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worldsfromhoney · 1 year ago

Text

When in Rome

Masterlist

cw: blood, gore, torture

You don’t mean to come upon them, but stories like this always start that way. Something happens that isn’t meant to and you’re bound to wonder what the poor souls stuck in that situation would do. It’s a bit self-degrading to call yourself a ‘poor soul’ but what else fits you in coming upon a scene so far detached from humanity?

Or perhaps it is so exemplary of humanity that you cannot help staying to watch and see and spectate.

It’s every day you visit tradition-lacking areas or, as you prefer to call them, ‘free’ places. You find these little pockets of freedom in an era where tradition and punishment against subversion reigns supreme, smile sympathetically, and offer your hand. Except it isn’t quite a hand in the way you aren’t quite you as it’s been for a long, long time. The ones you talk to seem to think you’ve gone too far with your implements and replacements, becoming more machine than human but they are wrong. You’re definitely human.

It’s just that you’re the glitch in this system—the wrong cog in the machine, the blocked pipe in the network, the unfindable wire in the engine.

This is how you manage to remain unseen when you stumbled on this scene. How not one of those traditionalists turned their discerning clockwork eyes on you and instead focused on the matter at hand.

Things might make more sense if you had arrived earlier and got to speaking with the man who’d been there a while ago. Maybe you would’ve known he was waiting for someone since sunrise and the sun was already gone from the sky hours ago. Maybe you would’ve even revealed your nature as a glitch and this man would’ve showed you his secret, too.

But you have arrived in the middle of a carnage and the story starts from here.

It’s five against one but in truth it’s just the four doing all the work as the fifth stands off to the side, supervising; watching and recording everything as traditionalist coppers like him tend to do. There is a chain of command, even in these savagery you’re witnessing, tradition persisting even now.

The man you would’ve traded secrets with is curled up on the ground, hands clutching at the grass and dirt. Around him are strips of worn cloth, further shredded by the violence of the figures assaulting him. You would’ve—should’ve—looked away from the man’s bare body, perhaps to save him a little bit of dignity in secret; to be able to say that you have not taken a step out of line as the others have.

But you are a glitch and a human who knows this is not a simple act of savagery. This is nothing like the punishments doles out by The Machine when tradition is broken or cracked at. There is a goal here and you need to watch to know what it is.

So you settle in the shadows, heighten your senses, and listen.

For a long while, all you hear is the sound of hands going deep into this stranger’s body, the squelch of fingers wrapping around a mix of flesh and wiring, before there is the violent wrench of flesh, skin, and metal from the body. The spilling of blood-oil soon follows, as if this man’s body couldn’t believe something so savage was happening to it.

For a while, it is just these other men of supposed civility tearing into this defenceless body that you forget the stranger is still alive. You see it in their clenched jaw, how their teeth grinds in place of words, and the taut curl of their body towards itself, bit by bit.

This stranger is alive and not making a single sound as they are torn apart snd you wonder, don’t you, what their voice is like? Is it kind? Is it deep? Is it soft in this world of rigidity and sharp angles?

You do not wonder for long.

The leader of this crew finally moves. It’s like watching a statue come to life except life flees it just as fast, replacing its movement with inhuman combinations of coal and steam and wirings sparking. He draws out a pipe and sparks the tobacco to life with the friction of their creaking metal fingers.

“And just moments ago, you were so eager to talk,” The Leader says. “What happened to that urge? Did your ragtag group’s betrayal deal that much shock to you, hm?”

The Stranger does not answer. But you and presumably the others see how he flinches from the mention of people supposedly dear to him. You see his eyes that’d been screwed shut now flutter open, tears obvious at the corners.

The Leader clicks their tongue, “Don’t go crying on me. You know your tears have no effect on me—on anyone… not anymore, at least.”

It is after this that you hear the stranger for the first time. He’s smiling, if a little sadly and it not reaching his eyes.

“It’s a human response,” The Stranger says, tears finally and silently falling down the side of his face. “Just as you’re angry with me ever since I left, right? That’s human.”

