ex nihilo

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Blake's 7 (probably series A/season 1, but otherwise ambiguously set) (A Question of Identity)
Chapter Summary: At the moment, it hurts too much to remember his own name, much less how he got here.
Word Count: 2369
Rating: Teen

 

        The man opens his eyes to darkness. Even squinting doesn’t help. The panic hits first, then some unpleasant combination of pain and exhaustion, but he’s not alone. Avon, it appears, has not abandoned him despite all threats to do so, though his mind is rather more chaotic than the man would have expected. Probably shock, come to think of it. At least the order with which he alternates between cursing Blake’s naïveté, the Liberator crew’s treachery, Federation traps and his own foolishness for letting himself get caught up in it all is somewhat predictable, like clockwork. The name Blake sounds familiar, for some reason, like it has some relation to the man in pain, but before he can quite work it out he’s gone again.
        He wakes again at movement. Avon is no longer there within some sort of reach he can’t quantify, not with the throbbing pain in his skull and back. Without that anchor, safety of some sort is no longer guaranteed. He tries to make his way to at least sit only to hiss weakly at the strain. The footsteps falter, something dropping to the ground, then begin to run, and he gives his position up as helpless, at the mercy of whoever approaches.
        “You were dead,” Avon spits, hands on his arms disbelieving and pressing a little too hard, though the man does not begrudge them.
        “Evidently not.” Though it might still be a near thing, if the sudden pang of cold that strikes him to his core is any indication.
        “Your heart stopped,” Avon responds, never one to let the possibility of an argument fade, and in response the man simply feels tired. Tired, and a little sad.
        “My left heart, yes,” he responds quietly, trying not to give in to the urge to let his head fall and rest against the cold rock at his back. He can feel the one on the right struggling to keep up, but he’s not meant to exist this way, with only one functional. The quiet suggests he has said something wrong, but he has neither the energy nor inclination to care.
        “The poison has overcome what little is left of your reason, I see.” Avon pries open his eyes, in case that would be in any way helpful; judging by the continual state of darkness and the disgusted sound Avon makes, it is not.
        “Unless you listened carefully or had instruments, I doubt I have any way to prove it to you. And given the circumstances, I’m not sure I’ll last long for your fact-finding.” This is, in fact, an urgent matter. If they don’t get it restarted, he probably will succumb to the poison if not to the cold—Avon’s diagnosis sounds right, if rather vague—but fighting through this fog in his mind is rather difficult.
        “You’re going to keep up worse nonsense than usual, Blake?” Avon is annoyed—that much can be communicated without touch.
        Blake. That must be his name. It rings true, and yet not at all, but he’ll accept it for the moment. He tries to speak, to respond, but the coughing rather catches him by surprise. When he finally manages to breathe again, his clothes feel like there’s a spattering of something warm and wet quickly cooling in the air of the cave, and there’s a hand on his pulse. This time he can disentangle his own shock and panic from Avon’s own.
        “You’re thinking rather loudly,” he manages thickly. Some of the blood, he works out, is from a cut on his tongue, making the whole rather itchy and throat sore. He’d bitten it at some point, it seems, but when is a nebulous quantity he cannot determine at the moment. Funny, that.
        On cue, Avon’s thoughts come to a complete stop before continuing again, much more precise and probing. Pictures of animals he’s only ever seen in vistapes are projected. Then why does he know their names?
        “Pink elephants, Avon, really?” Of course, the absurd is the point, a test. The specificity allows no room for error or fake.
        “This is a new development,” Avon muses quietly, barely audible but for the slight stereo thanks to the continued touch of skin. “Cally would have been overjoyed if she’d had the slightest hint we weren’t all human and therefore boring.” He’s already worked out that it’s due to touch, but—surprisingly—doesn’t pull away. Sure he has control of himself, that he can keep his secrets locked down. Futile, when it comes to some species, particularly those more powerful, and of course the fact that Avon is letting him in means that were he so inclined (never mind not dying) very little could be hidden, but as it happens, neither are true.
        “Fascinating.” A thought, but this time more deliberately thought, as if in his direction, accompanied, no doubt, by one of Avon’s smiles that are all teeth and nothing reaching his eyes. The choice of communication calculated to lessen their chances of being heard by pursuers seeking them in the caves. “But irrelevant at the moment. Who are you really?”
        Possession. A thought that would be laughable, if not for past experience. If anything, his head only hurts worse. He answers telepathically himself, a fit of pique making him send the answer before he means to. “It feels like I’ve been trying to answer that question all my lives.”
        The wording, he realizes, as Avon pounces on every word as if it’s the key to the mystery, with all his intent, unbreaking concentration, was indeed odd, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Fine, he’s feeling all fuzzy. Let Avon pry into the cracks of his mind and work it out. And of course their cautious comp tech thinks it could be a trap, but curiosity propels him forward anyway. It’ll be a difficult job, the man (Blake?) thinks with difficulty, sinking back into waves of steadily increasing pain, gritting his teeth against the possibility of making a single sound with only the vaguest idea as to why. There’s little there to work with, but it all feels remarkably consistent. If not for the bit where he’s poisoned, he’d feel as whole as he’s likely to ever feel—some memories are probably irreversibly lost. Efficiently the other man calls up responses to queries, as if Blake’s mind were nothing more than a computer program. He isn’t sure whether to take offense, but given that he can barely move concentrates all efforts instead on trying not to die.
        Resistance gives way. On both sides, Avon’s disbelief and Blake’s remnants of self-preservation. Mostly, this happens to be due to the fact that in his mind like this Avon can feel, just as Blake can, how hyper-aware he is of his own right heart valiantly struggling to keep beating. They have yet to encounter anything that physically changes a subject after possession, which does not necessitate that such a thing is impossible, but even then Avon cannot fathom it occurring so quickly unless such a change was expected and already prepared for.
