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curlicuecal · 7 years

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Let’s Be Outcasts (Kankri/AR, Latula/Mituna) ch 12/?

Part 2 of cyber!bunny Apocalypse ‘verse (tumblr)

ch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

read on AO3

Summary: Divergent AU where AR and Li'l Seb get kicked into a new universe with some snazzy new cyborg bodies. They’re still working out the bugs.

In which AR discovers that kidnapping rarely solves more problems than it creates, Mituna breaks out of a lab (with some help), and Seb continues to take good care of his Bro.

Chapter Excerpt:

Latula hesitates. It’s just the tiniest hitch in the conversation, but considering how effortlessly she seems to follow even your most scrambled utterances, the pause is noticeable. “It’s an outworld artifact,” she says, breezy and open.

“Wow, no grab-hulmping ass nugs,” you return before your mind can really analyze if sarcasm is the wisest choice for this situation.

—–

Ch 12.

Latula, you reflect, has the best secrets. Or possibly acquires the most excellent ones from other people. Behind the steel door at the back of the ransacked bunker had been a short, damaged shaft, like something for an out-of-service hivestem lift. Venturing down the rungs in the shaft wall (a feat, in your case, composed of equal parts climbing and falling), you and Latula had emerged into a second, more confined bunker. The sprawlingly empty labs in the level above had looked aged and deteriorated, fragile. A hollowed-out husk prone to falling to pieces at any moment—in retrospect you’re probably lucky your lightshow didn’t damage anything structural. This room has an equal sense of age, but it is shelled from floor to ceiling in metal plates and girders as if were meant to survive a war.

It’s a bit like being in a tin can, if it turned out that tins cans turned down the exterior noise from your metal mind almost as effectively as that underground dropshaft you hid in for a day, and were therefore very quiet. The perpetual static of Latula’s sigil chip buzzes and echoes in your metal mind, but you get only brief bursts of the distant voices of the imperial drones circling the city.

The tin can is also full of dazzlingly unfamiliar technology.

You want to look at everything.

You shuffle around the tiny room, pressing your face against screens and poking your fingers into circuit arrays like you could absorb the fascinating new patterns unfolding in your brain through your fingertips. You’ve managed to move a good chunk of this busy-ness from the inside of your head to the outside, your programmed subtasks paying off in scratchy lines of blue and red text that now scroll across your helmet visor, superimposed appealingly over all the other nonsense your metal mind seems determined to dump into your brain at all times.

You clamber over a counter and pause to contemplate a screen that has flickered on at a nearby hub, watching the numbers count down. That is new. With one fraction of your attention, you start mapping out the attached equipment, backwards extrapolating toward what kind of function they might serve. Your lips twitch up a bit as the countdown flicks past 44:44.

The whole lab could be overwhelming, but instead it’s engrossing. For once you have no shortage of tasks to divide your attention across, occupations to channel the restless tangle of your mind. The muffled data inflow from your metal mind fades into the background.

It is, it occurs to you, hard to be all one thing, to marshal all the disparate parts of your mind and your body and match up the edges and push them into lockstep with the world. With your attention scattered you don’t have to try so hard to keep your balance. Your blue mind purrs acquisitive conquest while your red mind whispers wary caution that it will all be taken away, that you will be filed into place with the rest of this puzzlingly obsolete equipment. But you’re steady.

Latula makes a grumbling noise from the back of the room, where she has been poking at the largest device, decoupling connections. “Hey, ’tunz.”

You turn this inscrutable string of syllables around in your head several times. Oh. Is that you?

“You happen to know how to hack an object duality function onto sylladex cards?”

You spend another moment of low-key bewilderment trying to decide if this is something you know how to do. Object duality: carapacian storage system. Programming structure and relationship to sylladex development: …no data? Did you never know or did you forget? “No-oh?” you try, anxiously. And then, with a bit more confidence as you rifle through files and your brain continues to be completely blank on the subject of non-imperial technology: “Oh-no.” Still, the idea is interesting. You engage a few of the sorting programs you’ve coded with your helmet, scanning through the ridiculous backlog of data from your metal mind. You don’t know if any of this clusterfuck could possibly be relevant to working out a technical puzzle, but you don’t know that it couldn’t. It gives another portion of your attention something to do.

