Work Text:
confetti fragment - Ren & Evely
by Lucinda
"Ask me again."
"You were right. The course is a lot harder than I thought, it takes a lot more to get through it than I thought it would, and it wasn't easy," Ren winced as his sore muscles throbbed, and he glanced over at the woman.
Leaning against the doorway, Evelyn looked calm and relaxed, a cascade of pale hair rippling to the bottom of her ribs, a faded green shirt brushing over the tops of her jeans. She looked pretty, and
sweet, and exactly like the sort of breathless and obsessive girls that followed actors and rock musicians around the country.
She gave a lazy smile, and brushed her nails against the bottom of her shirt, "No more comments about how you can do anything a human can do, only better?"
"Not from me. I swear not to ask `how hard can it be' ever again," Ren shook his head, dragging the hair out of his eyes yet again. "Not here, at least. But most people don't do things like that."
"We aren't most people, Ren. They ask more from us, and harder things from us than most. Most people are only asked to go to work, to make things in a factory, to work in an office, to tend to the
injured. Our country asks more from us," her words were soft, and she walked closer, her footsteps almost silent.
"The nations asks the most from the SEALs and agents, is that it?" Ren reached out, his fingers curling around a lock of her hair. "What does the country ask from you, Evelyn?"
She looked at him, with frost pale eyes, and sighed. "Some would say that they ask too much. My time, my focus, my youth... I do whatever is needed to get the job done. I've slipped past borders to get information. I've killed, I've flung myself in the path of danger to protect others. I've bled for my country."
"What cost does it leave? Where are your scars, Evelyn?" Ren's voice was soft, and he leaned closer, taking in her scent.
"There are no scars that a doctor would find," her fingers were cool on his arm. "Some of the serums took care of that. I heal very thoroughly."
"Everyone scars, Evelyn," Ren thought to his own scars, given when he'd failed at some task, or when his master had been angry and unable to deal with the true source of those feelings. "I scar, O'Cullough scars, the secret servicemen get scars..."
"My body doesn't anymore. Nobody who had an Alpha adjustment to the Kitborne serum scars in the flesh anymore," she looked up, and her eyes seemed to fade, becoming at empty and cold as the moon. "Only whatever tattered remnants of a soul that are left to us can carry scars now."
"I thought the serums weren't effective, or too dangerous. Why aren't the available for everyone?" Ren tried not to think of the reasons for someone's eyes going dead-cold like hers. "For the hospitals, and the sick people..."
"They don't work for everyone. They don't work evenly when they do work. Give the serum to thirty people, two of them will probably die, a few more will be very ill, about ten will heal better, and maybe one of those will have the Alpha adjustment. Alpha, Beta and Ceta adjustments are good for the dangerous missions."
"Two out of thirty will die?" Ren blinked, his aches feeling less troubling as he pondered those numbers. "Are you sure that they didn't just have one unfortunate person in the group?"
"If they'd only tested it on one group, maybe," Eveyln placed her hand against the wall, and sighed. "They've been trying to improve the serums. To reduce the side effects, to increase the chances of
survival. They've made a lot of progress in the last fifteen years. The odds of death or serious side effects used to be one in five."
Ren shivered, reminded that these were the same people who had created the labs. The people who had ordered him, created him according to a genetic checklist. "What did they do before they could make their agents heal from anything?"
"Before they got the serums working right, they would just patch us up, maybe grow a new pair of kidneys if we'd been drugged or poisoned a few too many times. Kidneys, livers and eyes were the ones to get replaced most often..." Evelyn shivered, and traced over her eyelashes. "I've had my eyes replaced four times."
Ren swallowed, tasting iron and bile in his throat. "I thought... didn't you say that an Alpha adjustment healed?"
"Three times before the serum, and once after, to make me look different after a mission in Kadzakhistan. It was easier to recover with the serum." Her voice had gone soft, and she looked at him with something that wasn't a smile.
"To some of them, you aren't a real person because you came from the Lab, because your DNA isn't entirely human. To those same people, we aren't quite human anymore because they can just rebuild us, replace the damaged parts, send us back out again and again until we don't make it back."
"I am a person," Ren whispered. "Maybe not quite human, but I am a person."
"I know."
"Why do you keep doing this? Why let yourself be chewed up like that?" Ren looked at her, wondering how many times she had been rebuilt, how many times bullets had been removed from her flesh, her bones pinned back into alignment.
"Because if I don't, if we don't, then they'll send others. Children, perhaps, people who can't do it as well as we do. And we don't dare fail," She almost seemed to shrink into herself. "If we fail, the people who will take power are even worse. There are always ways that things could be worse."
Ren had no words to say after that. He had already seen enough to know things could be worse for himself. He just hadn't realized that it was the same for her.
end