#roughish but i'm too sleep-deprived to care these days anymore so

[riftwalker-limbro]

scarred - part 1

masterpost

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The process of repairing the broken warframe ended up about as resource-intensive as Ordis had feared. Kali had helped Sufford and the Helminth find common ground in communication, so Sufford was able to decipher its demands for more resources of this or that type, which it made several times every day. Kelth would’ve liked to stay more on track with finding more of Ordis’ recordings, too, but the unsettling feeling about this warframe prevented them from switching their focus back entirely.

Eventually, after almost a week of robbing every base they could find, both Grineer and Corpus, the demands had mostly stopped. The frame wasn’t yet fully repaired, but as Sufford had explained it, it was more a case of letting the dust settle, letting the original pieces find their way back to each other, letting them reconnect, and providing them with the materials they needed during this process.

One day, while they were looking at some reports in the lounge, Sufford came by, sticking his head through the door and knocking softly on the wall. When Kelth looked up, Sufford made the sign for the somatic link, and headed back out. Uneasy at the short tone he normally never took with them, Kelth got up and hurried to the device.

Once inside, they connected easily back to Sufford, and immediately asked him what was up.

“Helminth requested my help,” he said. “Didn’t sound pleased. Want you there for it, in case something goes wrong and I need your help with the warframe.”

He was standing in front of the Helminth door, waiting for their confirmation.

“Alright,” Kelth said. “Let’s go see.”

Sufford walked forward, and the door opened.

The Helminth’s chair was empty, disconnected fleshy tendrils dangling above and around it. Next to it, on the floor, sat the strange warframe - looking similar enough to Ordis’ projection from the previous week to be recognisable, but not quite repaired all the way yet: his armour was riddled with glowing-blue rifts smudged with red, sunken into his body deep enough for his chest, where most of the damage was concentrated, to look almost caved-in. He looked like he’d just fallen from the chair, unceremoniously in a heap on the floor, hanging on to one of the armrests with one hand. The floor under his body looked a darker red than usual.

Through their connection to Sufford, Kelth could hear and understand the Helminth’s disgruntled hissing: “Not yet ready, bring him back, must continue our work.”

On the floor, the unfinished warframe jerked at the Helminth’s voice, and looked up. The way he held and moved his body looked all kinds of wrong, and that was already giving Kelth increasingly bad feelings about this entire adventure, but the way he launched himself backwards, away from Sufford, just at the sight of him-

Sufford instinctively dropped into a crouch, remaining where he was while the other warframe pressed his back up against the Helminth’s squishy walls. His sunken chest was rising and falling rapidly, and the airflow in and out whistled and rattled.

Sufford reached behind him, taking hold of his skana.

“Sufford,” Kelth said, alarmed, “what are you-”

He disconnected the skana from his back, sheath and all, and slowly brought it around, showing it to the other. “He’s afraid,” Sufford said to Kelth, before putting the skana on the floor to his side, and giving it a little shove, sending it clattering out of his own reach. The other warframe’s head followed it for a second, before snapping back to Sufford. His breathing didn’t ease up - on the contrary, suddenly, he was clawing at his own throat with his fingers.

Alarmed, Sufford stood back up to approach him, grabbed his wrists to wrestle his hands away from his neck, to try and avoid him causing himself more damage. Through the touch, Kelth suddenly got some glimpses of what must’ve been going on inside the other warframe’s head: there were no specific words, only a pervasive sense of wrongness, of panic and horror.

Sufford seemed to also realise that there might not be any communicating with him through transference, at least not for now, so once the other stopped struggling against his hold, he released him and sat back. When he didn’t look like he was going to start to claw himself open again, Sufford started signing: “You’re safe, take a deep breath-”

Sufford kept on repeating the same instructions, telling him to calm down and guiding him through breathing exercises, and it did seem to work. Gradually, the whistling slowed down and stopped, though the rattles continued. The warframe’s gaze remained fixed on Sufford’s hands, though he kept himself pressed into the wall, as far away from Sufford as he could get.

When his breathing had returned to normal, he tilted his head - and slowly raised his hands, holding one out flat, palm-up, and pinched the fingers of his other, scratching at his open palm with it.

Sufford was confused. That wasn’t a sign he recognised.

“Oh, it’s not-” Kelth said, before they realised. “He’s miming pen and paper. Shit, does he not know sign?”

“Can you understand me?” Sufford signed. The other drew up his shoulders - shy? defensive? - and tapped his fingers to his palm again.

On their private transference channel, Sufford swore. Under more normal circumstances, Kelth would’ve laughed - now, they just tried to come up with a solution. They didn’t exactly keep pen and paper on board.

