Chapter Text
I had been a defector. I didn't want to be a part of the war.
Ironic, I suppose.
I wish I could say it was out of some sense of compassion or camaraderie for my fellow man but, to be honest, I was just scared.
I'd heard about the trenches. Heard about the dark, damp tunnels hastily dug into the earth by terrified men to hold some arbitrary line, only for them to be sent out in waves to drop like flies in the hail of machine gun fire just to gain a few meters of ground.
How, every moment, soldiers feared an enemy sniper would find a vantage point to take them out. How one attempt to glance at the sun or feel its warmth on one's skin could be enough to get a bullet through the head.
About the way poison gas would flood the trenches, forcing soldiers out into the open where gunfire would mow them down. Like rabbits driven from their burrows, exterminated like pests.
Just the conditions of the trenches themselves was enough to cause deathly fever and rot flesh from bones.
Even the men who returned weren’t the same. They were like husks of their former selves. The papers called it “shell shocked” but I could see it in their eyes. Their bodies might have returned home, but their souls died in those dark, wet tunnels, just another thing for the rats and maggots to chew.
I didn't want that. I was scared.
When I got my draft papers, I ran. Or tried to. I didn't make it far. Didn't really have a plan. I was never good at that kind of thing. Border guard saw through my fake visa in a heartbeat. Caught me and the whole group I'd been traveling with at once. I wonder if the man who sold us the bogus papers had been in on the sting.
Doesn't matter now, I suppose. He's long dead. And I'm still here.
I guess, in the end, I still got out of Russia.
I wasn't the only one they brought to the Workshop. There were dozens of us. Not all of us were deserters, either. Some were criminals, some were prisoners of war. Some were men who'd served their time in the trenches and come back hollow.
The papers called them war heroes. But that didn't matter in the Workshop. We were all just things society had no use for. Extra cogs and gears that didn't fit into the existing clockwork.
They'd found somewhere we could still serve our country. A machine we could still fit into.
I'd heard about the machines. They looked like giants. Like colossi of myth encased in metal and cloth. The “man tanks”. They were supposed to be the answer to the endless trench battles.
I'd not really paid them much mind. Everyone always said they had the solution to the war, but none of us even knew why we were fighting. How could you solve a problem with no cause?
I guess I should have paid more attention. Not that it really would have mattered. It's not like much of what the papers said about them was true, anyway.
Besides, I've had plenty of time to get familiar with them, since. No one knows them better than I do.
Well, at least not mine.
Not you.
Is it terrible, that I've come to think of you like that? My one and only companion? The last thing, the only thing, that is wholly and completely mine?
Deep down, I know it's just the loneliness. I couldn't keep hating you forever. Couldn't be alone with my metal tomb for all time. My mind had to protect itself. I had to come to see it as more than that.
As you.
As mine.
I didn't make you. I don't control you. But I know you.
I know you.
And I know that, no matter what companies and countries have laid claim to you, no matter what names might be etched into plates on your body, you belong only to me. And I to you.
And us to each other. To the self that is both of us.
I barely remember what you look like. I only saw you for a few moments before they strapped me down into my final resting place and knocked me out.
By the time I came to again, we'd already been made one.
I panicked.
It took me a long time to just get a sense of how much they'd taken. I knew they'd taken my limbs. I could feel where the were supposed to be. I could feel that it was more than darkness that robbed me of vision. They'd taken my eyes as well.
I put it together, later, that they'd gotten rid of anything that could have been affected by the poison gas, anywhere it could get into my body if it got into my coffin. At first I'd just thought it was meant to be another layer of torture.
I knew I couldn't breathe, that had terrified me the most, at first. It took me a long time to realize it wasn't just because my mouth and nose had been sealed shut. I had no lungs to even try to draw breath with.
You'd replaced them, drawing in air through crude bellows like an iron lung and filtering it into the oxygen my blood needed.
Your blood.
Our blood.
It hasn't been mine for a very long time. You burned through what little I'd made to fill my own veins in hours. The fact I was panicking didn't help. The faster my heart beat, the faster you burned through our fuel. I realized that later.
But I can hardly be upset with myself for being scared.
New relationship nerves, you know?
Heh.
I felt it as you drained me. Felt myself fading, and you along with me. Part of me knew I should be relieved. I'd be free, at least, in death.
