Color by Te October 1999 Disclaimers: If they belonged to me I'd let them do precisely what they wanted to do. Spoilers: For Virtuosity. Ratings Note/Warnings: R for themes and stuff. Vicious. Summary: Change is a given. Author's Notes: Saw this again with Kasha, Misha, and Mighty Mighty Dawn Sharon. Continued to lust. There's a passion to this stuff from the other side, what can I say? Acknowledgments: To Dawn Sharon and Kasha for audiencing... * "Do you like this?" -- SID 6.7, Virtuosity * The coming of color should not have been a surprise, but it had been anyway. Parker was not, nor had he ever been immune to his own dreams, but they had been... safer before. Since saving Madison's child. (It was disgustingly pat, anyway. You should be grateful.) And he was. He was. It had just been a surprise. He had known he was not alone from the beginning, felt the queer doubling of perception while desperately trying to save the child. Heard so many different voices. But still, it had been months before there was ever *more* than the voices. (Change is eternal.) And now there was, and his dreams were so damned *bright* and yes, change was eternal but he'd never gotten used to that. Apparently there were certain sorts of adaptation that were beyond him. He wanted to believe that adaptation was beyond him. (You're very tired.) He was very tired. (I love you so much.) And it was needlessly hard and he had never been immune to his dreams anyway and he was. Not. Himself. Parker's day began late, again. He forgot to tape his knuckles. He didn't forget, he deliberately did not tape his knuckles. He also did not use his tongue to clean the bag. He did use his tongue to clean his knuckles. (Let me make you hard, Parker, please...) He remembers the oddly fast, desperate, and slapdash way SID tried to convince him to turn on (your keepers) the state. He remembers being vaguely and strangely offended. He remembers the desperation and the speed and the *hunger* he assumed was for his own rage and hopelessness. (For the game. For you.) And he knows precisely how badly SID wanted him, and how well SID knew him to know that any *real* attempt to corrupt Parker (at that point) would have ended in derisive laughter and an... ending. And he knows, he really does know, that all of this just feeds into the unfamiliar vibrance in his mind. (It can be as true as you want it to be, I swear.) He leaves the house in only a pair of shorts and his running shoes. The world is the color of dirty maize. He's a dry seed, blackened and withering. It's becoming slightly, just slightly noticeable that his left arm is larger than the right. To him at least. Of course, the seam renders thoughts like that irrelevant. (You're beautiful.) SID liked them lean. Half-starved before he even got to them. Which ones inside him were cowards? (I learned my lesson, Parker. I'll only lose you if I let you make me angry. Would you like me as a coward?) Implicit hint that the fear would solely be for his benefit but before he can carry the thought through he is given a flash of pale peach skin stretched tight over muscle. Arms invisible, shoulders straining. Rubber cuffs. Hands would be losing sensation... more than a few repeat offenders with wrist seams. Artificial was cheap, cheap, cheap SID on his knees mouth open sweat beading hair mussed. Suddenly bruised. Then less bruised -- he is vain -- and bleeding here and there. (Please.) Running becomes mildly challenging, but nowhere near impossible. It isn't cowardly to break under torture. (Would you?) It's different. Laughter in his own mind and he just padded the world for a dead artificial serial killer who could just be a vivid figment of his deprived imagination. L.A. hadn't changed since the 50s -- just louder and browner. Everything square and neat even in the midst of chaos. (People make chaos under duress.) He put himself under duress to escape chaos. It was a cycle. Perhaps he was simply a little faster than the rest of the world. Or slower. (Different.) Not so different. Madison had assumed Parker would think he was part of SID's makeup. The thought had not occurred to him, and yet... somewhere out there a bored 14 year old could be growing his own pet entity and who better for 6.8 than the man who had destroyed him? (You didn't.) He could at any moment. It seemed as though he was exempt from every weapons law at the state. He could jerk off at the Oscars and be quietly ignored. (Placated. They know you, fear you. They think they do.) If they knew him they wouldn't leave him like this. No one knew him anymore. (Ooooh... I love it when you talk paranoid and isolated, Parker.) He wished he knew how to pray. He wished he hadn't thrown out the module. He wished he had crushed it himself. He wished there was someone right there to touch him and hurt him and hurt him until that door, that little door opened up and beckoned him into the sweetness. Oblivion was bright. Sleep was brighter. In dreams there were greens, blues, red-browns of uncomfortable familiarity, softness and pain. A collection of sensation from his own experience, gathered and reworked into a careful tapestry of... life. Had he expected anything like this, he would have expected the pixellated shorthand of flash and absence that had made up SID's virtual world. And yet... SID had never had access to a true human mind. For all his baby softness and occasional, actual (always real for you, hate, love, whatever you want...) emotion, he had never been given anything real to work with. It was almost a shame. (Everything happens for a reason, Parker... if I had known you I surely would have killed you.) Because he was loved. Steam rose up around him in the shower and pressed in close enough to make Parker bleed out sweat -- sensed even through the pound of water. Slick under the beading heat. Hard everywhere, nothing wasted. (God was lean. He didn't let me touch Him.) God was in the roughly beaded false arm that soaped and rubbed him, in the shadows of steam, in the helpless want that was surely only in response to its mirror. SID had never raised himself from his knees, Parker had never offered a hand. The fist on his cock had never once had to be his own. He wanted... And there he was, against that wall, screaming against a backdrop of limp virtual ragdolls, reveling in it this time. The pain had not changed. Nothing had changed but his own realization of horror, actual horror and subjugation to the machine. Rage and blood. Pain and fear. Hate and ratcheting need. It was L.A. He could scream all he wanted. end. "Gonna get to know ya real well." --Alice Donut "Cain"