#ITS ALSO VERY BEGINNING VERY EARLY PREQUEL STUFF & ITS A BANGER

[forwhump]

a/n; I have to say, I’ve been fleshing out this little universe of mine for years & years and I genuinely forget how much content I have or what half of it is LIKE THIS ONE !!!!!!!!! I FORGOT ALL ABOUT THIS ONE & this is such a good one they were just little babies :’) awww my little babies

more early stuff & @ chi finally some caretaking 👀 better late than never 😚

word count: 4k, it’s long as hell

tw/cw: mentions of vivisection, grievous bodily harm, accidental grievous self harm, canon typical gore

living weapon whumpee, caretaking, the sort of blood and guts that come w taking care of a living weapon

Something Wren is starting to find almost helplessly endearing about Silas is just how intimidated he seems to be by the rest of them.

He cuts the figure of an old Hollywood movie monster, something that brings the word fearsome to mind. He has to turn sideways to fit through doorways because of the bulk of him, and all of it is muscle, genetically engineered or otherwise. Hal insists he has to be ten feet tall; Wren thinks, practically, he’s probably somewhere between eight and nine. His hair is long, almost unnaturally inky in colour, and there’s something sort of feral about the way he always lets it hang in his face, limp. His voice is just unnatural in pitch, a rumble, bass, but he doesn’t speak all that much, instead angling his head, grunting on a good day. He isn’t very expressive, but he makes a lot of eye contact. An intimidating amount of eye contact.

Frightful. And not just in bulk, but in what he’s capable of; if Silas decided he wanted to use the unit as his personal slaughterhouse, there isn’t a thing any or all of them could do to stop him. He’s frightful. But some reason, frightful as he may be, it really seems like the rest of them make him nervous. After weeks of trying to coerce him, like trying to befriend a stray dog, he’d started joining them in the common room but he’d never get too close, only ever just watching them. Wren’s always found something really wary about the way he’ll watch them, something nervous. It makes it hard to be frightened by him.

Robin’s the exception. For whatever reason, Silas is properly shit scared of Robin, and Wren can’t even begin to guess why but it makes him laugh. He tries not to, he doesn’t want to embarrass Silas, not when he’s already so skittish, but watching him full body react to something as innocuous as Robin turning his head is amusing in an almost painfully endearing way, and he just can’t help it, try as he might. The first thing that’s made him laugh, actually, since he got here.

The second is that Robin is weirded out by it. It creeps him out that Silas is creeped out by him. Their relationship is built on a foundation of very tense symbiosis and Wren couldn’t say what it is about it that tugs so firmly at his chest, but it does. It makes him smile if he thinks about it too hard.

He would dare say he’s charmed by it, but he has a sneaking suspicion it’s why Silas isn’t more tempted to spend time in the common room, time around the rest of them. Usually, though, he lurks more than he doesn’t, and he’s becoming a somewhat comforting fixture, so Wren notices, pretty immediately, that Silas isn’t his usual shadow in the common room. Even if he always just sits outside, watching, he always sits outside. Wren notices pretty immediately that he isn’t there; Silas is kind of a hard guy to miss. And Wren would be lying again if he said that, selfishly, he didn’t prefer having Silas around. Wren feels better in his company, even if he’s just a shadow. The soldiers are all afraid of him, so afraid of him, and they have less attention to focus on Wren when they’re scared.

June and Robin are having some kind of heated competition — push ups — and Hal is lying on the floor beside them, arms folded behind his head, eyes closed. He looks like he’s napping.

Wren doesn’t even bother to ask them. He crosses through the common room, mostly unnoticed, and peeks first into Silas’ room, where he’s usually hiding, where Wren has to track him down before coercing him out. Except Silas isn’t there, and his bedroom is empty.

And Wren is pretty certain Silas doesn’t have any of his field tests or his treatments, because it was always pretty obvious when Silas was being taken away for a field test or treatment — Wren got left alone, because Silas needed an escort of just about every armed soldier in the place. But Wren had been with Point, and Point had been his usual, deranged self, not the tense, colder version that impending Silas exposure seems to bring out in him.