He looks pleadingly up at his captor and you know there is something deeper between them; something you cannot fathom to understand. Not yet. Not now when you only have the pieces and they are being held strong away from you.

Still, you cannot read The Leader’s face. It is not a dark night but the shadows are drawn tight and heavy around his visage that looms over the prone man. He leans down, pipe precariously unbalanced with him till some of the hot ash falls right on the stranger’s face.

They flinch. He smiles crooked.

“I am angry, yes, but not of the reasons you’ve come up with in that little, rebellious brain of yours,” The Leader says, watching as bits of ash keep falling and burning the prone man. “I am angry for you have gallivanted around, dragging my name in dirt, as you break tradition after tradition and leaving others in your wake to take the punishment for you.”

“There… there w-wouldn’t b-be such sacrifices if you d-didn’t force tradition on people who had never agreed to it. Not once! Not eve—”

The pipe flips over and this strange man who had fire in his eyes even after being subjected to such savagery and humiliation screams. He curls further into himself, hands clawing his throat now as he retches on the ground, wanting wanting to vomit out the taste of smoke, ash, and literal fire that he’d swallowed. With every cough, his open wounds coughed with him. Blood spurted from every spasm, wires sparked, delivering jolts he couldn’t just shake off as easily as before. Sweat steamed off him till the stank smell spread round like a fog, seeping into crevices of the earth that had done nothing but consume his blood and suffering.

You have to stop yourself from acting. You were this close to taking another step that would’ve rustled the grass or sifted rock and informed these players that their game was up and wasn’t that the best thing to happen now? End this strange man’s suffering?

No. That is not what you have waited this long for. You slink back into the shadows and wait. And wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

The stranger eventually stops dry retching. It’s when he’s just lying back on the soiled ground, twitching and spasming and heaving great breaths that the first gentle touch comes upon him. The rest of the torturers retreat and make space for The Leader who’s finally deigned to go down on one knee. You watch his eyes take in everything about the sad state of the stranger and wonder if he’s looking to remember its state before this or to look for something.

You believe it’s the latter. Not out of instinct but by how you had noticed the frenzied but directed movements of the other men earlier as they tore through the stranger’s body. Looking, looking, looking.

The Leader smiles. He reaches a gloved hand towards the stranger’s face and cups it gently.

“My dear friend… You, I think, out of everyone, have been the closest to me and my heart for as long as I can remember,” He says in a soothing tone, flicking off some dried blood and tending to the bruises and hurts.

The stranger sobs. The Leader keeps smiling as he forces the man’s jaw open, pushes his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and grabs something underneath. You watch the entire thing just as this immaculate-looking man pats the stranger’s face and stands up, smoothing away the wrinkles on his clothes.

“And it is because you have been the closest that I know exactly how your little mind ticks,” He says, bringing the object to his eye for a moment that lasts exactly that—a moment.

It looks like a gear; a piece of clockwork so intricate and massive that it would end up relying on gears like that. You have seen one such piece of machinery. You have come from one.

You are the glitch of one.

Eventually The Leader and the rest leave, satisfied with finding what had been lost—no, what had been taken. They have no need of finishing off The Stranger. That is not what the job entailed and they are, if anything else, apt followers of orders.

After the shadows of many are gone, another one comes over this man who’d literally been pecked clean. It’s your shadow. You, who’s reaching for this stranger’s spilled innards and deftly winding back together broken and torn pieces; wired ligaments, piped veins, coal-breathing organs.

It’s you who wait by their side as they catch their first clear and clean breath and eventually look at you, a question in their gaze. You have a question, too. Multitudes of them actually, but a more important one you need answering now.

You introduce yourself. Their eyes widen. You hold out a hand just as you’ve always done to those who’ve broken tradition and knew nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The Stranger laughs. “What’s one more broken man for you, huh?”

One more is phenomenal. One more means the world and tears finally break through his eyes as you say this, taking his outstretched hand.

One more is all you ever need when changing everything.

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