“Right. You happen to have a sylladex slot that’s oh, say, this big?” Latula’s hands dryly sketch out the wall-spanning machine in front of her.

“Dong ilven halve a sillydickth.”

“Huh; we gotta hook you up with something. You know, assuming we ever get out of here, a thing which would be way the heck easier if I had any way of ganking the massive freaking technorelict I came specifically to hunt down. Damn it, Porz was supposed to be here.” She frowns at the machine in question, one hand on her hip. “Maybe we could just… leave it here? Come back with company and snag it before the ‘net gets back online and that lab full of dead scienterrorists get noticed. Assuming…” Her frown tips down farther. Her eyes glance toward the dropshaft, then back to her machine.

You turn to squint at the device yourself. Aside from being big, it doesn’t seem particularly more interesting than any of the other artifacts in the room. Some blackened screens, something you think might be sensors, a row of large glass cylinders that look a little like the carapacian growth chambers from the level above.

Maybe it’s presumptuous of you, but you’re pretty sure she should just take something smaller. “Walk innit?” you ask. No. Although some of those tubes are certainly big enough. “Waltz is’t.”

“Wow, no grab-hulmping ass nugs,” you return before your mind can really analyze if sarcasm is the wisest choice for this situation. Who the fuck are you kidding, your mind has approximately nil control over the shit that plops out of your mouth. You’re just happy when the contents remotely resemble what went into the digestion.

Latula snickers. “Yeah, okay, it and everything else in this room. But this is a big one. There’s only ever been three found like it before and they all stopped working sweeps and sweeps ago. ‘Least as far as anyone knows. Outworld technology is property of the government that finds it after all. The highblood council or whoevs says it up and broke—who’s there to say diff?”

“You?” No, wait, you think that was a rhetorical question. Conversation is hard. And now Latula is giving you an extremely sharp look, oh, oh. Torn between the desire to apologize and the desire to make her look at you more, you instead wander closer and examine her pet artifact more closely. Like you, it seems to be at the interface of technology and biology. Something artificial, but designed to work with living systems. Not the type of assemblage that could be used to modify a hatchling into a cyberorganic construct, no, you can’t make that fit the structure of the thing, but.

Not the right pattern of parts for the carapacian’s genetic modification projects either. You thought before it reminded you of the sort of equipment they might use to grow their generations of workers and soldiers, all the various castes of their population. Something for biological creation, yes, maybe…

“I’d really rather you didn’t overthink this,” Latula says, into your thoughts. “Or, like. Try not to pull out any more of your mad insights? ‘Cause I’m working on being responsible over here and I hella can’t promise that info’d work out safe for you.”

You spend a few complicated moments trying to determine how not to think about something and a few more wondering why this would possibly matter. In your experience, your thoughts and intentions have very little correlation to any of the things that happen to you. You wind up just staring at Latula.

“Unless you’d rather I told you?” Latula asks, not at all like she thinks your decisions don’t matter. “Because, I mean. I figure you’ve got as much right to know what’s going down as anyone. More than. It’s just... right now if things go completely ingestible-tree-ovoid shaped you could maybe slide outta it on not knowing and being, like. Technically stolen lab equipment? But if I tell, you’re kinda stuck with me ‘til game over.” She gives you a little fatalistic grin and shoulder shrug. “Win or lose. However the hell it all goes down.”

That sounds… really nice actually. In a flippantly ominous kind of way. You’ve sort of been figuring your whole life will implode any hour now—a seesaw swing of the pendulum for all the unexpected fortune you’ve been granted in defiance of probability. You’d spend every second of that time with Latula if the choice was in your fronds to make.

Latula looks at you like she thinks maybe it is.

“But, hey. Maybe we’ll go down in the fun way ‘stead of the dying horribly way.” She wiggles her eyebrows and grins and then tucks her hair behind her ear and looks half away from you. “You want in on this?” It echoes between the twice-two halves of your mind, flesh and metal, red and blue.

(“You wanna get outta here?”)

You dig your teeth in your lip and remember to breathe. You’ve caught her hand in your own without noticing and that’s starting to be a habit. She lets you keep it. So, is she dumb for not realizing by now just how far you would follow her, or are you dumb for never guessing that first invitation might have been for keeps?

There’s a completely nonsensical smile twitching across your face. For what’s visible beneath the helmet you must look completely deranged, but Latula’s got a smile growing to match.