Is it terrible that, even like that, I didn't want to die? I don't know if it was hope or just more cowardice.
I remember, so clearly, the first time we refueled. Precious life blood rushed back into my veins and it was like heaven. I'd never felt such pure relief. Never felt a sensation so exquisite. I knew I'd never stop wanting more of it, from that moment on.
That was the first time I felt it, so faint in the back of my mind, so impossible to believe that I dismissed it outright, and kept dismissing it long past the point it became impossible to deny: your happiness.
Your love.
They say all the things we feel are just from some kinds of chemicals in our heads. I never really understood it much. Never had the head for any of that new age science stuff.
So maybe that's all I felt. All I feel. Some kind of chemical one of us made that makes us want to keep getting more blood.
But I have to believe it was you. And I do.
I don't understand it, but I knew it then and I know it now. You knew what I knew. That I was what kept you alive. That you could never let me die as long as you lived.
You loved me for it.
And I hated you.
My jail and my jailer in one. My killer and my coffin. Keeping me from death. Feeding off me. Using me.
Protecting me.
Loving me.
I hated it. Eventually the feeling of hating you because of how much I wanted to die turned to wanting to die because of how much I hated you.
Hated the way you moved. The way you sounded. The way you would never, never, let me go.
Hated that, no matter how much I tried to poison you with that hate, you only ever loved me more in return.
I wanted you to hate me. If you hated me, you'd be willing to die to kill me, the way I was for you.
Loving me, you'd push yourself to survive anything, if it protected me.
Hating you was easy, but unsustainable. I didn't have the energy to keep hating you.
Apathy had been painful, but not difficult.
What had been the most difficult was when I felt myself starting to love you back.
It's really awful, isn't it? It feels silly to even think. Too ridiculous. Too pitiful. Too sad.
But it's true.
I love you.
When I first felt it happening, I tried to deny it. Then I got angry again. Angry at you, of course, but mostly angry at me.
How could I love this metal abomination? This parasite? This thing that had caged me for so long?
How could the sound of our breathing feel so comforting? How could your moans start sounding like singing? How could the suffocating grip of my coffin begin to feel like an embrace?
I still don't know. I guess it's probably something the brain does when you go crazy and then come back around the bend. When your mind breaks so far it has nowhere else to go but to put itself back together different.
I guess somewhere along the line I could keep hearing your singing as the sounds of groaning metal and wheezing bellows or start listening to the music.
If it means anything to you, you have a beautiful voice. It reminds me of how sailors described whale songs.
Part of me wishes I could tell you that, but part of me can feel you already know.
I also know you started singing more when you realized I liked it. Songs that would echo through the trenches we cleared and claimed, so deep that even the enemy soldiers miles away could feel it in their bones.
I remember the men on our side telling you to stop. It scared them. They said it was distracting, or might alert the enemy, but I could hear fear in their voices, even muffled by the metal of my cradle.
That's fine. They didn't need to enjoy it. It wasn't for them.
When the gas swept through in the night and stole their breath from their lungs like a thief in the dark, your song echoed through miles of empty trenches. A lullaby just for me.
It's been so very, very long since then. We're a relic. A leftover from a bygone era the rest of the world wants to just forget.
I can feel the way my skin has withered away. My only flesh left is the parts that are fully merged with yours. To be honest, I'm not sure if my brain is still in this dried out skull of mine. Not sure if, somewhere along the line, I stopped being in my head and started being in yours. Stopped being in this coffin and started being in your heart.
My heart.
Our heart.
It's strange, to know what I feel is “wrong” or maybe even fake, but to feel it nonetheless. And to want to feel it. I know I shouldn't. Maybe, deep down, I don't really feel it at all. I just want to so bad I convinced myself I do.
It doesn't matter. What's true and what isn't. What's real and what's fake. What I feel and what I just want to feel, have to feel to keep myself together. I don't care.
After centuries of belonging only to each other, I just don't think that whatever rules the rest of the world had about feelings apply anymore.
I know what I feel. I know what I want.
I want to keep this heart of ours beating as long as I can. I want to feel your joy every time we taste fresh blood and life returns to our body. I want to feel how much you love me in every beat of our heart. I want to hear your singing and be rocked to sleep by your heavy footsteps.
I’m never scared anymore.
I never hurt anymore.
You keep me safe.
You keep me close.
I need you.
I know you.
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you