#i have been thinking about secret weapons a lot lately if it wasnt obvious lol

[bleedingectoplasm]

At night, Jazz can feel the nanobots in her veins.

During the day, the sensation is almost bearable. She wears headphones and wool sweaters all the time now. Mom scolds her for being inattentive and Danny makes a face when he touches her scratchy clothes, but the prickly fabric and loud music dull her senses to keep her sane. While the sun sits above the horizon, Jazz can use psychology buzzwords to logic away the crawling beneath her skin, telling herself that it's merely psychosomatic or a trauma response or maybe even a low level hallucination, that certainly she can't actually be aware of microscopic movements in her bloodstream.

But when Jazz lies awake at night, waiting for sleep that will never come, her insides itch. Her veins feel too tight, as if there is not enough room to fit both her blood cells and machinery. Sometimes she wonders if slashing her wrists would relieve the pressure. She fantasizes about it, turning the idea over until she can almost picture it, finding perverse pleasure in the mental image of her blood splashed on the bathroom floor. Fear is the only thing stopping her from pressing a sharp blade against the soft skin of her inner wrists. She's too afraid of what she'd find, terrified that the contents of her her veins may be more metal than blood.

On her worst nights, Jazz can hear them. She can hear the tiny machines buzzing inside her body, hear their jointed steel limbs scraping against the walls of her blood vessels. She wonders how many capillaries they have crushed during their travels, how many of her cells have been killed and replaced with computers.

Worst of all, she doesn't even know if any of it is real. Is it real? Does it matter? It feels real, the tugging and buzzing and pinching of invaders under her skin.

Jazz's body no longer feels like it's her own. Her organs are on loan, biding their time until Vlad recalls her anatomy into his service. Her skeleton and muscular structure are merely supports for the robots that have taken up residence in her cardiovascular system. There is no recourse. There is no cure. She can only lie awake and dread the day that her borrowed body is made into a weapon.