#to be fair to my ear. i did just jam a rod of metal in there.

[frankensteindotpdf]

my ear itchy :(

[purkinje-effect]

Nuka-Cola Grape

Ours Is the Kingdom, Chapter 2. Go to previous. Go to next.

Twelve years ago

Brother August sat cross-legged in the wooden floor of the medic’s quarters, a pale young man working over a variety of glass vessels at his arm’s reach. The medic, an older woman with tawny silvering hair, worked with her back to him at an ancient prewar metal desk, equal parts apothecary and chemistry lab. His wiry, dark hair spilled from the ribbon which pulled it back loosely. In the filtered chartreuse glow of the myriad of cryptic glassware filled with dyed-cherenkov fluids, his superior could not see his unsteady hands, but she could hear every trembling junction of glass to glass, no matter how he tried. He set down his stir rod and his beaker of a dark substance, and cleared his throat to break the almost-quiet.

“Archemist, could I ask you something?”

From beneath the surgical mask, her rasping, strained voice served to bestill him, and she turned to lay kind eyes upon him.

“I’m unsure I’m the best source of counsel in this tumultuous time, but you have my eyes and ears, my child.”

He crossed his hands in his lap and pursed his lips.

“In the wake of Brother Andrew’s execution, do you think the Children will think ill of anyone who leaves?” August jammed his tongue into the furrow between two upper teeth and lolled his eyes to the wood-plank ceiling a moment. “I can’t remain here. My faith is unshaken, I swear it. Yet, I can’t shake the worry that I am abandoning what has been allotted me in life. That I am abandoning you and the others.”

The Archemist furrowed shut her failing eyes and shied from comment a moment.

“You have not told anyone else you plan to leave, I trust.” She glanced off out into the submarine hangar within which the commune had built its shelter and sanctum. “By the Division, tell me you don’t side with Confessor Martin in all this.”

“I do not profess to understand what has led Martin astray, but I assure you that do not follow in his stead. I wholly endorse the unity of cause which Conf– High Confessor Tektus leads the Children. For the Harbormen to have enacted such an unprovoked and gruesome act of violence against one of the most peaceful among us, it’s unfathomable, and unforgivable. I would understand if it had been me they felled.” August did not give her room to object to the comment. “It’s clear to me they will never see Atom’s holy glow, never see their world-souls unfurl. But… it’s clear to me also that I cannot be the agent of the High Confessor’s will. I cannot protect this family. My composure is failing, sister.”

A smile dulled her eyes into a squint, but she scarce could look at him directly. As she spoke, he rose, and slowly approached her.

“We are losing our most enthusiastic cook in this. An obeisant, diligent sibling. A skilled chemist. For how you handle a gun, I still wish you’d take the role of a Zealot, but I ramble… brother, Atom has bestowed upon us a homestead in this holy land, and He provides us all we have here. You are just as much a part of the collective blessings as anyone else here, and we will feel your absence just as we feel M– Forgive me, you do not leave forsaking your faith. The comparison is unjust.”

The tall man looked to her expectantly, and placed an endearing hand to her shoulder.

“But I do leave to retain my faith. What Atom requires of me, I cannot stay here.” His grip tightened on her shoulder, then loosened. “I suppose it really was not so much a question as it was a deference. I’ve owed so much to you in my time in Far Harbor. We all have. You are the only one I’ve told. I have not sought counsel from the High Confessor, for I know in his resolution that he’d find a way to keep me here.”

“If you leave by Atom’s accord, then why do you believe the High Confessor will not understand you? Did Atom come to you? Or the Mother?”

“Atom has made my task clear and bright as the sun. But I cannot ask this family to afford me.” His pale eyes grew wild. “Children will die if I stay.”

“You’ve handled the transition from the Harbor to the Nucleus about as well as I have.” She placed her calming hand atop his, but did not mention that he still trembled. “What Atom requires of me is to stay here and tend His Children. In the mounting tension, the Church needs me here now more than ever. But to hear your confidence that Atom calls you elsewhere at such a time… You intend to go into the Fog, then?”