He checks the common room again, just in case, but he isn’t there. He isn’t in the kitchen, either. The door to the bathrooms is closed. It usually isn’t.

Wren cracks it open, and he doesn’t know what he was expecting.

The smell is so overwhelming that for a second, he goes blind. It’s bitter, a sharp pain in his sinuses he hadn’t anticipated, the tang of raw meat. It makes him dizzy.

He takes two steps into the bathroom and has to brace a hand on the wall to keep himself from slipping. Looking down, the red mist had cleared from his vision but he doesn’t realize it for a second, because everything is still red. Redness is pooling on the floor.

Blood.

There’s so much blood.

He thinks first, stricken, that Silas must have died in the bathroom because he’s smeared on every wall and pooling on the floor. It’s an impossible amount of blood, so much of it in some spots it doesn’t even look like blood, but black paint.

But Wren rounds the corner, and the bathroom has been flooded, blood soaking through the canvas of his shoes, but Silas, somehow, is still alive, and he’s still standing. He’s shirtless, standing over a drain, and he’s been vivisected. His chest and his stomach had both been opened, a Y of a wound that yawns open, pulled wider with each of Silas’ breaths. It looks like it had been stitched together at some point, staples that tear chunks out of the already frayed tissue as they’re pulled, threads that tear ribbons out of his flesh.

Wren can really see it in him then, the widowmaker, the juggernaut. He can see why the soldiers are all so scared, so edgy around him; why they talk about him the way they do; why Point, in particular, is so weird about him. The rest of the unit, until Silas, save for Wren, had all been super soldiers — Silas is their weapon. Wren can really see it in him for the very first time.

But there’s something in the way he looks up, caught, the closest he’s ever looked to embarrassed, and the absurdity of it makes Wren forget to be scared of him at all.

“What?” is what he says. He doesn’t mean to. He feels lightheaded, like he’s started losing blood, too. Like the blood loss is contagious. “Are you okay?”

It’s a stupid question, because of course he’s not. Silas lifts his chin, sort of a nod, anyway.

“Um,” Wren says, because he’s is lying. He’s very visibly not okay. “What. Um,” he says, and even he’s surprised by how normal his voice sounds. A side effect of blood loss by proxy. “What happened?”

Silas just barely angles his head at him, dismissive. Nothing.

Wren’s a little irritated by it. Deflecting, probably, but he’s irritated nonetheless. “What happened?” He repeats firmly.

Silas heaves a broad shoulder, and Wren doesn’t mean to, but he watches as it pulls at his skin and the staple of a stitch tears a chunk out of his sternum. “S’fine.”

“Fine?” Wren says, and it comes out a little weak. He looks up — up, up, up — into Silas’ face. “You’re bleeding to death.”

Silas finally lifts his head, looks at him properly, and he looks for a long time. When he speaks, his voice is its usual, flat bass, a rumble Wren would swear he can feel in his chest. “I won’t die.”

“What?” He repeats. It’s a little surreal, this whole thing. “Silas,” he tries. “What did you do?”

“Pulled my stitches,” Silas says.

“Yeah,” Wren agrees. He tries not to look at Silas’ chest, at the way flesh had been pulled back over meat and was starting to come apart again, like frayed ribbon. “Why?”

Silas rubs the back of his head and Wren doesn’t think he’s going to answer him. But he admits, after a beat of silence, “I didn’t mean to.” Another beat, and his voice is a little more tense when he says, “I was trying to change my bandages.”

Wren blinks, and then he’s overcome with a wave of sadness so heavy it almost knocks him on his ass. He was just trying to change his bandages. He was trying to change the bandages from his autopsy by himself, and he was going to bleed to death in the bathroom by himself.

Wren takes a step forward and Silas eyes him suspiciously. “Do you need a hand?” He offers softly. He shouldn’t have to bleed to death alone, not a few feet from a unit full of people that would help him.

Silas looks at him blankly. “My hands are fine.”

Wren cracks a smile, despite himself. Despite the blood loss. “Would you like some help?” He tries again.

Silas looks at him again, and he hesitates. He looks at him for another long time. Finally, he says, “no.”

Wren tilts his head. “I don’t mind.”

