. Oh well. The nanobots feel sluggish, muscles in their forearms barely swelling as they strain at Ben’s wrist cuffs, sweating and gritting their teeth, until they manage to wrench them apart. He watches them work through two black eyes, uncharacteristically quiet. Jin isn’t sure how they feel about him having seen them all, like, like that. All huge. Out of control. Not that he’s never seen Jin out of control before, but now he looks so shell-shocked that Jin can’t tell whether he’s scared of them or not, and that kind of sucks.
Briefly, Jin considers asking him the same thing they asked the fake Ben - what did I say to you in the infirmary? - but he winces when they run a thumb over the fresh bruise along his cheekbone, so Jin knows it’s really him this time. “Hey, man. You look like shit. What’d they do to you?”
He focuses on them with a visible effort. “They... knocked me around. But I’m all right.”
“You fucking scared me, dude. You good to walk?” Jin’s not sure the answer to that question is a solid yes for either of them, but they sling his arm over their shoulders and get ready to give it a try anyway. Weird, it’s just now striking them that for all the ways in which they’ve been physically intimate with this fucking kid - all the times they’ve slept with him, throttled him, woken up with an arm draped over him, knocked him on his ass, fallen unconscious beside him, kissed him like their life depended on it - that the two of them have never, like, hugged. Jin has never, like, held him, like they held Soul that one time when she learned how to cry. Obviously the S1N unit is still blocking their exit and Jess and Sue Ann are still here somewhere and Polaris is still at large and there’s a lot more to do tonight and Jin is so, so fucking tired and their head hurts so goddamn bad. But like. Weird how these things shake out.