“I do not know what I intend.” August stepped back and looked out over the dry-docked submarine in the middle of the hangar, its aft lined with candles. “You’ve noticed… changes in me since we came to the Nucleus? What kind of changes?”

“You have always isolated yourself, been most private with your worship. But you no longer pray alongside the rest of us, except when the High Confessor leads us. Either you’ve grown more pious, or more guilty.”

When August tried to skirt around the Archemist to exit, she cut him off and cornered him on the balcony of her dwelling. He shied from her stern insistence.

“August, I’ve forgiven your theft throughout these past two years. I know it is some sign of illness. If it is an illness like my own, it is not my place to question what wickedness might have branded you with it. That’s between you and Atom to sort out. Yet, I feel I deserve to know why you always take blood packs, and not Stimpaks, if this has to do with your health.”

He stood frozen for some time before he lunged into a passionate, desperate hug.

“This is not what I meant to transpire from speaking with you.”

“It was exactly what you meant to transpire.” The Archemist failed to suppress a coughing fit, and she pushed him away. “Please… just be truthful and fair with me. I deserve that much.”

“…The Trappers… are heathens with the appetite of Atom but no understanding of it, no guidance through faith…” The words futilely spilled from him, his heart constricting in his chest. “Atom has given me all that I have. And I have… that appetite. Had it since I was a boy. As I’ve cultivated it, it’s expanded my capacity for Atom’s glow by such a margin that I doubt a metric can any longer quantify it. I can’t keep stealing from you, sister. Especially not now, when you will likely need medical supplies the most. Most of all, I fear what might happen if there weren’t blood packs to take–”

He swallowed hard and stiffened his posture, and flinched in the expectation of her scrutiny. When she did not lay a hand on him or say a word, he opened one eye and observed a woman locked in anguish.

“You are right. You cannot remain here.” The Archemist removed the mask to expose her radium-eroded jaw and throat to him. Her eyes grew wet. “How could I have never put together the symptoms? The Fog seizes unbelievers and forces them to act on its will. Do you truly believe in your heart of hearts that it is your right as a Child of Atom to act as the will of the Fog? To perform the basest of the functions which the Fog allots anyone but Atom’s chosen? It protects us by turning unbelievers upon themselves–yet you seek to stand in their shoes and act in their stead.”

Her scrutiny welcomed back his certainty.

“Atom has chosen me for this. It is my duty to cultivate my world-vessel to the fullest that I can, and this is the way that Atom has told me I must do so.” He approached her again, but she shied from him, and he stood down. “I am taking the next possible opportunity to leave, and I will trouble none of you further. I know it has been a trying dialogue. I cannot steal from, especially you now that you’ve told me you know it. Can I… beseech you for one last pack of blood? I came here to help you prepare scouring materials, but also to take my last meal before I go.”

The Archemist smiled through her tears, and shook her head.

“You are most unwell, my child.” She did not stand by her body language, however, and retrieved one plastic bag from the cabinetry of the desk at which she’d worked. She held it out to him, but glared at him and did not relent it. “Have the decency to take it somewhere no one will see what I have permitted.”

August took it only once she was convinced her words had shaken him, and he nodded in gratitude before leaving without another word. He tucked the blood pack beneath his thin, dark, humble robes, and as he readied himself to depart in the next few hours, he concealed it clutching it to his breast with the limb Atom had bestowed upon him in his teen years. There it remained as he knelt prostrate facing the submarine, and prayed in its shelter, for the last time. For strength, resolution, and composure.

Leaving all rations save the one specifically for himself, he took nothing save his apron of knives, his lever-action rifle, and whatever fistfuls of dried herbs he could stow in the one piece of Marine armor he owned. Once everyone was asleep, he stood in the decontamination arches of the atrium hall and wore a haunted snarl he scoured himself of the essence of Atom of the Nucleus he contained. Dampened by his penitence, he stepped out into the cool night courtyard air to exit through the gate formed by drums stacked high. As expected, Grand Zealot Richter stood watch outside, and stopped him before he got to the gate.