It’s impossible to tell what Silas is thinking. “Why?”

“Why don’t I mind?” Wren asks, angling his head again, curious. “Because you need help, Silas. You’re bleeding. A lot.”

Silas studies him intently. “You’d touch me?”

He says it with a skepticism that tugs at Wren’s heartstrings. “Of course.”

Silas looks at him with that same flat sort of skepticism, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Wren offers him a smile and holds a hand, expectant.

Silas angles his head, towards a bench mounted into the far wall. There are grey towels piled on top, knocked askew, blackened with blood splatter and a single handprint. Beside the towels, industrial rolls of gauze and strip bandages. On the cracked linoleum in front of the bench, an unwound pile of fraying, blood soaked bandages and gauze with chunks of meat woven through the mesh. Wren actually can’t look at them as he steps over them, and it has nothing to do with the gore — it makes him sad in a way he can’t articulate, in a way that makes him feel heavy.

He considers asking Silas to the bench but Silas is standing over the drain and that’s probably the best — the safest — place for him to be. The water in the district doesn’t run hot, but it runs lukewarm, so Wren wets a towel with lukewarm water and sidles into Silas’ personal space. He smells like a butcher shop, but Wren had expected that. The skin of his opened autopsy wound is threadbare, ruined, like whoever had cut him open had taken a cheese grater to the incision to keep him from ever being stitched back together again. It looks raw, and it looks so painful that it actually makes Wren’s skin hurt, which he hadn’t expected.

Exhaling softly, he twists his hair up tightly, out of the way, and tries his very best not to hurt Silas worse than he’s already been hurt. He can feel Silas’ eyes on him the whole time, watching him with a kind of intensity that Wren can handle from beneath his eyelashes all of one time, and then he can’t look at him again.

Soon enough, anyway, he forgets all about it, almost forgets that Silas is there with him at all. He’s meticulous, so careful that he keeps finding himself holding his breath, so focused he forgets about anything else. He picks all the most damaging staples and pulls all the most mutilating threads.

It isn’t easy work, by any means. It’s gory and it’s slippery and Wren’s always had a pretty strong stomach. He’d grown up in the south, and he’d done his time on a farm. His brother had been a cowboy once. There isn’t a lot Wren can’t handle, but there’s a lot of raw, bleeding meat before he covers it with bandages, and every so often his brain likes to remind him that it’s Silas, and it makes him sort of squeamish.

He cleans the wound as best, as gently as he can, and Silas is still bleeding when he finally starts to wrap his bandages. He isn’t quite sure how it was bandaged before, but he thinks mummifying most of his torso is probably the way to go, right?

Silas doesn’t complain or even twitch the whole time. Wren chances a look up at him as he winds a bandage around his waist; he’d forgotten how intently Silas was watching him, and it almost makes him jump. “I’m not hurting you?”

One of Silas’ eyebrows twitches. “You couldn’t hurt me.”

“Given my vantage point, I probably could,” Wren points out.

Silas doesn’t say anything, and it makes Wren just a tad uneasy. He knows his silence means it’s cute that you think so, and that’s a little unsettling. But when Wren says, “can you come down here?”, because Silas is pretty big and Wren can’t wrap all the way to his shoulders without contortion and strain, Silas kneels in front of him willingly, easy. He’s still taller than him.

It makes Wren smile. “Thank you.”

Silas bows his head, kind of a nod, and angles his head to watch him again as Wren more or less mummifies him in gauze and a wasteful number of bandages.

He swaddles him until blood stops seeping through the gauze and then he swaddles him still. He can’t look at him again, not as Silas watches him, not with so much less distance between them. Up close, he has really black eyes, the same unnatural inky colour as his hair, not dark, not really, but an absence of colour or light at all. Wren accidentally catches his eye and holds it for a beat too long, hands on Silas’ slick, bare skin.

When he looks away again, he can feel heat in his face and he isn’t quite sure what to do with that. Flustered, he flattens a bandage against Silas’ sternum and asks, softer than he means to, “what happened to you?”

Silas doesn’t answer him for such a long time that Wren has no choice but to look at him again, curious. Silas is still watching him, and when Wren looks up he raises his eyebrows, curious.

