Chapter Text
Be careful my darling
Be careful of what it takes
What I've seen so far
The good ones always seem to break
~~~~~
They say they aren’t human. Not after the chemistry takes effect.
They come only from the poorest families, those that can’t afford even just a sleeping pod.
By the twenty fourth century the space on planet Earth has indeed become a pricey commodity, with massive overpopulation and strain on resources forcing everyone except the super-rich to contain their entire existence in modules no bigger than a size of an adult male plus thirty centimetres on either side.
Efficient, equipped with air and water filters, stackable into hive-like structures to conserve the heat.
Simply somewhere to sleep.
Fili signed up for the Programme when he and Kili stopped fitting into a single module in their early teens. Too many arms and legs, too tight to fit in through the hatch, too much strain on the systems not designed to keep two people alive.
He must have known for years that he day would come when Kili inherited the pod. Their mother never planned on having two sons.
He said his goodbyes, joking that Kili would struggle to sleep if he wasn’t wedged in properly, yet in his eyes Kili read sadness, plain as day, and perhaps a dash of fear.
Fear was not an emotion that normally featured in Fili’s eyes and Kili would never, ever forget the look on his face that day.
He was right of course; not only couldn’t Kili sleep, he didn’t know how to exist without the other half of his soul, Fili’s breaths, laughter, constant care and gentle teasing he’s known all his life.
For Kili that was ten years ago.
They say you get to choose your poison. Element they call it, but of course it’s only a question of what type of pollution will ultimately kill you.
Fili chose water, and so they turned him into an undine.
The idea is that if not everyone can live in conditions suitable for humans, then perhaps some should live in conditions that are not.
Water, fire, earth, air.
Companies sub-contracted by governments to turn those who can’t eke out a space for themselves within the civilisation into creatures that might survive outside of it.
Undine, salamanders, gnomes and sylphs.
They say they aren’t human. Not after the chemistry takes effect.
Kili thinks it’s to justify the monstrosity of the process: wings bolted on by machines to spines, never-ending scorching or drowning and the inevitable onsets of insanity caused by darkness and solitary confinement.
It takes years to twist a human into a creature that can be released.
In the meantime Fili can’t have a pod, but he is entitled to a tank.
Kili stares into blue eyes, with whites turned red from constant exposure to salt water and levels of pollution consistent with those present in the oceans today. His golden hair twists around his head in a beautiful halo and it may have grown long, but there are braids there, still, meticulously put in, like the ones they used to weave in for each other when they were children.
He thinks the one thing Fili must hate the most is having his ability to speak stripped away from him. Water doesn’t carry sound the same, and communication isn’t deemed necessary to survive in the seas.
His lips move as he tries to say something, Kili perhaps, and reaches out a hand with nails turned into claws.
They’ve taken away his tears too: salt water mixes with salt water and it’s only the look of agony and shame on his face that betrays his feelings, seeing his little brother after all those years.
The public aren’t allowed to visit; not after the subject begins their transition. The death rate is estimated at over thirty per cent, but this fact won’t be uncovered until much later.
Fili’s process isn’t complete yet. He’s obviously been through the chemo and they’ve taken his lungs and replaced them with gills, fitted between his ribs. They haven’t started on the rest of his internal organs or his legs though, but they will soon, if the various lines and writing covering his body are any indication.
Where to cut, what to remove, where the bolts go, which will fuse his legs together.
They say they aren’t human.
Kili closes his eyes, and bites his lip against the supernova of overwhelming fury and guilt fused into one. It’s the most intense feeling he has ever experienced.
The public doesn’t know, doesn’t ask. They don’t know what it’s like, what it looks like, what it feels like to have bits of yourself ripped out, replaced, changed.
Fili came to this place willingly, to have these things done to him, even though he knew he would never see Kili again. He did it, so Kili could have a tiny space left to live in.
Kili presses his hand to the cool glass, watches his brother reach out to line up his own, but he shakes his head no and tries to ignore how hurt Fili looks at being denied.
Instead he concentrates the ever-burning heat inside him into the tips of his nails, where it will hurt marginally less than if he used his fingertips, and starts melting a clean, straight cut through the reinforced glass of Fili’s tank.
Kili chose fire. Because it’s the most painful. Because he wanted to be destroyed. Because it burned away his tears.
He never expected to be made powerful.
The undine stares at him, but he doesn’t resist or protest, even as water – the one thing he needs to survive - starts leaking through the ever-widening crack Kili is creating.
They hold each other’s gaze, but it’s hard to tell if it’s trust, resignation, or gratitude in Fili’s eyes as Kili works on the tank.
Underneath all those boiling emotions there’s guilt. In the end his sacrifice hasn’t made a jot of a difference. No doubt he thinks he’s failed.
Perhaps he thinks that Kili came to kill him. He isn’t quite right, but nor is he completely wrong.
At this point Fili has less than four minutes left to live.
Kili remembers shattered tanks he found five years ago, the bloodied mess that was left of their inhabitants. The laboratory is in the realm of humans and that makes it vulnerable when the meteorite hits. Not like the stable depths of the sea, the empty vastness of the skies, or the impenetrable strength of the bedrock.
Or fires. Fires that are about to sweep away the old.
He doesn’t expect it when Fili hits at the unfinished cut in the glass from the inside, but it’s enough, and it all explodes outwards in a flurry of sharp glass and salty water.
Perhaps Fili just wants it all to end.
