#or Armand wipes Daniel’s mind and watches as his boy picks Her. and this must be his soul. this must be what he wanted all along

[laniidae-passerine]

“what if Alice looks like Armand” what if Alice is a skinny pale as paper light eyed girl? what if Daniel chooses a woman who looks like the romantic ideal they painted over Amadeo for? you chase after white men who are fascinated by you for a minute, by how exotic and otherworldly you are, but then suddenly you are nothing but your powers and that too is eventually boring. so they leave you. they will always leave you. in the end, she is white and pretty and lovely. she gets to have Daniel and his pale baby girls. and you get nothing but the pain.

[ardesti]

olivia is only in a couple of days a week, but her eyes are sharp.

in glimpses of daniel's wandering memory, the creature searches and picks her shrewd gaze out among the rest, picks her apart with the frantic notion that drums in each beat of the mortal's heart. armand does not need to put the thought there for it to rise to the surface. time is short. they know. this will not last. danger. they know. as little as it would be to turn her eyes, to distract her attention elsewhere, it is a band-aid on a snapped bone. it has taken near too long.

the boy knows this. he frets, wrings his hands and paces through thoughts. he thinks of the future, the lack of it. how he will be reassigned, turned away to face another wall, to sit with his endless stream of curiosities locked behind his teeth, to live without living, mundane and unsatisfied until death.

is this all you want ?

there is an audible click when the door unlocks.

'I hope I get to look at you.'

lamplike eyes linger on the blinking spot in the corner for just a moment. does he? well. they will see. he has earned this, for his work. scarcely is there time enough to ambush and drink his immediate fill before the world is plunged into a violent red. the exits, the sharp edged shrieks, the spray hot across his face.

it is not hard to follow the sound of a heart by the time few remain beating. daniel's mind exists like a candle in the dark, hopeful and terrified, familiar and easy to find his way back to. he has studied it now for this long.

it would have taken less effort, perhaps, to instead wipe himself from the watchful eyes of the humans who have held and coveted him like some rare prize, to slip out like a shadow. he is not often a creature for senseless violence, after all, and yet hatred and hunger paint his shape with a careful brush. the whisper of a stolen starch coat grazing the threshold sounds like the breath of wings, punctuated by what drips.

the acrid stench of smoke clings to the boy's skin and hair. what must that look like? how soft to the touch? how he shakes, now, the sound of his breath audibly flutters and seizes with each terrified breath scraped in. thoughts echo near as frantic and loud as the alarms he has triggered, screaming uncertainty, prey animal bowing before open and waiting jaws. armand drops olivia - what remains - and lets her look all she can ever want.

" daniel. " the name beckons saccharine, soft velvet beneath the red red shriek of sirens and gurgling of the already dead. he has never spoken it before, not aloud, and there is some small tenderness in the intimacy of how it sounds, lilted with accent and irreparably stained red beneath the whirling overhead lights.

there is a soft creak of the desk as the monster's weight is added atop it, waiting patiently for vulnerable, trembling rabbit to draw nearer.

i have come for you, as you wanted. why do you hide from me? come out, daniel. let me see you.

@ardesti

olivia is only in a couple of days a week— she does something with tech and even though she has told daniel twice, he could only guess her job title— and she stopped him on the way in today. he thinks they may have exchanged pleasantries, but the only part of the conversation he recalls is when she told him he looked tired. he didn’t lie well enough, and so she narrowed her eyes a bit and asked him if everything was okay.

and that is when he knew he was running out of time.

7479 could not see the way his knee bounced or the fingertips of his left hand drumming against the desk. the nails of his right were being gnawed to nubs. daniel did not tell 7479 that he was out of time, but the nightmare could smell it on him. even buried in a holding cell where the closest they get to seeing each other is through a colorless screen permanently set to a night vision mode, 7479 can listen to his heart beating faster, can sense the dryness of his mouth, the anxious edge to his words.

daniel wasn’t planning on doing it today— he wasn’t planning on doing it at all.

but daniel knows what happens to people who lose their unbiasedness toward scps— who fail a mental evaluation, whether routine or conducted to follow up on a reported concern. they’re removed from that project. walled off from all further study or access to information regarding the scp which has managed to damage their neutrality. permanently. for the sake of remaining secure. better to remain safe and devote the resources to filling the role again than risk what daniel is thinking about doing.  

7479 got quiet, as if politely giving daniel a moment to consider his options, and then asked him a question.

----------Daniel. Is this all you want?

and armand did not have to press him further.

He’s going to kill you.

It felt as if his hand moved of its own accord, directed with a numbness nestled firmly in his soul.  It did not hesitate to flip open a keypad and begin typing in a series of numbers.

usually the entry-code is used only for food or else under circumstances in which 7479 must be removed, but always when 7479 is sedated. heavily, from what he understands. the medical part is beyond his scope of work— he only designed the cage. and it, of course, is only designed to accept the entry code at certain registered times. it would be a poor security system if a single code and thumb-print unlocked the gate at any point on any whim.

however, there is an override.

it is protocol to have an override function.

“ I’ve only ever seen you through a screen. ” an absent murmur as daniel began inputting his security information.

I hope I get to look at you.

he rubbed his index and middle across a tired eye and fumbled in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes.

“ gate’s unlocked. I don’t know if it made a noise or anything. ”

his hands decided it is an appropriate moment to begin trembling as he watched armand open the door. the waiting was excruciating, but brief— he was only on his second cigarette when the screaming began.

And daniel thought the screaming would be long over by now. everything else daniel thought is dubious. perhaps the nightmare crawled between his brain cells and stole away important questions and his ability to care about the answers. what is armand going to do? how will he do it? who will he do it to? when—

he doesn’t remember how quickly he decided to shove himself underneath his desk and pull his knees against his flailing, screaming heartbeat, but against every instinct to try and save himself, he remained anchored in place. He pressed himself harder and harder against the corner as the sounds of panic unfurled into carnage, nauseatingly vivid. louder than he could have believed. it has not touched him, but it is on its way.  

his hands are screwed over his ears as if chasing the hope of sparing himself all the shrieking. it is difficult to decipher what is human from what is only the wailing containment breach siren.

when the harsh thud of something lifeless lands beside him, he screams. he jolts hard enough to slam into corner he shoved himself into. her eyes are glassed over, mouth gaping, her skin faded of color and bathed in the red light of the whirling alarm. blood crawls over pristine black tile and seeps beneath the desk.

his terror has cauterized his sobbing into silent, whole-body shuddering. a sweat-soaked hand is clamped over his mouth catching choking, wheezing breaths desperate to fill lungs woven tight with panic. he does not see armand, does not move, does not sever his gaze from the dead person asking him why.

“ what the fuck— what the fuck did you do? ”