“What happened?” Wren repeats, trying to meet his eye. “What did they do to you?” He knows there are treatments and therapies and medications the super soldiers needed and need to make them and keep them super soldiers. It’s nothing like this. It’s never anything like this.

But Silas heaves his massive shoulders, a tense sort of shrug. “Surgery.”

He says it with a simplicity that makes Wren all too aware of the thickest, most raised scars — the inside of his arms, armpit to wrist; down his sides, from armpit to hip; the Y shaped scar of his torso, shoulders to groin. “Surgery,” he repeats softly. “Do you have a lot of surgeries?”

“Yes,” Silas says.

“Why?”

“Improvement,” he says flatly.

“Improvement,” Wren repeats.

“Mm,” he agrees.

Hidden behind the oil spill of his hair, there’s a ridged scar along the bit of Silas’ hairline that Wren can see and he can’t help but wonder how much of Silas’ hairline it spans. How much of himself he was allowed to keep and how much the district has taken away.

It kind of stuns him into silence, and he finds himself looking really hard at Silas’ bandages.

Silence stretches and Wren isn’t sure how to break it. He keeps busy; once his torso is mummified, Wren takes the lukewarm towel to the cover of gore on his skin. Tries to, anyway — Silas catches him quickly around the wrist. His hand spans most of Wren’s forearm.

He looks up at Silas, who looks back and doesn’t say anything, dark and intense. They look at each other so long Wren is kind of startled out of it. He says, “did I hurt you?”

His eyebrow twitches. Amusement, maybe? “No.”

“Then let me clean you up,” Wren chides gently.

Silas looks down at Wren’s hand, caught in his own. “You don’t have to do this,” he says.

He tilts his head. “Do what?”

“Touch me,” Silas says.

Wren frowns and gently pulls his hand from Silas’ grip. Silas doesn’t stop him, so Wren takes the towel to his skin again, carefully, carefully, carefully wiping away the carnage. He’s as gentle as he can with the burlap they get for towels, and he’s careful not to pull too hard at Silas’ skin. He cleans his shoulders, his arms, hands, under his nails. His throat and his collarbones. The line of his jaw before he finally asks, “why do you think I wouldn’t want to touch you?”

Silas answers him like it should be obvious. “I’m a freak.” I’m disgusting.

Wren stills. The flippancy of it actually upsets him, probably a bit more than it should. He looks up with a frown and says, “you’re not a freak.”

Silas angles his head down towards him slowly. It would probably be intimidating if Wren weren’t a little irritated with him, even if he doesn’t quite know why he’s irritated with him. Then Silas gives him this look, and he doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to — it’s the most expressive Wren’s ever seen him, and his expression says you’re an idiot.

He breathes out a laugh, despite himself. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re not a freak, Silas.”

Silas raises his eyebrows and doesn’t say anything.

Wren raises his eyebrows right back. “You’re not a freak.”

Silas angles his head, relenting, but there’s something Wren finds kind of condescending about it. Washcloth to Silas’ cheek, he uses it to tilt Silas’ face so he’ll look at him. “Stop it. You’re not a freak.” His eyebrow twitches and Wren’s starting to think it’s definitely amusement. “You should be kinder to you,” he tells him.

Silas snorts and there’s nothing amused in it at all. “I don’t deserve kindness.”

Wren can’t keep himself from recoiling. “That’s a horrible thing to say,” he tells him, and he’s mad at Silas on Silas’ behalf. The guy could stand to be a lot kinder to somebody that was bleeding to death in a dirty bathroom by himself. “Why not?”

Silas looks at him critically. “What do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” Wren says. “What are you?”

“I’m a weapon,” he tells him.

Wren already knew that. “And?”

Silas looks only just barely baffled, but it’s obvious on his otherwise marble face. “You’re a soldier. You don’t know what weapons do?”

There’s something incredibly condescending in his tone but that’s not why Wren prickles. “I’m not a soldier.”

Silas angles his head back to look down at him, and Wren can see it in his face, that he’s really looking at him for the very first time. How much smaller he is than Silas, how much smaller he is than all the rest of them. “What are you?” He asks.

