“Haa, haak...”
He lifted his trembling left hand and felt at the stump of his right shoulder. Then, drop by heavy drop, tears fell onto the sheet.
“I don’t want this...”
A voice already low to begin with sank deeper still. As though he were going down into an abyss deeper than the one a month ago, when he was first rescued.
“If this is what you brought me here for, why were you kind? Why were you tender? You should have just killed me...”
The slender ‘center’ he’d clung to so desperately in the captain’s quarters yesterday snapped, pointlessly. Because he’d tasted hope, the despair was crueler.
Luca curled in on himself. His spine pushed out against thin skin. That alone made an already small body look more fragile, more precarious. It overlapped with the way he’d looked when the captain first saw him, breathing and nothing else, craving only death.
“Luca...?”
The captain couldn’t make sense of this. Only yesterday Luca had been so full of hope, so why had he suddenly turned like this?
“Luca, what’s the matter...”
He started to reach out, and Luca screamed at him savagely.
“Don’t touch me...!”
The captain flinched and went rigid. Eyes still brimming, Luca shouted at him.
“Just kill me! If you’re going to turn me into a robot weapon like this, kill me!”
“Luca, it seems there’s some misunderstanding...”
“I said don’t touch me...!”
“Luca...!”
“No, nn, this isn’t how I wanted to survive. If you were going to use me like this, you could have told me in advance. Why did you do it? Why make me want to die even more...”
This was past the level of a misunderstanding. Luca’s despair had clearly gnawed away every rational part of him. The captain spoke stiffly, in the guise of the ‘cold-blooded captain’ he’d never once shown Luca, the one that only appeared on the bridge.
“...Obel, Kai. We’re postponing the surgery.”
At that low voice the two of them hesitated. Kai spoke first.
“Captain, if we leave Luca’s body like this, the nerves in the stumps will necrotize. We need to connect the prosthetics quickly...”
“I heard you. That’s enough for today.”
“But...”
“The synchronization rate has already dropped below what the surgery requires. Do you intend to force the connection?”
As he said, the rate had fallen from ninety-two to fifty-eight. Forcing the bond wouldn’t endanger Luca’s life, but there was no telling what shock his mind might take. The Eternos energy could even contaminate his brain. Obel obediently gathered up the instruments he’d brought.
“All right. We’ll stop for now.”
He packed up, and right until he stepped out of the operating room he kept warning them.
“But Kai is right. Delay the surgery and eventually the prosthetics won’t connect at all. There isn’t much time. Make the decision quickly.”
Having delivered that cool assessment, Obel left without looking back. Kai withdrew quietly after him. The two remaining prosthetics, still waiting to be connected, had been left on the bed. He seemed to have left them there hoping Luca might grow even a little accustomed to the machines.
But for all Kai’s thoughtfulness, Luca didn’t so much as glance at them. He only went on shedding silent tears.
“...Luca.”
In a space with only the two of them left, the captain’s voice shifted back to the tender tone Luca knew.
“I’m sorry for startling you. I wasn’t trying to frighten you.”
A large hand cupped his wet cheek. Luca startled and moved to push it away, and this time the captain caught his left hand and held on tight.
“Hic...”
Hot tears spread along his fingertips. As if to hide the fact that he was crying, Luca turned his head to escape the touch. Anticipating it, the captain didn’t release the face he held.
It wasn’t a coercive attempt to force eye contact. It was that if he didn’t hold on somehow, Luca’s soul looked ready to crumble apart on the spot.
“Luca, could you look at me?”
“Let go...”
“Lift your head. Please?”
“I said let go...”
The captain held his breath and studied that face. Eyes hollowed by frequent nightmares and pain, lips gone pale without a trace of blood, and lashes trembling faintly with terror.
A face that had only just come of age, that ought to have been brimming with life, had death’s shadow lying over it. The will to live he’d worked so hard to plant seemed to be running out of him like grains of sand.
“...I’m sorry, Luca. I pushed you too hard without a word of explanation. It’s late, but I want to explain everything now. Will you listen?”
