Asch the Bloody (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodyashes) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lazybox2021-03-29 06:38 pm
bloodyashes) wrote in lazybox2021-03-29 06:38 pm
SOUP SOUP SOUP
So the thing is, normally none of them would pay all that much attention to rumors of a mystery Aegis in the custody of anyone. Like, of course they'd go try to free the blade in question, if they couldn't free themselves, because that's what they do. Blade rights is an uphill battle without any end in sight.
But this time, well, this time Asch's intuition is screaming at him actually, that rumor's not all wrong, and so of course they need to go investigate it.
... With Mythra running distraction, because honestly, taking a light blade on an escape/heist (depending on the state of the blade in question) is a recipe for failure. At least she understands that part. And with all of them in resonance, it's not like Jade and Asch can't both yank on her attention for backup.
Intuition gives them easy, silent progress through the facility, with the aid of a bit of dark ether and a few heavy blows to the head for the couple of guards unfortunate enough to come across them. No killing, yet, mostly because the repercussions will fall on the local blades, rather than them. Asch has an unfortunate tendency to be hyper-aware of that.
So now, it's the dead of night, and he and Jade are making their way up to the cells. Asch, for his part, isn't sure if it's better that it's the cells, or if it would be easier if they were just picking up a core crystal. On the one hand, escaping with a core crystal is much easier. On the other hand, it makes it kind of difficult to get an idea what kind of blade they're dealing with.
Either way, they're just about there. Asch holds up a hand to prompt Jade to stop, the both of them dressed in dark clothes that completely cover their ether lines. (Like this, they could almost pass for a pair of mundane human infiltrators, which is part of the point. Between them they have every element, including surprise.)
"Almost there," he says, tipping his head in the direction of one of the cells. "Let's see what we're in for this time."
Because it's never simple. He can feel from both the ether signature down the hall and the way his own intuition weighs on his mind that this time definitely isn't simple.
But this time, well, this time Asch's intuition is screaming at him actually, that rumor's not all wrong, and so of course they need to go investigate it.
... With Mythra running distraction, because honestly, taking a light blade on an escape/heist (depending on the state of the blade in question) is a recipe for failure. At least she understands that part. And with all of them in resonance, it's not like Jade and Asch can't both yank on her attention for backup.
Intuition gives them easy, silent progress through the facility, with the aid of a bit of dark ether and a few heavy blows to the head for the couple of guards unfortunate enough to come across them. No killing, yet, mostly because the repercussions will fall on the local blades, rather than them. Asch has an unfortunate tendency to be hyper-aware of that.
So now, it's the dead of night, and he and Jade are making their way up to the cells. Asch, for his part, isn't sure if it's better that it's the cells, or if it would be easier if they were just picking up a core crystal. On the one hand, escaping with a core crystal is much easier. On the other hand, it makes it kind of difficult to get an idea what kind of blade they're dealing with.
Either way, they're just about there. Asch holds up a hand to prompt Jade to stop, the both of them dressed in dark clothes that completely cover their ether lines. (Like this, they could almost pass for a pair of mundane human infiltrators, which is part of the point. Between them they have every element, including surprise.)
"Almost there," he says, tipping his head in the direction of one of the cells. "Let's see what we're in for this time."
Because it's never simple. He can feel from both the ether signature down the hall and the way his own intuition weighs on his mind that this time definitely isn't simple.
even if he's not i am!
Yuri stammers about how he couldn't possibly be an Aegis, he couldn't possibly be without knowing, without someone else knowing. The flesh eater thing in particular pings as curious to Jade - those are not the words of a man who committed the act himself, not on his own terms.
"I suppose if they had no idea the blade they were making into a flesh eater was an Aegis," Jade suggests, though he does wonder how anyone could feel Yuri's ether signature and not know. Humans, he supposes. "And - I don't know how young you are, Yuri, but blades generally don't make the history books within the first few decades of their lives. And if this is your first lifetime - and it must be, right? If you remembered others, you would know you were an Aegis. Regardless, how could anyone write about a blade who has been asleep for most of the history they're writing?"
His eyes flick towards Asch, subtly enough that Yuri might miss it, considering it's not like Jade can move his head much without interrupting Mythra.
(He processes how distressed Yuri really is about here, and hopes he hasn't been too cold, too harsh - wishes he'd thought to try and borrow some of Asch's compassion before he dove in.)
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"My first driver," he says, voice too crystalline to be anything but the truth, too close to shattering, "wanted to make our Aegises into flesh eaters, so that blades would never have to rely on human drivers again."
He stops again, takes a deep breath, and leaves it there, for everyone else to process for a little while. Instead he says, "I'm probably the person most familiar with flesh eater medical treatment in the world right now, if you want me to take a better look at that wound and your health in general."
