Work Text:
He wakes to the sound of machinery beeping, to the sensation of a cool gel against his skin. For a brief moment, his body tenses, registering the sensation as wrong, has a sudden sense-memory of crackling warmth against his fingertips.
Is this what new life is like? he wonders.
There are alien shapes in front of him, moving around the tank he is suspended in, clicking at various screens. Then, the tank opens suddenly, and rough, inhuman hands lift him out of the viscous gel he was submerged in and unceremoniously place him on the ground.
He does not have a name. He does not have an identity. He lands on his own two feet and stumbles, unpracticed with supporting his own weight. But he also knows, somehow, what he is (a human) and what he is supposed to do (stand upright).
Those alien creatures murmur to each other in some indecipherable language before addressing him directly. “You know who you are, yes?”
He doesn’t, but he nods anyway. There is something, an instinct maybe, telling him that shaking his head “no” would not end well for him.
…
In the next few weeks he learns who he once was. Ivan. Male. 186 cm. 78 kg. Graduated in ANAKT Garden’s 50th class. Likes: classic literature. Dislikes: ignorance and rudeness. Talent: sparking flames from stones. Top 3 performer on Alien Stage. Was eliminated in Round 6.
It is strange, seeing his face reflected in all those files he was handed, referred to as Ivan. He has seen himself in a mirror before; they are almost identical, even down to the snaggletooth. But the Ivan of before… there is a vacancy in his eyes that the clone cannot seem to replicate.
Slowly, he reconciles who he once was and his current existence, enough that Ivan as a self-referential is not too jarring in his head.
He flips through his own files: notes from the ANAKT Garden teachers, his magazine interviews, recordings of his performances.
Including Round 6.
He watches himself throw away the microphone, march halfway across the stage, and pull the grey-haired young man into a— “kiss,” his mind whispers. The word surfacing from some strange nebulous memory. He doesn’t know why or how he knows what this is. But some part of him, watching the him on stage kiss him and then choke him and then take three bullets in his side before collapsing to the floor in a pool of his own blood, instinctively knows.
The other is named Till. It is marked, prominently, on the side of his neck. But when Ivan carefully shaped his mouth around the word—
Something, somewhere deep in his chest, splintered.
Why does it hurt so much to speak his name? No, even just to think of it? It is not a sharp or even that strong of a sensation in his body. But something has been awakened in him. A crushing, bone-deep ache. For what, he is not sure yet, but a somewhere, a yawning chasm has opened up within him.
Ivan knows, down to the marrow of his bones, that he has discovered something he can’t go back from.