“What business do you have outside the hangar this late, brother?”

The concentric sigil of Atom on the Grand Zealot’s face radiated from his right eye and obfuscated most of his features save his dark, rusty beard and salt-hardened gaze. August could not remember if he had ever seen Richter remove his full suit of emblazoned Marine armor, and he did not turn to face Richter.

“I seek the Mother. Please. It is urgent, and I am sleepless for it.”

“You take your rifle on sabbatical?”

“Please. Do not contest me. This is between me and Atom only.”

“State your intent, or risk concern of heresy. Be mindful of the climate, August.”

“In this exact moment, I have only the intent to follow in the Fog. I must commune with Atom directly in this. In this, I will find all answers I seek.”

“Do not let me regret it,” came a gruff reluctance at last, and a benign authority. “May she guide you in His glow.”

August turned to face him one last time, just long enough to meet eyes.

“Atom keep you, Grand Zealot.”

“And you as well.”

August crossed the narrow dock across the waters which surrounded the Nucleus, and traveled up the rocky terrain to the face of the hillock from which Atom’s Spring poured, a glowing, uranium gold in the moonlight. He knelt at length, permitting that it pour over his head and down his body, warmed by baptism anew in the glow of Atom which the waters imbued. Then he bowed down and drank by the palmful until the aura of the Fog overtook him, heavy, metallic, and overwhelming.

And where it guided, he walked.

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[notadog]

@demisexualhale sorry you had a rough time today. have this au that i saw you talking about after i creeped on your blog. it’s... uh. probably not what anyone involved thought it would be. but i hope you like it? 

anyway. 

sterek. 2k. spy au. warnings: i know nothing about spies, secret criminal organizations, or technology in general. just roll with it.

“I’ll pay you twenty bucks to hum the Mission Impossible theme while I do this,” Stiles muttered, fishing an exacto knife out of his tool belt. He fit it under the very edge of the ID scanner and, with a flick of his wrist, popped it off like a dream.

“You could pay me twenty thousand and I still wouldn’t do it.”

“Spoilsport.” Gently pulling all the wires out into the open was the easy part; it was identifying the right one to snip that was going to be the tricky part. Would it kill all organized crime syndicates to stick to one universal standard?

“Try the yellow wire. Third from the left.”

“Try?” Stiles repeated under his breath. “We’ve been planning this job for weeks and you want me to go in with ‘try’?”

He could practically hear the eye roll on the other end of the earbud. “Cut the wire, agent.”

“Manners,” Stiles snarked, guiding the exacto to the wire in question. It slid through with a gentle snick and the red light on the ID reader went out.

“You’re welcome.”

Stiles gently fit the card reader back into the wall and got to work prying open the door. “I don’t recall saying thank you,” he grunted, heaving the heavy metal back inch by inch.

“I’m sure it was implied.”

“I might be inclined if you—” Another grunt as he wedged his shoulder in the space he’d made, trying to use it to get some leverage against the protesting metal. “—helped me with this door.” Not for the first time Stiles lamented the fact that he was chosen for the field, instead of the literal werewolf. Instead, he was embarrassing himself and his very human muscles while Derek got his nerd on from the comfort of the unmarked van parked a few streets away. Life just wasn’t fair.

Stiles gave one last shove, and the door gave way with an angry screech that he was pretty sure was audible in China.

“Derek?” he hissed.

“Hold on.” Polite as always, his partner.

Stiles waited, every muscle in his body coiled tight and ready to spring. Whether that meant to fight or flee was yet to be determined. At least three times he imagined some noise that would precede his discovery, but he forced down the instinct to panic with a violent mental shove. The government hadn’t spent billions of dollars in training his ass to trust his partner with his life for nothing.

