he fail on my experiment 'til i so to speak

i've been wanting to post something on ao3 for a little while and i honestly thought my birthday event would have gotten a bit more engagement and help reconnect us to the fandom but. oops! thank you chuff for pitchers thank you john for support

"You're so bitchy," Mythra had complained to and of Minoth once, and Minoth had only shrugged, made a cunty little face, and gone back to his writing. And serves her right, thought Mikhail, because even though he didn't like Minoth, he could appreciate that Minoth sort of very much did have a reason to be bitchy. Perhaps, difficult. Or at least perturbed.

Mikhail was, in actual fact, all of these things as well. He just masked it via an extreme overarching need to make himself useful, to ingratiate and acculturate himself to whatever the scenario demanded, such that he would not be discarded, or worse, beaten.

Now, "acculturate" was very surely a strong word. But it was a word Mikhail liked, because it was pleasant to say, and it made him sound jaded and superior, instead of just a victim. He assimilated quite well, thank you very much, whether the people about were drunks or just happy-go-lucky.

Well. He was still working on the bit about being happy-go-lucky. First, there had to be hunky go dory. Then might come devil may care. Possibly a little bit of johnny come lately, if the situation permitted. And those were all big asks.

So Mikhail did best with small asks, like chopping cabbage and herding cows and begruding Milton a smile when all seemed allowably well. Of course, he always had to save himself some effort to the side, as well, so that he never gave up the fullest of his advantages.

No, he couldn't be himself. How dangerous, to ever trust so much as to become himself.

And Minoth was like that, too. He always talked about being a failed experiment, about being in some way innately broken as a result of all the steps that had led him thus far. But then, he spoke from a wealth of experience, of wise intuition and casual casualties. If he ever was to be left limping along, he never let anyone else see it.

Minoth's cavernous eyebags were about as deep as he ever let anyone in. That haunted look in his eyes... Mikhail knew from haunted looks, and he knew that while he had certainly feared for his physical safety nigh-constantly for the past...three years, at least? While he knew what it was to be exhausted, he didn't know what it was to be that stripped of this certain kind of autonomy. To be changed, so fundamentally.

To be sure, Mikhail's travails had fundamentally altered the way in which he would process through the world, and how long he had left to do that. But his personality had formed around this childhood development, such as it was, and so...

Was he fine with it, then? Had he accepted all that had come thus far?

More so than Minoth had. And Mikhail chuckled to himself about it, though darkly and not in a mode of self-possession. This was so horribly morbid, and yet it was true. As many things are, have been and will always be.

It had been quite a long time since he'd run from anything or anyone, hadn't it? He'd accepted this grim, continuous fate of being sold from one set of dirty hands to the next long ago.

But that was when he'd had nothing to run to. Now he had (had) Milton, Haze, Lora and Jin. Though each left him more unceremoniously than the last, their impression remained, and Mikhail ran from the monks with their horrible Titan weapons for as long as he could, which wasn't very long, because he was ten years old and short even for that tender age.

So they caught him. So they rounded him up with the other orphans, freshly minted or otherwise, like so many cattle, and shepherded them all to Indol. Which wasn't a horrible thing, necessarily, given that all Mikhail knew about the Praetorium's refugee camps was hearsay, and he wasn't much for trusting hearsay. For some reason or another, he wasn't currently being killed, which was pretty nice, all relevant circumstances and fates considered.

It became a horrible thing very quickly, however. There wasn't so much as a well-meaning but frightened nurse to shush him when that scientist with his beady, begoggled eyes loomed and leered over him with a scalpel.

It was all so very...nonspecific. Mikhail had thought it to be vagary, when Minoth waved a hand at what had been done to him, but no, he couldn't recall anything that happened. Only that it was dark (even though it was deadly hospital bright), it burned, and he was changed.

Once the blood had faded, there were scabs, and pus, and the sting of ever-reddened flesh. Mikhail had never been so intimately acquainted with his own collarbone. He now found it to be woefully overdressed.

Gone was his prior glumness, his ability to mope and sulk through it all. Suddenly Mikhail's life was a raw, open wound, defendant against nothing at large but everything at bay because he was bleeding, he was violated, he was changed.

And that was without a thought granted to this voice, silent and subconscious and subterranean, subterfugal, that now occupied the vessel of flesh, blood and bones that had erstwhile belonged solely to one Mikhail of Estham, Alrest. As a singular corpus, walking entity, Mikhail had owned himself.

It wasn't that he resented the Blade that once had been, in particular. That this Blade had been returned or relegated to its Core in the first place signified its relative lack of use to the Praetorium, and that was a lot Mikhail would love to throw himself in with - until such time as he might be so blessed as to become actively hostile, that is.

He could endure the slaps and lashes much better than he did the procedure itself, Mikhail felt. Here, obstinance was that precious measure he'd always reserved to himself, and he found that he delighted in practicing it as much as anyone could delight in such a thing, down in a dungeon of delinquency disguised as divine ordination.

The food was minimal - and they even went so far as to justify it, operative as it was to their tests and further research. Which was all this was, of course. Research.

Heaven forbid Mikhail ever have had childlike, or even childish, curiosity.

Occasionally he did wish that Minoth might come to save him. That is to say, he fantasized. It did not occur to him that Jin might yet be available, given as he was to avoiding thoughts of the dread ritual for his own mental fortitude. Instead, Mikhail imagined the footsteps of one who'd been betrayed by his very own home - his Driver, for all that meant; Mikhail would never know - stepping there regardless out of a selfless, all-consuming need to avenge future victims.

It's what he would do, after all. Or, if he could manage it from the outside, that'd be even better.

Mikhail sat and scratched and atrophied for weeks, months, sometime just short of a year. And then someone did save him. How noble that someone was.

Though Mikhail was now freer than he ever had been for any extended stretch of time, and freer by dint of his slightly more advanced age than he had been when protected, however briefly, in Torna...he was not free. He was forever changed.

If Jin was shocked by Mikhail's metamorphosis, he didn't let on. If he'd said anything, Mik would have replied that he had to pick up the slack, now that a certain someone had reached into the deepest recesses of what it meant to be reticent and clung there.

Malos was a mouthy S.O.B. too, after all. So if Jin could handle one, he could probably handle two. Even helped account for the resident Blade with fa-...flamboyant fans.

Dancing. How easy he made it seem, to dance this dance of death with all the life he had left, as if nothing was wrong, as if he'd been born this way.

Akhos and Patroka were troubled, too. They all were; that was kind of the point. Sometimes Mik thought about revealing himself to them, just a little bit more - as the only ones, left or otherwise, who'd ever understand. It was a fine dream for a failed experiment like him.

So juvenile. To think of anything but guarding his heart, still beating?

No, he couldn't be himself. How foolish, to think that he could ever go back to being just himself.