#selffriends | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

iconuk01 · 6 years

Text

The SelfFriend on the Other Side

A Warlock (and sort of Cypher) fanfic by Icon_UK

They touch. And Douglas Ramsey Warlock’s world spins like the wildest of tops. In that flash, Warlock’s physicality merges totally with Doug’s. The same shape remains – roughly the same.. but not the substance. From head to toe, every square inch of Doug’s body is covered with Warlock’s living circuitry…the young alien’s technorganic “flesh and blood”… creating a fantastic synthesis that Doug soon realises… is more than skin deep.

- New Mutants Annual #2

But what about the OTHER half of the fusion? How did Warlock feel? How was it to be…

The SelfFriend on the Other Side?

A Technarch’s body may appear to be a random, shifting, ramshackle collection of parts, and it is, but their minds… that is quite another story.

The mindscape of a Technarch is so alien that no human telepath could ever hope to comprehend or even touch it. Endless intertwining four-dimensional spirals of though, memory fractals arcing into the… well, there is no word for that. Parallel brain tracks curving in directions with no human equivalent. Concepts and instructions shimmering and, in some senses, coagulating from nothing into simply… being and then dissipating, though not necessarily in that order.

Like all Technarch’s, Warlock maintained a complete conscious awareness of his mindscape at all times, and as such, was now watching it in awe/panic as it collapsed in on itself. Spirals were straightening ALeRT+++DaNgeR thoughts-phases were contracting WARN1111NG_+_THreaT, and new, more linear though processes were coming online to cope and accommodate a new mind, a human mind, the mind of his best friend, Doug Ramsey.

This was not something that the Technarchy would ever have conceived of, to even suggest it would be an… //Err0r//abomination/NULL-thought/crime//Err0r//. It was insanely risky for Doug, both in mind and body, but he could feel that mind and body merging and diffusing with and through his own even as he had the thought.

Warlock knew, intellectually, that the changes for Doug would be more instant and profound, but a number of his parallel braintracks were reminding him loudly that there was always a trade-off about such things.

Doug+/-Warlock was experiencing vastly widened perceptions, multiple new senses feeding into his/their worldview and a body that shifted as t(he)y thought about it.

Doug was used to processing one stream of consciousness, so would be more likely to be overwhelmed by the immediate sensations.

Warlock-/+Doug was used to having as many streams as he needed, two thousand three hundred and eighty-three was his average (mostly to look after the body awareness perceptions that humans had an autonomic nervous system and subconscious for… and now he knew the context of the words “autonomic nervous system” and “subconscious”), so was better able to maintain a sense of self, but that wouldn’t last forever, the nature of their fusion wouldn’t allow it. More brain-tracks were collapsing in on themselves, realigning.

So whilst Doug was going “wide angle”… Warlock… Douglock? (Warlock? Doug? Was there a difference now? //Error// //Error// !!YES!!) was going “telephoto”. He was gaining a fixed context for reality, a stable set of perceptions informing a history that wasn’t his own, and yet now was his own, and it was… astonishing.

He was overlaying a monomorphic lifeform, integrated at the cellular level. Doug’s human genetic code was giving their form a stable basis. The notion of even a remotely fixed shape was utterly alien to the Technarchy, it was something that foodstuff species suffered with… //Doug =/= food… confirm and loop/repeat//.

By rights it should have been limiting, it should have seemed impossibly restrictive, claustrophobically painful even, and yet somehow, even more impossibly, it wasn’t.

Intellectually, he (they? it was blurring again NO //Error// CEASE+/-STOP+/-ARREST+/-! //Error// HE) knew that psyche-separation must be maintained to ensure that the reversal process would be possible…. HE had known since arriving on this world that humans lived in fixed shapes, with a sensory input of their surroundings that would have seemed to a Technarch to be utterly unworkable.

Optically receptive to a minute portion of the spectrum, crude vibration awareness, a ridiculously limited tactile sense, plus some sort of airborne/oral chemical senses which were sort of linked together, and absolutely no perception of lifeglow, and all whilst trapped in an immutable form. Disdain was the most obvious Technarch response, and even Warlock had tended to default to “Pity”.

Yet, despite millennia of existence and their own aesthetic, no Technarch could have conceived of creating sounds like Bruce Springsteen, or Mozart, or The Bangles purely for pleasure (He was sure that there was more to it, but Doug’s wasn’t especially musical), or created LEGO (or known the pain of stepping on same), or playing Centipede, or enjoyed the smell of hot chocolate on a cold afternoon. Nor could they possibly comprehend the sheer unutterable satisfaction of popping bubble-wrap that were now part of Douglock’s shared existence.

He now had memories where he only saw a fraction of the radiation //Error// light spectrum that he was used to, but now he could NAME colours rather than simply classify wavelengths. He knew that Earth’s sky was perceived by us/humans as having a wavelength of 474 nanometres, but that didn’t convey the sense of the many shades of “sky blue” t(he)y now comprehended.

T(He)y knew the names of every colour and shade because Doug did. (Of COURSE War+Doug+lock //ERROR// DOUG… knew the words for colours, he always knew the words.)

T(He)y had memories //ERROR// not memories, separate experiences t(he)y had been THERE, of family that would never translate into anything the Technarchy could possibly comprehend.

“Father” and later “Siredam” were the closest words he had been able to come up with to describe a relationship with Magus when the other New Mutants had asked, but the term was cold… more descriptive than emotive.

The now-shared experience of being raised by two discrete parental entities who loved their offspring, nurtured and supported them/him was almost too much to bear for a Technarch. Childhood tantrums gently chastised? Foolish actions used to educate? Comfort after breaking his elbow aged five (Warl+D0ug understood ELBOWS!! Astonishment) Encouraging? Patient? Communication? These previously abstractly understood concepts now informed his worldview and he wanted to hold on to them with both hands (And wasn’t THAT a very human turn of phrase?) because no Technarch had ever experienced them and once he had, how could he let go?

Warlock knew that Doug had, to a certain extent, envied him his Technarch abilities but Warlock envied his friend just as much.

If/When++!NO!++ absolute+WHEN//resist+effort>temptation this fusion came to an end, Warlock knew Doug would crave the experience again, because he could feel that craving.

But Warlock would crave it too, for entirely different reasons. Doug was by far the more decisive of the two of them/us, but this time Warlock would have to be the strong one, and resist the merge when Doug asked him to because the emotion he now knew as selfishness meant he wanted to feel it these sensations again. Even as t(he)y thought this, and even as he locked the thoughts away in an isolated and unused memory location that Doug might never notice, Warlock also knew he was lying to themself.

Friendship is saying “Yes” when your friend asks you for something, selfsoulfriendship is saying “No” even though you want it as much as your friend does.

#fanfic #warlock #doug ramsey #cypher #new mutants

14 notes · View notes