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nat-of-personifs · 4 months

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Thirteen Thirty-Four; 10985//11019

I WROTE THE MAJORITY IN A LOCKED CLOSET

this is a cry for help /j

Even on her periphery, Overseer One’s presence is strong enough to nearly tear open the scar slicing through Site-17’s middle. She skips all of her routine when receiving a new anomaly—reviewing its file for the fifth time, double-checking the cell it’ll be staying in, and wrapping wool around a heart that isn’t hers—to reform on the hard concrete mapped to her fingers. He’s threatening to break one of the bones if she doesn’t.

She’s exactly three feet away from his transport van, hands over eyes on instinct until she remembers the Council rescinded the blindfold order. The latex of her gloves leaves pale impressions on her cheeks when she slides them down. Her first glimpse of her greatest is only a higher quality version of the images she’d tried to block her true body from sending: Overseer One is tall, thin, gray streaks in black hair, and it’s alright as long as she doesn’t look past his neck.

She’s suddenly reminded of how numb some humans are to the concepts she helps wrap around others of their kind (it’s mutual, she has a harder time latching onto them too) when someone, her by proxy, wraps their fingers around One’s arm without warning to steady him as he steps down, visibly shaking. The crinkle of the jumpsuit she’s tried to ignore, audible only to her, draws her eyes down like there are hooks attached. Her irises sting in the places they would have pierced when she sees.

The hole she’s hollowed for him has always been noticeable, especially at night when she feels blood seep through the mattress, which is wrong because she is nothing but rows of absences she needs to fill.

Blue doesn’t fit him; his suits have always been gray or black, from the rare times her Director describes him. But it fits who he needs to be for her, soothes the allergic reaction she feels building along her arms, and it might stop her from vomiting him out.

His eyes meet hers. She blocks the pain in her eyes when she blocks out his jumpsuit and gives him an imitation of the smile she uses when she first sees most humanoids. She doesn’t flinch as her scar seals shut properly. He’s still hers somehow, she tugs at him too, and he breaks their staring contest as he tries to pull away from his guard.

That won’t do. 17 shakes her head and he prods One’s back with the tip of his weapon. The callousness, and the former Overseer’s wincing and stumbling, quiets the itch along her arms like eczema cream. It’s not her fault. The Foundation herself ordered her not to be gentle.

She stays rooted to her spot as the guard walks him up the path to the point of control. He’s clearly uncomfortable in his uniform, which she understands; she’s an SCP too, and she conducts plenty of tests on herself.

The images of his face she lets her true body send her now are still exactly what she expects. He falls into the second category of anomalies she contains—resigned to his fate, not truly present, which is better than the itch of a fighter.

He reaches processing.

Her jaw snaps shut when he reaches the first dark shadow of her true body: she breaks him into pieces with his number, softens him with her paper saliva, swallows him with every stamp of approval. The detectors along her esophagus promise her safety even as bile rises, but she can’t throw him out until she avenges the body of the sitespirit he nearly ruined. The metal doors to her stomach slam open and closed again, and she hunches over it where no one can see her as she forces him inside. Even with her precautions, he’s rotten and barbed.

Her scar rejoins the itch in her arms when she no longer sees him with her avatar’s eyes, so she reforms in a corridor adjacent to him. He hasn’t spoken or resisted since he pulled away from his guard—which is unusual, but so is everything else about this situation. He knows her too well. He’s uncomfortable, but he’s not hostile. Contrary to popular belief, she doesn’t judge.

Besides, her digestion isn’t complete.

She shoves him into his cell, into the absence she has hollowed out for him, and the number on her walls muffles the rising anxiety she can feel through the link that should have terminated itself long before. She can’t stray too far without her scar splitting again. She doesn’t it bother her.

She sits outside his door, soothing herself with footsteps as reliable as her heartbeat. They don’t stop for hours. --

Unlike her guards, Site-17 recognizes the woman who walks down the corridor to One’s cell with a tray and a file immediately. She’s the head researcher for 11019, which she supposes she needs to start thinking of One as. Annoyance from an Ethics Committee briefing clings to her; no wonder she’s late. Ethics tends to let her function as the Foundation’s heart go to her head.

“10985-S17. I can’t say this is unexpected.”

“Hello, Head researcher Huang.”

She doesn’t stop walking as 17 makes room for her to enter, bracing herself for the adrenaline already prickling in her arms as the researcher types in numbers she knows automatically into the keypad. 11019’s tug forces her to lean forward unconsciously as Huang opens the door.

Huang senses it. “Come in with me. It’ll register as a crosstest.”

She nods, and slides her computer under her arm as she enters. His room is as spare as all of them are: suddenly, she remembers his office, and resists the urge to gag at the contrast. 11019’s curled up on the thin mattress. He faces her avatar, and his eyes open wider than they should when Huang approaches him.

“Hello, 11019.” She nods at him. He doesn’t object to his designation.

Most of them fight it somehow, with or without fists.

Neither Huang nor the former Overseer register her when she presses a hand to her stomach, forcing the nausea back down: Director Gears wouldn’t approve of this and she almost wants to leave, but 11019 in front of her is more important, even after she’s broken his power into pieces.

There’s only one empty chair, so 17 sits on the piece of floor closest to him.

He’s frozen to the bed as Huang excuses her delay and complains about Ethics—which 17 fully agrees with—and sets his food-laden tray on his nightstand. He’s clearly hungry. She almost envies him.

