Chapter Text
You’re sleepily combing hair out of your eyes with your fingers when the last of the feathers comes away in your hand.1 Idly, you twiddle it between your fingers, letting the light from the half-dimmed overheads glow through it, and then cast a glance across the room to Kal’tsit, in the middle of getting dressed.2
"So," you say. “I think maybe it’s time I saw my real medical records."
She doesn’t look surprised;3 she just pauses and sighs.
“I wondered when you would ask,” she says, brushing her curtain of white hair over the back of her collar, and without further preamble, takes a couple steps over to her desk.4 The sheaf of papers she brandishes is held in an opaque white folder, and is alarmingly thick.
"Not to leave this room, I imagine," you say.
"Yes. It is also, I admit, still partially redacted." She frowns, lightly. "There are still some things that... I cannot explain.5 But I anticipated your asking."
She hands you the folder, and you tuck the bedsheet under your arms for some nominal modesty as you start flipping through it. Meanwhile she sets about combing through your hair, inspecting the remains of your crest and cleaning up the remaining empty feather sheaths.6
At least your name is right there at the top the same as you’ve gotten used to. But there’s the bit you were looking for:
[Race] ▮▮▮▮▮7
[Cell-Originium Assimilation] 0%
Subject shows no symptoms of Oripathy.[Blood-Originium Crystal-Density] 0.5u/L
Under no circumstances should ordinary operators come into contact with Dr. Lau’s blood.[Infection Status] Non-infected as confirmed by medical report.
Here is the hypothesis that you have assembled:8
You have undergone gene therapy to pass as something relatively common among the nations of Terra, albeit an imperfect and hastily-designed regimen which accounts for some of your waning physical symptoms. Time in the sarcophagus undid this, but left remaining physical traits until they naturally fell away with time.9
Your sleep disorder is an inborn trait, rather than a race-inflected Oripathy symptom. As for your Oripathy…
…your results were so strange that you did one of those reckless idiot ideas that passes through your head and got out a scalpel and some topical anesthetic.
What you found you had to sit with for a while. The crystals were not rooted, or spreading, just—sitting dormant under your skin, like they’d been inserted there.10
Which begs the question, as you idly flip through pages—
What the fuck was wrong with you?
[1] Several months ago, you were presuming it was the start of some seasonal molting. But nothing grew back, and then—there were a few other things.
[2] Although you take a moment to appreciate the curve of her bare back. You’re not a solely practical woman. Also, it’s mere days until you deploy to Londinium; you have to bank the strength while you can.
[3] Of that you in turn are unsurprised; after all, she has to have noticed: the gradual loss of your feathers, and the new slight surgical scarring from your in-progress experimental excavation of the originium crystals laced into your skin.
Your suspicions had started when, deployed in the field, you’d felt a little off-color3a and run some blood sample tests with one of your spare low-tech kits of the kind usually distributed to far-flung communities without consistent electricity. You’d anxiously awaited the results, and the results had been… perplexing. Odd enough that you’d run the test four more times, sure you must be doing something wrong.
[3a] (It turned out to be food poisoning.)
[4] You have always wondered why there’s a drawer locked with a mechanical key in her desk—but then again, on a landship that includes Closure, maybe that’s more secure.
[5] "Cannot" rather than "won't," again. You put a pin in that for later on your mental board of mysteries.
[6] She’s still got her clinical expression, but there’s a gentleness to her hands that makes it an intimate gesture. Neither of you has put to words any worry about your respective upcoming deployments, but an anxiety hangs in the air around the whole landship.
[7] Redacted, unsurprisingly.
[8] Which under any other circumstances would be a crackpot tinhat fantasy. But when it comes to matters like this—you're starting to discard those feelings of "that'd be ridiculous." Ridiculous happens to you much too often.
[9] Whether this was your idea or anyone else’s is an open guess, but it smells like the kind of reckless idiot idea you might have gone for.
[10] This was probably your own stupid idea also. Also, all of this gives a kind of disturbing portrait of your own prior emotional landscape. Either you were really that self-assured, or that self-destructive, or both.