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He fights back the urge to cry or scream or - well, anything, really, that seems childish and stupid but would, he thinks, in the moment, really make him feel at least a little better. Maybe he'll be able to find a nice river to yell into later. Right now, with the outward ease that comes with a lot of practice, he drags himself back together with brute force. Poke at the problems later, when you have time and allies you can trust to watch your back against anything.
In the now, focus on what's in front of you. And what's in front of him is Asch, looking almost as on edge as Yuri feels, offering him a boon.
Frankly, Yuri does not want Asch to take a look at him. In the cell had been one thing - he'd been actively bleeding out, if just a little - but he's hit a mental limit and his skin is crawling and numb at the same time. Just being in the same room as all these people is enough to make his annoying heart beat faster. But he also sees the offer for what it truly is: concern, a gentle change of subject, and, knowing healers, Not Actually An Offer.
Not that he thinks Asch would just walk over his consent if he actually said no, but. He'd probably act like Yuri was being an idiot about it.
He very carefully avoids thinking about...the Aegis stuff. Only so many world shattering revelations at a time, and if he has to pick one to focus on, it's going to be the universe jumping. Healthy? Probably not!
"Blade studies in general aren't a big thing in Terca Lumireis," Yuri says eventually, tone even. "Flesh eater studies...well. I'd probably have to get into the history and politics of my world for context to even explain the complexities of why flesh eater studies either don't exist or are super under the table...?" He trails off with that, leaving the question open. It's not like he knows fuck all about how flesh eating works here, socially speaking, though the fact that only Jade in the room is also a flesh eater...honestly says a lot, from his point of view. "All that to say that. yeah, if you want to throw your expertise this way, you can." He shrugs, trying to play it off a little.
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Jade shrugs, here, a smile to take the edge off the mood.
"Such is our lot, I suppose."
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The first thing Yuri gets, though, is a core crystal ping - not the resonancing type, but a diagnostic sort from a healing blade who has worked with other blades enough to know what to look for. Give him your ether outputs and your sync rates, buddy.
"You made the mistake of wandering around with an open shirt anyway, so you get to lean back instead of forward," Asch says, keeping his hands very much where Yuri can see them. Putting down his hair brush and getting up provides plenty of warning long before he's going to have to touch the other blade's chest. "Has anyone ever actually checked your pulse before?"
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Asch's ping against his core is - weird, actually! It's just as impersonal and professional as the rest of his check over, which is a little ??? to Yuri when it comes to, you know, sliding up against his aer to get a real good look at it. Estelle's checked him like this, sometimes, but once they were in resonance. He resists the urge to blush and slap Asch's metaphysical touch away from his core. This must be something that's...maybe not common, here, but common enough that it's not something to freak out about; another aspect to the upkeep of blade health that comes about in a world not actively trying to no mercy run them.
He tilts his head as he considers Asch's question. "I don't think so?" He says. Flynn had, once, but that was before he'd had one - on one of their first missions gone badly, when Flynn had slipped into shock and autopiloted his way through some basic first aid before they'd both gone wait, Yuri, you're a blade. "Is that something that we should have been doing?" Oops, if so.
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Maybe he shouldn't be joking about this. Well, that isn't going to stop him.
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Honestly. That said, the number of flesh eaters he knows who take care of their bodies effectively is really only like two: Malik, and Jade (bullied into doing it by Malik).
Thankfully, Yuri does give him the data, and... Wow, okay, that's sure a thing. "Point in the Aegis column," he says, "you're offputting slightly more ether than Jade is with a shitty synchronization rate." Jade was a powerful blade with an appallingly well-synced driver, but it's all ice; Yuri's output is much better balanced - another sign of an Aegis - so it's not as obvious until actually crunching the numbers, but there it is.
The next words are more of a statement than a question, a foregone conclusion that Asch is just seeking confirmation on. "That wasn't your own driver's heart, was it." It might have been a driver's, it's not ether-dead the way someone who hasn't been exposed to blades might be (flesh eaters are changed by the organs they put in, but the organs themselves don't change much), but it sure has hell isn't in a 'natural' resonance loop.
trauma time :D (again)
It's not panic that freezes Yuri in that moment, but it's the closest word for the feeling he's got. He teeters on the edge, caught between attack! and flee! and the only thing that keeps Asch from getting a fist to the face is that he finally settles on the middle ground of getting everyone the fuck away from him - he shoves Asch a little as he scrambles back, but it's without malice or even intent, really - and once he's got a little more personal space to breathe in once more, the urge to call on his sword and start swinging has lessened. A little.
