Chapter Text
His feelings about the boy had always been complicated, to say the least.
Finding him had been a revelation, a miracle. The search party had been struggling through the horror of the crash site for what felt like an eternity, finding only burnt and mangled corpses. With every step, Brad’s legs had felt heavier and heavier, and the dust and ash choking the air felt as though it was sinking into his lungs. All he had wanted was to give up, to fall to his knees in the hot sand and die like the thousands of people around him. Surely, he’d thought, this was hell.
And then he’d seen him. The little figure, stumbling over the sand. A kid. Alive.
It was the sign he’d needed, the hope he’d needed, and life had surged back into his limbs at once. Someone was alive, someone else had survived. He ran forward as the child pitched into the sand, catching the small frame easily. Brad hadn’t been able to stop the almost manic smile on his face, or the desperate glow in his heart when his finger contacted living flesh for the first time since the crash. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped, leaving an icy coldness in its wake. Something was wrong.
The little body was hot, feverish. That alone wasn’t shocking–with all the child had been through, Brad would be surprised if he wasn’t ill. But as he turned the boy over, looking into his bright, unseeing eyes, Brad knew this was no ordinary illness.
The boy’s eyes glowed, glowed a hot, bright blue, punctuated in strange, delicate lines that spread over his skin in complicated patterns. As Brad watched, the lines flashed and burned, flickering and fading in an uncertain sort of way. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Under his white SEEDS tunic, the boy was barefoot, and his feet had been sliced to bits, likely by the shrapnel lodged in the sand around them. The wounds pulsed red blood, but also blue light, and growing out of them were long, white feathers. The feathers twisted and curled, lazily buffeted by some unseen current, seemingly unmoved by the fiery wind whipping around them.
The joy Brad had felt earlier curdled inside his chest, turning into something sickening. He dropped the child–the creature– back into the sand, backing away, chest heaving. Distantly, he could hear the others in the search party calling him, wondering what he was doing, but he didn’t answer. His mind was elsewhere.
He’d only seen plants a few times before. If he was honest, he found them creepy as shit. Brad was an engineer, but he preferred the cold logic of machinery to whatever the hell they were. Machines made sense. Electricity, pistons, levers, hydraulics, all explicable. Even plant engineers like Luida had to admit that they really didn’t understand why plants did what they did, or even what they really were. Or why they looked so much like people, but not.
Luida thought they were beautiful. She’d taken him to see one on Ship 5, once, stimulated it to open so he could see what it looked like, all the while chattering about AT fields and feather generation, but Brad hadn’t really listened. He’d been watching the flower open, thinking maybe, okay, it was kind of pretty in a creepy way, the way the delicate blue glow lit up like filigree and the feathers unfurled gently in the water. But then he’d seen the thing inside. The body, once you got over the long fingers and the crazy bent legs and the glowing lines and all the goddamn feathers , the body was too human. It could be a woman, if he squinted, maybe a pretty woman, and the thought sent shivers down his spine. That’s not right, was all he remembered thinking. That’s not a person, it’s a thing. It’s a generator. But its eyes had opened, and it–she–had looked right at him, like she was staring dead into his soul, like she was wondering why he had clothes and a name and free will and she lived her life in a cage and suddenly he’d felt bile rising in his chest.
Plants weren’t sentient, Luida had told him later. There’d been studies. Of course there had been. Humanity would never use plants as generators if they were sentient. Just because they looked like people didn’t mean they were. Just because she had looked him in the eye didn’t mean there was anything going on in her brain. Plants were just people-shaped tools, no different than the engines he worked on. He accepted it, and stayed the hell out of the plant chamber from then on.
He accepted it, until he was looking down at the child, shaking on the sand as feathers poured from the wounds on the feet it had just been walking on, holding up a hand to him that glowed blue, looking at him with eyes just like hers had been.
Just like hers, through the glass.
Brad swallowed hard, fighting the revulsion and fear creeping up his throat, and bent down to bundle the boy into his arms. Heat rolled off the child in waves, in shaky breaths, and Brad noticed with a little thrill of horror that there were tears running down the boy’s face. He looked away quickly, and used his free hand to unclasp the blanket he’d been wearing as an improvised shield against the sandstorm, wrapping it around the boy to at least hide some of the wings before the others in the search party saw.
I’m going to regret this, he thought as he started back to Ship 3, the plant child in his arms.