However tenderly he spoke, Luca’s pale blue eyes only wandered, unfocused, over empty air. Perhaps the reflection of himself in those hollow eyes struck him as selfish; the captain chewed at his lip.
It had never occurred to him that the prosthetics he’d brought as a gift of life were, to Luca, nothing more than an enormous lump of iron that would crush him.
“Luca, look at me. Please...”
Even at a request that came close to begging, the tear-soaked gaze stayed clouded. Luca murmured as though exhausted.
“No... I want to stop now... I want to be done...”
“Luca, don’t do this. It hurts to see.”
“Don’t be tender with me. I don’t want to be hurt by your hypocrisy.”
“Hypocrisy? Why would you say something so painful?”
“I thought I could be used by you, but... this is too frightening. I don’t want it... I said I don’t want it...”
At that listless response the captain carefully wrapped the small body in the sheet. He lifted the cloth-swaddled bundle gently and pressed his lips firmly to that round forehead.
Ordinarily the sudden contact would have startled those pale blue eyes wide as a rabbit’s. This time there was no reaction at all. The eyes stayed empty.
The captain clenched his teeth. The tendon along his jaw stood out sharply and then subsided. Suppressing his emotions somehow, so as not to startle Luca, he asked carefully.
“When did I... ever try to use you? Can you tell me why you thought that?”
Carrying him, the captain walked out of the medical bay with its cold smell of drugs and its humming machines. He knew perfectly well that nobody left the medical section without Obel’s permission, but this wasn’t the moment for that kind of principle. Even once the medical center was behind them and they were out in the corridor, Luca only murmured on with a blank face.
“Because you saved me...”
“You thought I saved you and brought you here for some purpose?”
“Why else would you have brought me...”
“Haa, what have you been thinking, all on your own...”
“I thought the tenderness had a reason behind it. Even if you attached prosthetics and made me a machine person to use as combat personnel... I told myself that much was repaying a debt, that I could accept it...”
“Luca, how far exactly did you take this...?”
“Nn, but... the prosthetics were built purely for combat. You really were going to make me a machine person, hic...”
“No...! Kai only modified them to suit you better because you said you practiced martial arts...!”
“Don’t lie to me...! I just... I pictured prosthetics that were like part of my own body. Not hideous machine limbs like that... I don’t... I don’t want to be a machine’s component...”
Inwardly the captain heaped curses on himself. He’d watched over Luca’s feelings so delicately, and at the moment that mattered most he’d failed to look after him properly.
It was because he’d been so firmly convinced the prosthetics were the only solution. By ignoring purpose and process entirely and caring only about the result, he’d hurt the person most precious to him.
He couldn’t stand his own thoughtlessness. Late as it was, he wanted to give Luca back some peace.
“My quarters were comfortable, weren’t they? Do you want to rest there for a while? How about it?”
“...”
“The juniper scent you like will calm you down. Shall I bring the yellow roses too?”
“...”
“...Don’t cry, Luca.”
The whole way, carried in the captain’s arms, Luca cried with the sound muffled. He hadn’t known he’d fear the prosthetics this much himself. It was as though some trigger inside his calm had been pulled.
Because an Aegis ship destroyed everything I had... did I come to hate anything mechanical...?
If he hated machines that much, this ship should have been horrific too. It wasn’t, and so he couldn’t read his own heart.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I couldn’t picture the future I’d been dreaming of. Not with those prosthetics...
Recovering his composure bit by bit, Luca just managed to stop the tears. He looked up at the captain carrying him so carefully down the corridor.
“Luka...”
It was the first time he’d put the name that was also his own in his mouth that way. The captain seemed just as surprised by that first moment; his golden eyes trembled slightly as he looked down.
A different face, a different temperament, different circumstances. Apart from the name, they had nothing in common. He was plainly a stranger, and yet he treasured Luca to this degree, and Luca had kept up a half-measure of an attitude all this time, neither accepting him nor pushing him away. Meaning to put an end to that now, he spoke.
“...Tell me now. Why you brought me here.”