It's not Asch's fault he just stepped right onto Yuri's one, singular, I Cannot Touch This line of thought. He couldn't have known. He repeats this in his head, over and over, like a mantra. It doesn't really calm him as much as he would like, and in that moment he feels a flash of petty, visceral hate for Asch.
Then, he just feels tired. He's so, so tired.
"No," he says. "It's not my driver's heart. How - how could you tell?" Could he tell more? Flynn's voice echoes in his mind, words that have haunted him for three years without end.
Was it Hisca?
"Like..." he trails off. He knows fuck all about human biology. "Can you tell the..." not gender, probably. Hearts don't differ depending on that. He thinks. "The age of it?"
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"Not without equipment I sure as hell don't have here." Could he tell? Yeah, probably, intuition would scream it at him if nothing else, but Yuri is close enough to breaking down already. Whatever the hell the circumstance was, it clearly wasn't a good one. (Not that any flesh eater's circumstance was good, but there's a different between being Malik-level fucked up when it comes up, and being Kratos-level fucked up. This is more on the Kratos end.)
Asch regulates his breathing carefully, hoping that projecting calm as much as he can manage will help Yuri keep hold on whatever he's holding onto.
"All blades have a synchronization rate," he says instead, explaining slowly. "Usually it's with their drivers, but for flesh eaters it's with their human organs. If it's their driver's, it's significantly better than if it's someone else's." He's not avoiding the word 'heart' out of strict respect for whatever about the question set Yuri off. Hearts are just the most common. "Most of the time, it also means they'll have less nasty side effects. Your synchronization rate? One of the worst I've ever seen." Genis' is probably worse, because his heart is actively killing him, but Asch hasn't done anything more than hear about the roaming flesh eater in passing.
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"I suppose that's another point in the Aegis column," Jade muses. "Your health being as well as it is, considering." No sense repeating what Asch just said.
Perhaps he should have let the Aegis thing lie until Yuri was more calm... or perhaps it'll get Yuri on a still-bad-but-less-triggering track. One can hope.
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"Maybe I'm just an outlier," he says, trying for humorous. His ears are ringing, a bit, for no physical reason, so he isn't actually sure how far it falls flat because he's trying to reorient his brain into actually being functional. "Above the curve, so to speak."
Okay, that was a terrible joke.
He turns to Asch and sends him a weak smile. "Sorry," he says. He isn't sure if he's apologising for the grab, for asking for more details in the first place, or both. It's up to Asch to decide how he takes it, he guesses. "That's just...a bit of a sore topic for me. You've probably already figured it out by now, but...I didn't exactly become a flesh eater willingly. And no, it wasn't my driver. He's fine."
He shakes his head, then looks at Jade. Another point in the Aegis column, huh? His next question he addresses to the room:
"Say I am an Aegis," he says. "Like. What's the next move, past presumably getting out of here?" Yuri's not usually a plan guy. But hey, sometimes you need a little bit of stability in your life.
Yuri feels like he needs to cash in a few decades worth, right now.
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So, no, he's not angry about the grab or anything. He's not even really surprised. (Realistically, Yuri's holding it together better than Kratos would in the same shoes.)
As for the question... "I don't have any genius ideas right now," Asch says. "Other than maybe dragging Mithos out of the network to get his opinion. In theory we could do that anywhere, but since you're not a part of our network..."
They might actually have to go to the Goddamn Tower And All Its Fun Shit for Yuri to talk to Mithos.
"...Either way, we should keep moving for a while. The people who captured you won't give up that easily, if they managed to figure out what they had."
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"Asch is right, though. I'd say we should take some time to rest, seeing as we paid for these beds, but we'll leave first thing in the morning? Maybe even sooner, if we want to use the cover of night to get further unnoticed." They have two dark blades. Might as well use them.
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And right now, after everything he's been through recently, the stabbing and the world travel -- Yuri's body is begging him to just crash for a solid twelve hours. He knows he probably won't be able to give it that much rest, but maybe he could meet it halfway and give it at least six.
He...doesn't really want to get into it right now, because at Asch's statement a very loud Actually Most Flesh Eaters I Know Did In Fact Kill Their Drivers piped up in the back of his head -- Yuri, forced into what he is against his will and with a heart not his driver's is, in fact, a wild anomaly in his society -- but he shuts it up because it's late and this isn't his world. This isn't his place to speak.
(He does wonder what it's like, though, to live in a world where flesh eaters are rare, where they're mostly unknown -- are humans just better in this world? No, that can't be it.)
"I guess we'll head out in the morning, then?" He says, to the room at large. "Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm beat. I need to make like log for at least a few hours." The bed he sits on is all but singing to him...