I Made The Thing Haha

I made the thing haha

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..his arms refused to obey and his mouth was filled with the taste of blood and he couldn't bring himself to take a single breath because his ribs felt like a crooked metal cage and the agony was sucking him into a vortex of unconsciousness and he was too lost and hurt to resist and…

..and it took him a while to realize that he was okay.

That it wasn't his head that was flattened like a rotten apple. It was the head of his mech.

It wasn't his throat that was filled with blood. It was--

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

_______The whole thing under the cut_________

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

Orion feels like a mug without a handle. Like having one earbud fall out of your ear. Like a shirt that's had its buttons ripped off.

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

He remembers the rattle of metal and the roar of the monster. He remembers someone shouting warnings to him over the comms. He remembers something grabbing his head and slamming him to the ground with so much force, that some part inside his head audibly cracked and it was very warm and stinging and painful and suffocating and he was screaming trying to rip off his helmet and do something but his arms refused to obey and his mouth was filled with the taste of blood and he couldn't bring himself to take a single breath because his ribs felt like a crooked metal cage and the agony was sucking him into a vortex of unconsciousness and he was too lost and hurt to resist and .

..and it took him a while to realize that he was okay.

That it wasn't his head that was flattened like a rotten apple. It was the head of his mech.

It wasn't his throat that was filled with blood. It was--

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

He can't get used to Shockwave being gone. It feels like a mug without a handle. Like--

..like a part of him has been torn away. Not essential to life. But critical to completeness. The science department calls it “ co-dependence. ” Engineering says that combining two minds into a single whole can make people see themselves as one entity made up of two parts. Most call it grieving.

Orion isn't sure what to call it. He doesn't know the right word for what he's experiencing.

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

He's not asking to deactivate his implant. He just reconfigures it so the reconnect checks aren't too frequent. The silly little device continues to pretend that Shockwave's absence is a technical problem that can be fixed by trying again.

Orion is strangely grounded by this ritual. Allows him to pretend that Shockwave is still somewhere nearby and all it takes to synchronize their minds is to try to reconnect.

And then he'll be whole again.

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

He looks in the mirror and sees a puzzle. A mosaic.

He sees the little pieces he borrowed from Shockwave. As well as the holes left where Shockwave took pieces of him.

Connecting minds tends to make them bleed into each other. Blurring boundaries and confusing identities.

Orion thinks that part of Shockwave was preserved in him.

He also knows that part of him died that day along with Shockwave.

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 not detected. Reconnect.]

[Device 2 detected. Connect?]

Orion freezes, not immediately realizing what has changed.

Could it be...?

He'd seen a lot of impossible things lately. Aliens and resurrections and black holes and honestly. He had gotten a little tired of being surprised. So when the possibility of traveling to other dimensions gets added to his record?

Haah

He had been told that other worlds would probably be very different from his world. That on the other side could be any kind of unimaginable madness or guaranteed death or nothing at all but infinite emptiness and none of those things could be predicted but when he gets close enough to examine the strange alien portal setup, his implant sends him a ping.

[Device 2 detected. Connect?]

At the end of the day. There is one impossible thing that exists on the other side