When Kili comes round, he can already hear the distant roar of the hit wave, wailing sirens and he realises that it must be almost too late.
Fili is there with him, writhing on top of his chest, clawing at his shirt, ripping it to shreds and leaving deep gauges in his skin.
He’s dying, Kili realises, watching blue eyes roll back, and he must have been without water for several minutes now –
It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Kili was never meant to cause all this agony, weak spasms of Fili’s body, his legs kicking out as he slowly suffocates, his eyes full of helpless questions.
It doesn’t matter now.
All Kili can do is grab his brother and wrap himself as tight around him as when they were children, sharing a single pod, a single mind, a single soul.
All that is left is to send the signal.
~~~~~
Kili measures time in the beeps of the machines which slowly, painstakingly filter salt and chemicals out of Fili’s blood.
He looks like hell: unnaturally pale, swathed in bandages, exhausted.
And yet, his heart goes on.
When Fili finally comes round, they’re still wrapped up in each other as tight as possible, even though there’s a whole, wide bed to spread out on. For many, the pod syndrome never goes away.
“Ki… li…” he whispers, hoarse and not at all like Fili should sound.
A second, two, luxurious closeness and –
Fili trashes, having realised that he’s produced a sound and that he’s breathing air.
“Shhhh… easy! You’re alright, you’re okay, Fili. Just breathe with me a while. In… and out… In…” They have learned the rhythm a long time ago: one chest expanding, as the other one deflates. The only way they could fit. Together they fall right back into it and manage to stave off the panic. For now.
“You have your lungs again,” Kili whispers. “Bio-grown from your own DNA, so they’re near-identical to the ones they took away from you. The gills have been removed, though they haven’t yet started on the wounds left behind. You need to heal a bit more first.” He hesitates. “I wouldn’t normally take those decisions from you, but you were critical for a while and we needed to make a call.”
Fili stares at the faint black lines along the sides of his fingers, where the webbing was meant to go, and at the claws that have been trimmed, but aren’t quite nails yet.
“There are also nanites working on your vocal chords. Medically, it’s fairly minor, but I thought it would be important to you. They will be a few days yet, so try to speak as little as you can.”
Fili nods, though the array of questions and things he wants to say is obvious in his eyes.
Instead for a while he simply curls up around Kili, arms pulling him even closer if that’s even possible, holding onto him for dear life, and Kili returns the hug, heart pounding, eyes burning with tears medically incapable of falling.
They never thought they could have this once more.
“Where?” Fili croaks eventually.
“When,” Kili corrects him gently. “For you, it’s five years into the future of where you left off. For me, it’s ten years since you left for the Programme.”
Fili shows him the crisp lines in a silent question.
“We jumped into the future, Fee. You were going to die, and I wasn’t going to let you.”
Fili closes his eyes, trying to wrap his head around the concept of there being a future.
“It was a bit touch and go for a while,” Kili admits, trying to offer as many answers as possible. “The day I came for you was the day a giant meteorite hit the Earth, wiping away civilisation as you remember it. Most of those who survived were Elementals, better adapted to the extremes that followed. Some humans did too, but one thing was certain: nobody cared anymore; it only mattered that you were alive.”
He pauses when Fili slots his fingers between Kili’s, something like marvel reflected in his eyes.
“There were two predominant technologies left all around us: one designed to preserve human life with minimal possible amount of resources and waste, and the other centred around medical tech and body modification. Out of those developed self-sustained space travel and ability to relieve or reverse elemental changes altogether.”
That makes Fili’s eyes snap up, and it’s by the hope there that Kili knows he’s made the right choices for him.
“You have fire,” his brother shifts his focus to study Kili’s scorched nails, which up until recently were able to melt reinforced glass. “I’m sorry,” he adds in a broken voice and Kili’s heart rebels against such guilt.
“Don’t be. It was my own choice. Besides, I had most of it reversed. Re-grew my skin and hair. I only kept some of my element to be able to save you.”
“How?”
Kili smiles. “It’s a bit of a story, actually. We first discovered time travel was possible when we took to the stars. It’s a side product of going faster than light, but it takes a lot of resources, so each person is only allowed to go once. You see, the remaining gene pool we had just wasn’t big enough, especially if you consider that some Elementals wouldn’t be able to have offspring with others. If we controlled it, we could survive for around six more generations. But we were all so proud to be human, still, despite everything, and there is nothing more human than the ability to choose the ones we love. We bring them back, Fili. One by one, so we can have a future.”
“Love…?” Fili whispers, the word heavy, thick with everything he’s endured and helpless hope.
They could have ripped him apart and all his pieces would have still loved me, Kili thinks, touches his brother’s cheek, searches his eyes, drowns in the longing he finds there.
They kiss as if they only had a single breath to pass between them, as if it was the only moment they were allowed to have each other. More than a decade of having only half a soul, of screams exploding in clear bubbles, of whatever it was that Fili told himself as he allowed them to hurt him again and again.
“You…” Fili breathes against his lips, winces when his vocal chords won’t cooperate any more.
“Yes. I do. Always have. I’ve never loved anyone but you, Fili.”
Fili will say it too; a thousand times, in a hundred different ways, and in time they will forgive themselves for all their crimes perceived and the handful committed. But right now he can only kiss Kili again, deeper, slower, more like Kili imagined Fili might kiss.
Right now there’s only closeness, taste of sea salt on his tongue and that precious, obvious love.
~~~~~