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Jaska, of the Sarvi Nalka diaspora, no relation to the Volutaar who attended the first meeting that made him, is far from the strangest person the boy who will become Vanguard has seen in memory. He holds his right hand out first upon their introduction, unhesitant. He ignores the harsh lights Mother keeps at full blast in the boy’s room, the sad outlines of the plants that are wilting because he’s so busy he doesn’t have time to water them.
The boy cringes inside without meaning to when he meets Jaska’s handshake. Human touch has been strange since what Mother calls Incident 10985-1-1/S17 #1, which she tells him she’ll make him forget soon, and beneath the haze from the infestation in his abdomen the world is far too vivid.
But sometimes when Mother puts a clean dry hand on his shoulder, he feels fireworks, and the part of her stuck in him is satisfied, so he leans into it regardless. Affection is rare enough. The size of their hands is enough to differentiate them, and render him into the direction of a personification-in-waiting.
Jaska has her effect, in minature. Sparklers. The shadows and highlights on the boy’s hands deepen against his, body more resistant to the pain. Jaska’s nails are… not sharp, but like dull stones, leaving small red crescents on his skin, nothing like a baseline human’s. He’s dry too, though. And clenching is different when it’s around the whole width of his palm instead of his fingers.
He’s so small.
That’s the knowledge that takes hold of the boy the hardest, beyond the stone nails and the other marks of lihakut’ak–his wolflike pupils, his seeming lack of ears, though from the way he bristles at footsteps Mother only parses through the intuition that comes with being the place they stand in, he’s certainly able to hear.
Small is an odd thought considering he and the boy are identical in height, but the personification’s real eyes are in the walls, at every angle. The fireworks and sparklers help with illumination.
Jaska can’t be any chronologically older than he is–eleven, appearing as such, the boy clearly the first personification-order being he’s ever physically bonded with.
It’s just a handshake. It only lasts a few seconds. The boy blurs back to the hazy pain of boy-spirit when Jaska stops touching him, and Mother’s arms are crossed; she’ll push him away if he goes to her. The infestation will grow. Jaska’s hand goes straight back to his side. He eyes her with suspicion.
The boy smiles to chase away the stabbing ache of the lighting enveloping him. It assaults his eyes and radiates from his pain–it’s the same in the end, isn’t it? Jaska looks trapped, a shadow of the wariness the boy’s seen from the people Mother’s contained. It wasn’t a long journey from the Library Way the Hand used to send Jaska to Site-17, but he’s so small, it was probably still hard on him. At a loss for what to do, he locks their hands together again, which helps, judging by the way Jaska exhales.
“Is it okay being away from your family? How can I get you settled in? Don’t… you–uh, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, as much as I can, like this, do you want anything?”
Jaska blinks. Jaska opens his mouth. He responds. The boy knows immediately he’s been called mature for his age too many times and there’s regret behind his reassurances and
regret something lights up. He fists his free, sparking hand
no, no, no, regret what did he do what is he doing how does he make him stop regret flaring his infection anchoring him to it a thousand steel bars heavy, heavy guilt “I’m sorry, I know it’s hard, what will make you feel better?”
From Jaska: sadness.
Too strong. Sparklers. Fireworks. Protection. Service. Protection. Shelternormalizeinform, shelter shelter shelter he needs to be his shelter guide in the dark–it spills out of his chest, not his mouth, direction driving away the infection. He’s so easy to need to care for. It’s sparklers, but it’s everywhere.
And he has so much to give back. Not now; it’s a different kind of lock the boy needs to break, one of time, for his potential, instead of the usual reluctance to part with tradition that he runs into with most of Mother’s people. They’re thousands of stone walls and all he has is streams of the good, soothing parts of him, the parts that float, to wear them down. He keeps his deposits of ugliness to himself. The only things that are stony about Jaska are his nails.
The boy who will become Vanguard’s hand is so present, too present, giddiness tracing his veins. He’s so easy. Too strong.
From Jaska: confusion. Curiosity. He can feel him, deeper than skin, the infection far away. Still tinges of regret, but for now, overpowered by a need to know. And… uncertain shelter. Willing recipient to a personification-in-waiting’s ecstatic attempts at exchange.
Jaska speaks. “The feeling should be temporary, I’ll be, uh, okay in time, we have something set up so I can talk to my parents, can we just…get a move on? Sorry.”
Definitely mature for his age.
“Of course, no, I should be sorry, yes, I won’t interfere too much as you… settle in. Your room’s across from mine.”
The backpack Jaska’s probably been wearing since at least he came out of the Way is still on his back.
“Foundation told me that already,” he mutters, like he’ll summon her wrath by mentioning her name. The boy understands the impulse, but Mother’s rarely angry. “I’ll go.”
He nearly screams as Jaska lets go of his hand, infection returning in full force, tears pricking his eyes. He breathes shortly and swallows down the rising bile.
“Don’t close the door behind you,” he says, wavering, to Jaska’s pack. The human obliges.
The boy’s knees shake with the effort of standing and holding his sickness in. His own breath grates at his ears. This is why Mother doesn’t like to touch him in the way that’s relieving, or for other people to touch him–he’s always shaking when they let go. He’s supposed to pick up connections and sustenance that isn’t her guilt as he grows older, naturally, but he needs to know how to tolerate this. It’s a fair punishment.
“He’s permanently employed as your minder, Vanguard, you’ll get to see him every day.“ Mother walks around from her place sitting on the boy’s bed to his front, where he doesn’t have a choice but to look at some part of her while stiffened by his pain. ”That’s if he finds you appealing enough to consider working for. Your first impression was not up to standard; don’t immediately start asking him what you can do, you need to introduce yourself first. And apparently it comes across as overbearing.“
The boy clenches his fists around a hot wave of something else, I couldn’t help it, I just wanted exchange with someone who wasn’t tainted by you you said it yourself it was natural and acid guilt again coming down to replace one neurological tyrant with another. The lights are too bright. The space behind his eyes is heavy. He shakes. He was meant to release, not hold.
