Chapter Text
The personnel are going through another phase of trying to get in. It's quite annoying, really: Idia's trying to concentrate on some ultra-high level magic here, but the renewed hammering on the door keeps breaking his focus.
“Master Shroud!” They're going to wear their voices out, shouting his name like that. Not that Idia really cares, but it's super distracting. He reaches for a pair of headphones, puts them on halfway through another ‘let us in’. Honestly. Can't they just leave him alone?
The body is fully assembled: he finished it last week. He touches it briefly, as if to reassure himself that it's still there. (Where could it have gone? He's not left this room.) It looks exactly like Ortho does. Did.
Why am I doing this?
It's not a new question; he's asked himself this— sporadically, as if the question rather than that which it questioned were the sacrilege— since he started, some probably-large number of days ago. Why's he doing this?
Making something: it's the thing that comes most naturally to him, quells the itching in his fingers for a while.
Making something in secret: he knows they– everyone– would, will disapprove.
Making a mechanical facsimile of his dead brother:
Idia can do many things. Raising the dead is not one of them.
(some months later)
“Ortho!”
His eyes snap open to see absolutely nothing. Darkness: his face is wet, his hair burning dimly, his breathing shallow and fast and doing nothing to ease the tight knot in his chest and it's dark, so dark, he can't see anything so who knows what's out there—
“Idia? Should I turn the lights on?”
He turns, desperately, to see Ortho the robot looking at him through the gloom with an almost perfect replica of human concern. It's all he can do to make himself nod.
The overheads flicker to life, washing the room in ice-blue light. Idia twists in bed to ensure it's empty, safe. It is. He forces himself to take a deep breath and wipes the wetness off his cheeks. “Thanks.”
“No problem!” It's exactly the kind of chipper tone Ortho would have used; Idia is caught halfway between a shiver and a smile. “Is there anything else you want, Idia?”
Anything else he wants?
A hug, a smile, someone to tell him it'll all be okay. The bed on the other side of the room to be filled again. A pair of golden eyes and blue hair and that gap between two front teeth that was always super obvious when he smiled:
he wants Ortho back.
But Ortho is never coming back, so he smiles shakily at the robot who can never replace him and lies, “Nope.”