Your answer tangles with a thrum in your throat and comes out sounding more like a dirty suggestion than a word.

“…Yeah?” Latula says, eyes bright as lit fuses, and reels you in.

Or maybe you’re both really, really fucking smart.

You do eventually have to pull up for air, only for Latula to spend a giggly few moments testing the bony angle of your jaw with her teeth, following it back to where flesh meets the metal of your left interface. You even took off your helmet for her, despite how dizzingly like freefall the sensation of losing the control it provides is. It’s worth it when she tugs you by the hair, tweaks your horn. When she snickers at the huffy noise you make when you give up on shaking your overgrown bangs from your ganderbulbs. Latula feels like the very best kind of freefall.

You nuzzle at her face, hair, hands, anywhere you can reach, and her fingers trace fractal patterns back along your jaw and cheekbone, down from the raised headphone-like interfaces you have where ears might be and down along the vulnerable skin of your neck.

“Wow, babez, you are all over circuits.” One finger plucks testingly at the high collar of your flightsuit and you make a happy, contented noise for her. “How far down do these go, anyways?”

Hm. “I four-get?”

“Oh!” Latula pops back up from your neck to grin into your face, eyes lit up like you just handed her a present. “…wanna find out?”

The words lick through you like an electric current. Straight to your nook. But in a fun way.

You blink again—one, two, three, four—and then tangle a hand in her hair, because yes, okay, good, perfect. Words not functioning, but no part of you has any confusion on the answer to that question. Latula folds into you, laughing—and then abruptly keeps folding, her laughter blowing out in a hiss as she turns her forward momentum into a shoulder roll across the equipment-cluttered counter behind you. Your own breath abandons you with an oomph as your ass cushions hit the floor. Falling is like your special talent.

Metal and wires clatter to the floor. Something shatters. A pale shape skitters by, flitting through the air, dodging debris, and Latula sweeps up her staff—wow, when did she put that down, you’re not sure you’ve ever seen her let her weapon out of arm’s reach before—and scrambles in pursuit. The point of her staff stabs out once, twice—and then she’s pinned it, just before it could dart into a crevice behind a wall unit.

“Aw, fuck it all,” Latula mutters, frowning at the fist-sized genemod still twitching and oozing blue goo onto the point of her staff. “I just can’t catch a break tonight.”

Your adrenaline-sped pusher suggests otherwise. You are (red) panicky and (blue) panicky, but you also just did the psiistorm thing twenty minutes ago and one floor up, so you are mostly just balancing on the panicky in a fun, internal way. It’s almost comforting in how familiar it is. And nobody’s dying; that’s nice. Winning all around.

You scramble for your helmet and take only two tries to get it on.

Better.

Making your way around the counter, you peer past the flashing text on your helmet view screen to squint over Latula’s shoulder at the fluttery, leggity hoofbeast-faced thing. It has about a half a dozen more eyes than you feel are really called for and looks like something some carapacian geneticuller spliced half the contents of his DNA library into on a whim. You can’t see anything in particular to make it worth looking at—other than the ungodly suspiciousness of a feral genemod turning up two levels down in a sealed underground bunker lab in time to interrupt your make outs.

It’s a scientifically engineered nookblock, is what it is.

Latula’s eyes dart around the confines of the lab again, narrow and seeking. You don’t need higher level processing programs to recognize a pattern. You just wish someone would explain why it matters.

“Think we just got put on a timer,” she mutters. Your head twitches uncertainly toward the console across the lab, the one with the countdown running on the screen, but Latula’s turning back toward the wall-spanning outworld device in front of you. She faces it down with more determination than conviction. “Right. Get the goods and get gone. Hm."

You blow out a frustrated breath through your nose. “’tu-la, what.”

Her eyes shoot to you almost guiltily. “Um. So. Speaking of deetz I haven’t been sharing with the schoolfeed cohort.” She fiddles the little mutant corpse free of her staff, holding it up by one of the many insectoid legs before flipping it out of sight, into her sylladex. “It’s possible somebody’s using these to track us. I wasn’t sure for a while, but the co-inky-dinks are kinda piling up now, and…” her patter trails off, face going inwards-turned. Her free hand toys with the red scarf concealing her hanging scar. “…I sorta feel like this is all familiar in the bad way.”

Shitty titfucking nose-bulge, you have no idea what any of that means.