He falls back on procedure like he’s supposed to. “I’m sorry, I’ll be better the next time I meet someone,” when he tries to twist his tone into I’d sound better if you gave me more chances to talk to people though he’s pretty sure the only thing she hears is resentment. Or nothing at all.
Mother sighs when she sees the tears leaking out of his eyes.
“You’re so sensitive,” she says, with the same neutral curiosity she probably used to interview Jaska’s parents. “Continue working when you’re sure you won’t ruin the paper.”
Her hands are on the labcoat hiding her upper thighs, and the boy wonders if she’d touch him if she didn’t know he’d grow up to be her back door parole.
–
Jaska comes back the next day, and all the days after that except for his time off and Nalka holidays, and the boy who will become Vanguard gets almost as many sparklers as he wants; stronger as he acclimates more to him, but never like fireworks, because that’s a privilege only Mother has. The boy needs him. Jaska doesn’t flinch when he screams when he touches him with wet hands, a week after the Incident, or ask questions when Mother tells him he’s sensitive.
“Anomalies don’t object as often to what they don’t understand,” Mother explains when the boy asks her why Jaska was chosen. “Their own bodies are excellent reminders not everything has an explainable order.”
The boy has to bite his lip to avoid pointing out the obvious. She means well, though–she’s just bad at phrasing it.
“And Sarkic carnomancy will become useful for certain milestones that will occur as you mature.”
She’ll unredact what milestones are at a later date, apparently. He’s not eleven in his head, but he’s not an adult, either. It doesn’t worry him; he’ll release information like that to the people above the Veil–staggered, in waves, over years. In the meantime, he enjoys what Jaska is.
Jaska as his shadow when Mother’s penalizing him, Jaska taking away his pain with his hand in his when he’s rewarded, Jaska’s sensitive ears–hidden like an owl’s–listening to both Mother’s lectures and outside threats, two sides of the same coin. Jaska learning everything he does, though he can’t retain as much because he’s human and what the boy learns isn’t his entire life. When Jaska isn’t near him on worktime, he’s with Alpha-1; modified training regimen.
The boy learns Jaska’s allegiances.
He’s attached like spider silk to Mother, with all the reluctance of a trapped fly. He loves her only through him, her executioner.
“He doesn’t have any sort of exchange with me.“
Food and water and clothes were afterthoughts in the brown backpack he came to Site-17 wearing; most of its anomalously large interior was filled with Library books. The Hand wrote the runes that allowed for the space herself; even the boy is a more proficient mage than Jaska. She assesses his continued allegiance whenever he returns the books, and she lives through his To Read lists.
“I love him, of course, but Foundation renders him almost as invisible to my sixth sense as a cloak designed for that purpose. Nothing on you. Does he miss me?”
“Of course I love books more than you,“ Jaska teases. It’s a good thing that the boy’s going to become thousands of books, then.
There’s his Nalka heritage, a thin red line connecting him back to Vasna and the Sarvi through the pictures he sends to his parents, who pass them to his grandparents, who keep them in photo albums under the pillows of their beds. The mitotic fraying of the line when he returns for holidays prickles on the edge of the boy’s latent personifhood, but the only one of his kind he knows demands total allegiance is Mother.
But Mother only tolerates Jaska, the Hand is too unsure of herself to always be coherent when he calls, and Vasna is far away. It’s only for the boy he has the sparklers.
Falling asleep with Jaska, stony nails an anchor against the infection and the things inside his head that like to attack him at night. Holding onto the human’s arm is like being inside a hot air balloon–floating, high above what he is in the day. The infection is his only tether to the ground.
Falling asleep alone is a matter of sheer exhaustion for the boy. His abdomen will do anything it can to keep him awake, the pain forcing him into immobility or pressed against the cameras where he at least knows Mother is watching, and there are no walls between lightheadedness and sleepiness. The blur of his vision is only a sign he’ll be taken away soon. It wipes away the echoes of the lights that will come back to startle him awake, every day, precisely at 6:00 AM.
With Jaska, he can negotiate with tiredness and comfort by adjusting his hold on him. More than once a week is too much. The boy’s grateful, of course, that Mother allowed him at all; it’s a reward, not a right, and of course, a chance to prepare. For what? She’ll tell him later. Jaska is surrounded by more she’ll tell him later than most.
The boy refused Jaska’s requests for years, for his own safety. If he holds Jaska so frequently, for hours on end, he’ll leave him barely breathing, and Mother will have to carry him away every time the boy gets upset again over something tiny because he’ll get upset too. Jaska’s not even his founder. And the boy isn’t like Mother, who never needed to worry about giving.
Something she’s right about is that individual humans don’t always know what’s best for them. It’s better to spend nights widening his eyes at the security cameras than to hurt someone he was meant to protect, because every time he does that, the pain swells and balloons and pushes its way further in.
After he reaches the milestone, he’ll be grateful for it, Mother says. He’s starting to think he’s not looking forward to whatever she’s twisted the word into. Something below the pain clenches when she talks about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s for Jaska.
And he has his head, anyway. Nights are the best time to imagine Jaska on duty with their hands linked, the odd bumpiness of Mother’s red glove on his back, the anticipation of meeting someone new (in a strictly human sense, he isn’t in this just to eat, he can control his 10985 impulses because he learns from Mother’s mistakes). He’ll be fine.