After an excruciating eternity, Derek’s voice filtered in through the earpiece. “You’re clear. Not for lack of effort.”

Stiles couldn’t help grinning. “You say the sweetest things.” False confidence was easy again now that his heart wasn’t jammed halfway up his throat. He rummaged through his toolkit for one of his most versatile gadgets: a retractable rod made of a polymer material developed by Derek himself. It was three hundred times stronger than steel but lighter than any other material of its kind on (or off) the market. It was a beautiful piece of some of the most sophisticated technology to come out of R&D, and it gave Stiles a thrill of childish joy to jam it inelegantly between door and wall to keep his escape route free.

“Speaking of which…” Derek’s voice was that special brand of pained that signaled to Stiles that his trick had hit its mark. “Let’s try to keep to aliases while we’re on the comms, all right?”

Stiles winced. He had called out Derek’s real name in a moment of panic, hadn’t he? “It’s not my fault you rejected my code name suggestions.”

The sound quality was considerably different behind the door than in the hallway. Though he couldn’t see into the space, it swallowed up Stiles’ voice in a way that suggested space… a lot of it. Stiles fumbled for the flashlight at his belt and stepped cautiously inside.

“You’re not calling me Eagle Two.”

“Well I’m not giving you Eagle One, dude. I called dibs.” He clicked on the flashlight and did a slow sweep of the room. Well. Cavern was probably a better word for it. It was big enough to swallow the weak beam of his government-issued flashlight, leaving the ceiling and far walls shrouded in shadows. “Are you seeing this?”

Derek hummed, but gave no further comment.

“Gotta admire their style, though,” Stiles continued conversationally. The whole affair was an ode to vaulted ceilings broken up by stone columns and sloping walls covered in expensive-looking tile. Whoever built it certainly had a flair for the dramatic. To his left was a small bank monitors hooked up to a lowly humming box. Stiles made his way over to it. “I mean, you gotta respect the whole batcave vibe.”

Derek snorted. It was a shock, completely at odds with his usual implacable stiffness. In his entire time working with him, Stiles had never once seen the man so much as crack a smile. And here he was, almost laughing in Stiles’ ear. “It’s an evil lair, agent. Much more Luthor’s speed than Wayne’s.”

Stiles considered the space again. It did bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to Lex Luthor’s underground lair in Superman. Much more so than any adaptation of the Batcave. Point to Derek. “I didn’t know you were a fan of the classics.”

“I’m multifaceted.”  

How someone can sound so unbearably smug with only two words, Stiles would never know. “Nerd.”

“Center console. There should be a panel under the monitors.”Definitely smug.

Stiles fumbled around until he found a hidden switch. A previously unseen panel slid forward, revealing three USB slots. Stiles thumbed open the smallest pocket in his tool belt that housed the USB sticks Derek gave him specifically for this point in the job. Just to be sure, he asked, “This the one?”

“Mhm,” Derek confirmed. “You know which one’s first?”

Stiles rolled his eyes. Even if Derek hadn’t labeled them 1 and 2 in obnoxious silver sharpie, the four consecutive run-throughs Derek had forced him to listen to before letting him out of the van would have been enough to hammer the point home.

“Yes, dad,” he muttered, fishing out the first stick. “Just let me know when I need to switch them out.”

“You’ll know,” Derek replied cryptically, which didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence, but Stiles would be damned if he admitted that out loud.

Stiles watched in interest as the script contained within the flash drive did its thing. It was another of Derek’s projects, something he’d been developing for months with the rest of his little nerd squad back at headquarters. Derek had explained a little of it back in the van. If pressed by a superior, Stiles could explain that the code was meant to create a channel between this server and one controlled by their agency, one that Derek’s team could use to read through and copy every file stored on this server. Anything else had gone over Stiles’ head.