She’s so full she’s surprised there’s no swelling in her abdomen, full in the wrong places and starving in the right ones, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Huang gives her an hour in the room, so she sets a timer. 11019 picks at his food, despite his hunger, as if ensuring it’s edible. 17 watches his reaction and monitors her own, reveling in the detachment she feels from the distance of an experiment log. It numbs her to the itch more effectively than a guard’s prodding.

They lock eyes again, but neither says anything. Their communication will be in reports to the Council and proxy dialogue from both of their research teams. Besides, he already knows everything she could possibly tell him.

17 opens her phone and sets a timer for the hour she’s allotted as Huang pulls up a chair, sits at his side, and says the things she’s not allowed to: apologies for the quality of the food, an explanation of her own position. Her words, read off a script she memorized years ago, push the rash along the sitespirit’s arms further into numbness.

It forces itself back into her memory when the fabric of her skin-tight shirt shifts with the motion of her hand against the page, but ignoring strange sensations is just another routine in her life.

“...Would you be Dr. Elena Huang? Specialized in Mechanical Engineering? I remember seeing your name somewhere…”

She raises her head. He trails off. 17 sees Huang with her Director almost as often as Huang sees him with her, not counting the time she’d locked herself in his closet for 16 hours–authorized, with no human objections–to test his ability to identify her through sense. And 11019 is Gears’s father. Hadn’t he recognized her before?

Huang confirms. 17 returns to her notes, but keeps her eyes on the anomaly, who ceases picking at his food to watch Huang watching him. She does her best to glance over the cracks in his mask from their scrutiny. She’s not authorized to notice them, but every wince works its way into her mind, and she feels her own hands on her arms when he crosses his to hold himself.

The heart inside her beats in time with his, but her AC freezes his accelerating anxiety in the space between them.

She listens to Huang’s briefing the way she watches 11019’s face and feels the wood of the pencil she clutches distort under her grip. Huang’s vision is tunneled to nothing but his face and his file, as she’s practiced for decades, present only in this room. 11019’s arms are wrapped around him like they’re the only things containing his body; it must be lonely to have only a shell of skin to seek comfort in, 17 decides. Concrete, and all the other things 10985s are made of, are more trustworthy.

She may not be gentle, but she isn’t harsh, either. He’ll have as much freedom as she–Huang by proxy–feels is safe.

Fingers on keyboard keys blends into the imagined ticking of her timer into the ruffling of thousands of ledgers and the clicking of other keyboards typing other containment procedures, here and beyond, their combined action apparently manifesting as notes on all the liberties 11019’s granted.

They’re more extensive than her own, which fluctuate like Ethics’s mood.

“Would it be presumptuous to expect perfect compliance from you?”

17 startles at the familiarity of that sentence, which isn’t routine, and twitches as a memory crawls out of a hole. They were the Foundation’s exact words to her when she ordered her first vivisection.

Scars along and across her stomach and arms and legs flicker lazily to life.

She digs the edge of her computer into her stomach to chase the fire away, careful not to bruise, and glances up at Huang. She wasn’t–there, though she’d felt it like all the parts of her. Something like the sparks that ignite in Ethics’s eyes when she reviews a new violation have wormed their way into the researcher’s.

It thaws 11019’s uneasiness before her AC snuffs it out again.

“...I know the boundaries I must follow,” he answers, with the same disdain 17 directs at the Committee. It always makes her angrier, but Huang’s not hers, so she smiles instead. Her eyes crinkle the way 17’s do when she practices her own in the mirror. The words echo when she tries to commit them to memory.

Huang stops for a moment to glare down at her: she’s not supposed to show her anomaly, especially in front of other SCP objects, or they’ll wonder. What does that matter? He knows what she is.

Still, she nods, winces when her scar twinges at the new red mark on her file, and terminates the echo mid-syllable.

“Good,” Huang says to both of them, and her vision tunnels again. 17 shifts in her seat on the floor. The researcher produces the form most humanoids are given, comfort in checkboxes. Her hand snaps up to brush against the paper, and the brief touch is enough to soothe the scar. Huang doesn’t comment.

The only thing 11019 requests are sleeping pills, which she grants. His whisper gives her fullness thorns: he and Gears should be memos and written orders, authoritative, never hesitant.

“Keep it. You might want to fill it up in the morning,” Huang says as she hands over the form and a pen, but 17 doesn’t touch it again. 11019 nods, suddenly mute. He sets them on his nightstand.

“I’ll make sure I do,” he says as he recovers. His delayed reaction retracts some of the thorns. 17 winces, before the absences are filled with herself.

Huang breaks her observation to stand and replace the chair, carefully as always. She’s never rough with her true body, no matter how many times 17 reminds her she can’t feel it.

“Researcher Annan will come in a bit with some sleeping pills. We’ll see each other tomorrow,” she reminds him, then turns to 17. “How much time do you have left?”

She checks: “It’s been thirteen minutes, thirty-four seconds.” “I expect a crosstest report when the hour’s up,” Huang orders.

“Of course.” She’s already drafting it in her head.

Her guards open the door for her, a small courtesy. They’re as rough in closing it as most people are, but 11019 twitches at the sound of metal on metal. 17 bites back the apology on the tip of her tongue.

He exhales and almost closes his eyes, before he remembers she’s still in the room.

17’s irises meet his first. It should feel right. It’ll be wrong again as soon as she can fix him. He opens his mouth—for what? To order her?—but whatever words he has die in his throat when she smiles.

#Another Time #personifposting #scp foundation #scp fanfiction #O5-1 #Aaron Siegel #Foundation site 17 #Site 17 #icba to go look for her tag rn #this is also on AO3 #tw food #it’s just how 17 perceives containment man

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