Wren’s shoulders tense. “That’s none of your business.” Silas studies him closely, all dark and intense, but he doesn’t say anything else, he doesn’t push, he doesn’t pry. Wren tries to roll the tension out of his shoulders and huffs out a breath, wiping the last of the blood splatter from his face.

“Wren?” Silas says.

Wren almost wrings out the towel, then thinks better of it. He looks at Silas, very close to eye level. “Silas?”

“Thank you,” he says, and there’s something sort of awkward about how he says it, tense, out of practice.

Like a surprising number of other things about Silas, Wren finds himself kind of endeared by it. He takes a hand to his chin and tips his face down. It surprises him again, how willingly Silas moves, and Wren smiles against the ridged scar of his hairline as he presses a kiss there. “You’re welcome.”

Silas looks at him, and he’s as unexpressive as he usually is but he touches his hand to his forehead, to the spot Wren had kissed. “What was that?”

“What?” Wren says, because it’s not what he was expecting. He has to stop expecting things from Silas, he thinks. “A kiss?”

“A kiss?” Silas repeats, and Wren can’t tell if it’s another question or if he’s just mimicking his inflection. He says it with Wren’s accent.

It kind of feels like a lightbulb going off, like a bunch of odd puzzle pieces finally forming a bigger, odd picture. Maybe Silas isn’t what Wren thought he was at all.

“Silas,” he says slowly. “Where were you before this? Before you were here.”

“I wasn’t,” Silas says.

And that can’t possibly be true, but it opens this yawning chasm in Wren’s chest that sucks all the air from his lungs. He feels so guilty for ever likening Silas to a stray dog that it actually might make him flush. It isn’t that he’s intimidated by them, it’s that he doesn’t understand them. Silas is their only weapon — has he known anything before this but violence? Is that all he can remember?

“You weren’t,” Wren says softly.

The corner of Silas’ mouth lifts and it’s the very first time Wren has ever seen him smile. It makes him smile, despite himself. “Freak,” he explains, and there’s something almost challenging in the way he says it.

“Stop that,” Wren tells him, and it makes Silas smile properly.

Silas has a very handsome smile.

Silas has dimples.

It almost makes Wren recoil again, but that would be rude, so he doesn’t. It’s close, though. There’s a particular scar on Silas’ face, thin and shiny, angled across his jaw and the corner of his mouth so when he smiles, it’s lopsided. It’s uncomfortably charming, and the dimples that carve out of his cheeks make it almost overwhelming. He also has great teeth, which is jarring, a stark contrast to all the rest of him, raised scars and messy stitches. He thinks Silas might actually be really handsome, and that feels jarring, too.

He smiles anyway. He can’t help it and he doesn’t know why.

Silas looks away, but he still has a dimple carved out of his cheek on one side and Wren presses the washcloth to it, an impulse he can’t quite control. “There you go,” he tells him. “Good as new.”

“Thank you,” he says again, and it’s still awkward, and he still won’t still look at him.

Wren smiles a bit wider. “Anytime,” he says, and Silas grunts. “I’m serious. Anytime. You’re gonna start being kinder to yourself and you’re gonna start by asking for help.” Silas grunts again and he adds, “don’t be shy. I don’t bite.”

“I do,” Silas says, and he doesn’t say it like a joke but he says it like a warning and Wren doesn’t think he’s kidding.

He isn’t quite sure why it makes him smile again. “I don’t mind.”

Silas looks at him, angling his head. Wren can’t tell what he’s thinking and it should be intimidating, daunting, but Wren’s been having a really hard time being afraid of him. His full body fear of Robin had started it, but having him kneel patiently in front of him while Wren swaddled him in bandages may have been the thing to cement it. “Okay,” he says finally.

Wren surprises himself with how pleased he is. His smile is bright. “Okay,” he agrees. “Good.”

Silas dimples on one side, just barely, and angles his head down towards Wren.

For a second, Wren doesn’t get it. Then he breathes out a laugh and leans up to press another obedient kiss to Silas’ hairline.

When they get back to the common room, Silas sits beside him, and a mountain has been moved. Wren isn’t sure why it feels so much like a win, but he preens, anyway.