Latula’s eyebrows go up and, yep, you are surprise audio-tracking a static-y version of your internal dialogue. You bite your tongue on the middle of the string of curses exiting your maw, gulping off the runaway flow through straight bodily force. At least you’ve also cut short the post-make out ‘murder and contemplation of dead things’ portion of the evening. Small victories.

“Sorry,” Latula says, which has the novelty of coopting your next avenue of verbal stress dump. “I’m not trying to be cryptic; it’s just like a disease. I think my life is half lies these days.” She twists her hand in the scarf. “Or half-truths. Maybe whap me upside the head or something when it happens.”

Alarming. No.

Although, with your coordination and her cooperation maybe you could just skip to whapping random body parts together. Eheheh.

“So, right. Cards on the recreation platform. Think you’ve sneaked a peek at like half the deck already. This obnoxiously complicated dealio here,” she gestures at her giant out-world artifact, “is for making wigglers the un-fun way. And like I said, this is the super rare, holographic edition kinda item; a lot of people would like to get their claws on it. So, okay, there’s me and Porz and some other peepz—I dunno if Kurloz counts he’s kind of nuts—and the deal is—“ —but you don’t get to find out if she’s winding up to tell you about her kinky breeding program plans or what. You don’t actually hear the soft shuff of a misplaced footfall, you just see Latula’s eyes flick toward the dropshaft and your auditory sponges catch up later. “—the deal is,” Latula continues, voice even as ever, eyes suddenly bright and fixed on you, “I’m going to need to put a save point in this explanation for later. All these things popping up that need taking care of, you know how it goes.”

As she speaks, she steps back slightly and to the side, like she’s going back to the device, tucks her staff with apparent casual disinterest under her arm. Caught in her eyes, you turn with her. It’s only belatedly that your instincts catch up to the way this places your back to the empty dropshaft and whatever made that noise. Your pumpbiscuit trips and speeds in your chest, red fear and blue fury and you don’t fall to either because you’re watching her sort sylladex cards and thinking about the way your back to the shaft means her hands out of view.

She comes up with a set of finger-sized knives like mawbeast fangs, and something small and metallic, held so the chain won’t clink. They disappear up her sleeves. “Sorry to keep expo-bailing on you,” she says, and her voice makes a joke of it. “…Trust me?”

“Yes.” Your reply, for once, comes out crystal clear, as sure as your certainty, a perfect line between thought and action.

Latula’s own next line stops halfway out of her mouth, like you’ve startled her. You watch her pupils flare wide and dark, the teal in her irises brightening in contrast. Her tongue touches her lip, her breath caught there. You get a glimpse of her dichotomies again—all vulnerable/dangerous and careful/reckless and hungry/satisfied—and she’s not more honest like this, just different honest, like seeing the flipside of a coin in the air.

“...oh,” she says, in this naked, bruise-roughened voice that flips your pusher and sends a clench of pity dizzily through your veins.

Just a glimpse, and then the coin revolves and her game face is back in place, determined and calculating and exhilarated. She leans in toward you, close enough to kiss, close enough to be indistinguishable to an observer. Close enough you can feel her grin a breath away from your lips. “Hold that thought, babe.”

A moment later she's sliding past you and into ambush so fast you almost can’t see it. There’s a flurry of noise from the bunker’s exit, a rustle of cloth and the scrambling metallic sounds of someone ascending a ladder at speed. Latula disappears up the shaft after her unseen quarry and you’re left blinking after her, hands clutching the item she pressed into them.

You flick your eyes down.

It’s… her sylladex. On the top three cards are all the components to the device she’s secured so far—everything she could break down small enough to captchalogue. You stare at the device for two beats more, at all her belongings placed in your hands, and then you reboot a half dozen internal processes and start towards the dropshaft exit. You struggle the sylladex into assemblage with your helmet’s fetch modus slot as you go.

A flicker of psionic sparks licks the back of your brain, high on adrenaline, half nervy, half pumped. You check your emotional balance, tweak your programs—and start up the ladder after her. Above you, the sounds of a fight grow quieter, and you think the confrontation might be done before you get there. Oh, good.

You’re pretty sure you can keep her stuff safe, but you can’t make any guarantees about this building.

---

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#latula pyrope #mituna captor #latula x mituna #cyberbunny au #ccwritings

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