“Return him, finish the job,” the Helminth growled. The damaged frame flinched back again, hands flying to his shoulders, hugging himself while he shivered as if cold.

“Let’s get him into the chair first, and we can get him something to talk with after - he shouldn’t be out of it yet,” Kelth said. “Can you try and tell him-”

Sufford mimicked the sign the damaged warframe had made at him earlier, scratching at his open palm with pinched fingers. The other warframe stopped trembling, nodded vigorously. Sufford hesitated, unsure what to do next - so Kelth took over, raised one finger, pointing the other hand at the chair. Repairs first. The warframe on the floor looked back and forth between Sufford and the chair a few times, clearly hesitant. When he didn’t move, Sufford reached down and dragged a finger through one of the smears the other had left behind on the floor, showing it to him - his own blood. You’re wounded.

He looked down at himself, and shocked a little, as if seeing his wounds for the first time. He glanced at the chair one final time before fixing his gaze on Sufford again and nodding.

He put his palms to the floor, leaned forward, tried to stand up while he clearly didn’t have the strength to pull it off yet - but before he could fall, Sufford was by his side, pulling one arm around his own shoulders, dragging the other up like that. The close contact once again allowed Kelth some insight - he wasn’t panicking anymore, but he was still in a lot of pain and stress, and beyond confused. The contact was too brief for Kelth to figure out any way of reversing the flow of emotions, of finding words to reassure him.

Depositing the frame back into the chair, Sufford took a step back to watch as the Helminth reconnected its tendrils to various open wounds. Almost immediately, to Sufford’s surprise, the other warframe fell limp, shoulders losing all of their tension and head dropping back from where he’d stubbornly tried to hold it up.

“Unnecessary damage sustained,” Helminth growled. “Will not let him wake again before he is ready.”

Sufford’s disgruntled frustration at his unintentionally-broken promise was evident - it would be impossible now to get information out of him before he was fully repaired. Damn the Helminth.

“We’ll just put a datapad in this room, for next time,” Kelth offered. Sufford grumbled agreement and walked back out of the room, intending to do just that.

Kelth decided he could do this by himself perfectly fine and closed the connection, sitting back in the somatic link. They double checked that he couldn’t hear them anymore, and then allowed the events to sink in properly.

What the hell had they done? They hadn’t ever had to rebuild Sufford from the ground up, they hadn’t known it would be like this, was this why Kali had been so insistent on repairing him? Fuck. Oh, they suddenly weren’t at all sure anymore if this had been a good idea. They shouldn’t have let Kali insist on this so hard. What if this warframe went rogue? Could it- did it have any functional abilities at all? Ordis had said-

“Kelth? Your heart rate and breathing just spiked,” Ordis interrupted their spiralling, clearly concerned.

“Ordis,” they said. “Do warframes go rogue? How many-”

“They- some of them, sometimes, if they get abused or undergo extreme stress-”

Oh, this absolutely counted as extreme stress. “What safety measures do we have on board? Can they stand up against warframes?”

“Kelth, calm down, you have Sufford on board and he can- handle the skinny fuck- likely overpower the damaged warframe if need be. What happened in the Helminth’s room?”

They realised he was right. Sufford had even had to help the other get back into the chair. “The- the warframe, he’s not okay, Ordis,” they said, calming down a little, getting their thoughts back in order. “He doesn’t even know sign. We’d have to teach him.”

“Would have to? Are you not planning on keeping him aboard?”

“I don’t know what he’s capable of at all, or what he thinks of us - he got scared of Sufford when he walked into the room, and tried to scratch himself up for no apparent reason.”

Ordis hummed in thought. “He wasn’t ready yet, right?”

“No, he was almost done - functional enough to somehow get out of the chair, but not whole yet.”

“Let’s wait with any judgement on him until we have the full picture, and can properly evaluate his situation,” Ordis suggested.

Kelth was reminded of the drives with Ordis’ recordings, of how they didn’t quite have the full picture yet there either. They sighed. “Okay, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good plan.”

When Ordis next spoke, there was a smile in his voice. “Assuming he will be in there for a while yet, and that we have yet another day free from the- disgusting- Helminth’s demands, what are you doing to do with the rest of the day?”

Kelth smiled and searched out Sufford’s signal again. He had deposited a spare datapad within arm’s reach of the Helminth’s chair and was just cleaning the Infested goop off his skana’s sheath, to avoid tracking it into the rest of the Orbiter. He readily accepted their connection, and once he saw their plan, agreed to that, too.

“We’ll get back to recovering your mystery drives. That’s one thing we can solve by not sitting on our asses until the Helminth’s done.”