Stiles’ skills were more hands-on and intuition based. Identifying suspicious characters? Convincing them to divulge all of their deepest secrets to him? Finding the fastest way out of any resulting shootouts or capture attempts? That was where he shined the brightest. Developing extremely complicated code to infiltrate evil corporations’ systems, do… stuff while inside them, then exit without a trace? That was Derek’s thing. Stiles was just the sneaky middleman needed to insert peg A into slot B.

The screens flickered constantly between different windows. Lines of code would appear and disappear again too fast for him to read, but based on Derek’s intermittent hums of approval in his ear, Stiles guessed they were doing their job. As the script worked, he kept an ear out for any sign of discovery.

They passed the time together in silence, both of them tense at the thought of the most important part of their mission falling through at the last second. It left Stiles alone with his senses, feeling wrong-footed for the first time since infiltrating the compound earlier in the evening. After a too-long stretch of time, activity on the screens slowed down, then stopped. All the screens were black except for one, which held a single line of green text and a blinking cursor. Stiles leaned forward to read it. When he did, he made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat.

Insert 2nd USB stick, agent. (It has the number 2 on it.)

“Told you you’ll know,” Derek’s voice was a gentle tease in his ear.

“You were so cryptic about it,” Stiles muttered, complying. “I thought it was gonna be something cool.”

“Computers are cool,” Derek replied, then lapsed back into silence.

The second stick took much less time than the first, or maybe it was just the end in sight that made it seem like it was going faster than it actually was. Whichever was true, it felt like no time until a single green line of text was displaying Installation Complete before all the screens went blank.

Derek’s voice was like silk. “Don’t forget to take the USBs with you.”

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Thanks,” he snarked, tucking the USBs back into their pocket and securing it. “What would I do without you?”

“You would be dead seven times over if it weren’t for me.” 

“Fair,” Stiles conceded. It was gratifying to return the door and find it hadn’t budged an inch since he’d left it. It was rare in Stiles’ line of work that the things he set down stuck around and waited patiently for him to collect them. Granted, at this point in his career most of the “things” Stiles set aside for later were informants and enemies of the government, so a little bit of disobedience was probably to be expected. But whatever. Details.

Easing the door closed was trickier than forcing it open, Stiles soon realized. Not only was he worried about loudly protesting metal, he wasn’t sure how he was going to stop the whole thing from slamming closed the second he pulled out Derek’s rod.

Heh.

As always, Derek chimed in with the solution at Stiles’ precise moment of need.

“Retract it gradually,” Derek commanded, and Stiles complied. “Good. Now fold your jacket in half and stick it in so it doesn’t slam… Good. Now just pull the jacket out.”

Under Derek’s direction, Stiles eased the nightmare door closed. The jacket muffled the metal-on-metal impact, and when he yanked it out, the door settled back into place with hardly a complaint. Stiles made a mental note to make the whole experience sound a lot cooler in his retelling the next day.

“You’re welcome,” Derek whispered in his ear, voice dripping with self-satisfaction.

“I don’t recall saying thank you,” Stiles replied as he popped the card reader out of the wall again, grinning at the echo of their conversation from earlier. There was a prolonged pause as he bit off a length of electrical tape and carefully brought the snipped ends of the yellow wire together.

“It was implied.”

“Whatever you say, big guy.”

Stiles secured both raw edges of the wire with the tape, then confirmed that the ID reader was once again operational. He carefully tucked the bundle of wires back into their space in the wall, then returned the box to its home for the last time, good as new.

“Ready to get me out of here?”

“Always,” was the curt reply, sounding almost fond to Stiles’ delusional ears. “You’re alone on your floor, but there are two guards stationed outside the elevators to the west, same as when you came in. Your best bet is to go south to avoid them, then take the service stair up to ground level.”

“Got it,” Stiles said, already moving towards his exit. “See you soon, dude.”

“You better.”

Stiles made good on his promise, and was rewarded with a nod of acknowledgement from Derek when he threw open the van door. It was the closest Stiles had ever come to getting an honest-to-god smile from the guy, and it made something warm and gentle unfurl in his chest.

He couldn’t stop grinning the entire drive back to headquarters.