        It is undoubtedly unwise to let someone so single-minded in so deeply, because even as he seeks confirmation of the man’s identity and problems to be solved he’s keeping an eye out for vulnerabilities to be ruthlessly exploited later, but Blake hasn’t made it this far being wise, and in any case one of the few facts he knows with certainty in both his hearts (however unbeating) is that he trusts Avon. This momentarily baffles and distracts their comp tech, but after a mere pause he presses on, shoving that confusion aside in favor of continuing to work until he’s been satisfied with the data that has been presented.
        Avon attempts to find what rewrote the code. Blake’s mind spits out two distinct moments that merge into one, a headpiece that rewrites his entire being, and when he returns he has Avon’s coat sleeve stuffed in his mouth and is half dizzy with apparently screaming into it, throat raw and pained (though his own equilibrium probably isn’t aided by the looming possibility of his second heart failing). Upon noticing his return, Avon quickly shrugs back on the coat, swapping which hand is touching Blake’s. The other man’s touch is freezing, but then, he personally can’t be much better off. Chameleon arch. The meaning of the words is out of reach, at the moment, but that is the name of the device. That, and—
        Ah.
        The pocket watch, the one that Blake somehow still had on his person with no memory as to how it had gotten there. It had piqued Vila’s interest—why would a man carry a pocket watch and a wrist watch—and Blake’s own quickly fading curiosity and even remembrance of the incident coupled with the admonishment not to open it must have been too much for their thief, who likely just had to see what was inside. Blake could not remember how, at the moment, but therein lay the key.
        “That’s enough to be getting on with,” Avon thinks definitively, satisfied for the moment. “Since you can’t remember, the facts are these: we are on a cave on an ice planet. Despite my warning, you decided to blindly trust old alliances. At my most generous, they were accounted for the same way you had been, though it is considerably more likely they merely weighed their options and found selfishness more valuable than charity. At my probing specifics one of them had decided we were better off dead. The knife was distinctly cruder than the poison it was laced with. The Liberator is not answering, and while the signal might be weak in these caves, it was not on the surface.” He is also carefully not adding the fact that he had dragged what he had to have presumed was a dead or dying Blake with him to safety rather than just abandoning him, which warms Blake’s remaining beating heart considerably. A threat to not reveal this information to anyone is added with deliberate urgency, speed calculated so as not to appear hasty. A moot point, if they can’t manage to keep him alive. There’s another word—regeneration—but useless and out of reach with only one heart beating.
        “Do you have any idea as to how to save your life?” Avon continues smoothly, stilling as the sound of shuffling and voices becomes audible. Blake attempts to breathe more quietly, heart pounding even faster under Avon’s fingers.
        “If we—” he starts to respond, losing track of the sentence and coming back what feels like mere seconds later, though Avon’s carefully controlled panic suggests it’s been rather longer, “...if we can manage to get the second heart started, I should be able to purge the poison and start to heal. Or at least regenerate.” The concept is vague and nebulous; he’s not even on his first, whatever that means, but the thought skitters away before he can grasp it.
        “There is no mechanical injury, then?” Blake is starting to drift again, but that strand of hope—he is unsure if it is his own or Avon’s, but he will grasp it tightly with both hands.
        “No,” he answers slowly, distantly, that memory, at least, not completely out of reach. “The problem is proximity.” Aiken’s hand had been shaking, he realizes with perfect clarity—the only moment in the whole tour he can recall so vividly. He had meant to stab the heart, but missed—but the poison had managed to stop that heart quite effectively anyway, and if they take too long, the second will as well, simply on a delay. And the torment of his biology rewriting itself a second time blended in perfectly with the agony of the poison working its way through his system. If not for that, though...he’d have quite likely already been dead.
        “Blake, focus,” Avon insists. It would be annoying if not for the reason behind it, that Avon is very determined that Blake should not die—not here and now, at any rate. “If that is the case, how do we restart it?”
        It’s a pity that most of his time as a schoolboy had been spent daydreaming about stealing a TARDIS and going off to fight injustice like The Doctor, rather than actually paying attention to his studies. Such as biology.
        “Blake.” The warning, Blake realizes, is no mere impatience. The hand on his wrist has determined something rather crucial—his heart rate is growing more erratic.
        “Force—chest compressions will work best.” He imagines he can feel Avon working out the spot using symmetry, since his hearts aren’t quite located where they would be on a human. “If that doesn’t work, I might need a shock.” Avon could probably repurpose one or more of the gadgets they took with them to make something—well, it’s not likely to be anything like a defibrillator, but it’s the best they can do. Blake could, possibly, if he’d even felt like he could lift his arms.
        “And that won’t stop your other heart?” Avon queries out loud once more. The shuffling of clothing suggests he might be trying to warm up a little so as not to jeopardize the attempt. Probably replacing the glove. Blake mourns the loss of contact. No wonder Cally had been so despondent at times. It’s hard to miss something you don’t know, but now that it’s gone, he’s suddenly feeling even more lonely than before. Particularly when he still can’t see.
        Blake swallows down sudden nausea and bile to respond, quieter than he even intends. Avon has to lean down to try to hear him on a second try. “Shouldn’t think so, but at this point, I suspect we might be a little desperate.” He’s not entirely sure they have a choice, either, but doesn’t have the breath to say so, not with Avon arranging him meticulously before beginning in earnest, a sharp, cold pain tearing through Blake at every movement. His breathing hadn’t been particularly good before this, but now it’s all he can do to gasp, brain sluggishly attempting to grasp the pattern. Somewhere in the middle, the darkness and pain engulf him again.