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If they were going to force Abel to work with a team, he will make sure they were up to par. He would not work with anyone too incompetent—something humans, especially these humans, had in spades, unfortunately.
There were a few outliers, however. Hunks of raw iron, just waiting to be pounded into steel. A woman who could shoot from distances most wouldn’t dream of, men who didn’t flinch under live-fire drills. A man who, despite his utter lack of fighting ability and utterly pathetic constitution, was smart enough to beat him in several games of strategy—Abel let him win a few of those times, but he was impressed, nevertheless. And then there was the girl.
“She’s like you,” Clef mentioned, several times. By ‘like him’ he meant she was ‘abnormal’ by their standards. ‘Anomalous’, they called them. Humanity's propensity for weakness had driven them to refer to beings like him as anomalies. He would not deny his extraordinary nature, that much was a given; but there had been a time when beings like him were not so unusual. Not so, anymore. But he wouldn’t know how—he had spent most of the last thousand or so years trapped in his mausoleum.
He tests her. He always tests the soldiers they send him, but with her he has something special. A series of puzzles, spaced a considerable distance apart, with a time limit to solve. Whoever solves the puzzles first is the winner. She was small, and frail. She had to take great steps to keep up with his strides—she wouldn’t be able to cover the distance between each piece to solve them in time. She will have to be quick, she will have to be clever—she will have to use everything in her arsenal if she wanted to beat him. That strange device she used and her gifts would only take her so far if she didn’t know how to truly use them.
She’s a small scrap of a thing, blonde hair tied in a crude ponytail and a pair of big blue eyes. A blue jacket slung across her bony shoulders, on the back was a printed set of bolded letters and numbers, ‘SCP-105′. From her neck hangs a bulky camera on a black strap, its wide lens a single eye, staring into the distance.
Despite her small and unassuming appearance, it did appear that the girl had something between her ears after all. More than half the idiotic ‘Mobile Task Force agents’ they sent him did. She beats him quickly, fair and square, and Abel finds himself both surprised and impressed.
When he claps her on the shoulder and tells her she’s in, he expects the jump. She is small, and weak. Though she deigned to look him in the eyes when they first met, she could not hide the fear in her gaze. Suffice to say, he was not expecting her to squeal in excitement and wrap her arms around his torso.
“Thank you, thank you!” She cries in a happy, hyperenergetic voice. She detaches from him just as quickly as she had grabbed ahold of him. “You won’t regret it.”
She walks back towards her own handlers, one of them one of the soldiers he had picked out a few days ago. The woman who could shoot, with brown hair she kept in a ponytail. When the girl draws near, the woman wraps her fingers around her arm and yanks her close.
”Hey, don’t do that again, okay? We don’t know how he’ll react to that kind of stuff.”
”Sorry, I just got really excited...”
He is not unaccustomed to his soldiers being afraid of him, but the woman shouldn’t expect much from him. They had him collared, as Daeva did before them. Despite his desires, he was enjoying his time outside of that infernal box.
And the girl...
(he stands at the edge of her door and says, “baby sister!”
”you’re back!” his sister, just ten-and-six, bounding toward him with arms outstretched, a smile stretched wide across her face. nothing like the indignance upon her face when he left. she did not wish to see him leave; he was her treasured playmate, her favorite brother. her best friend. she had told him she hated him before he left, and although it had stung, he had merely laughed and called her a liar.
he knew she did not mean it.
and when she wraps her arms around him, now; he knows all is forgiven.)
No. He shut his sister away a long time ago, along with his memories of his other siblings. What use was a sibling to him now? A stab in the back when he wasn’t looking. He could neither protect them nor protect himself from them—another useless endeavor, a useless connection in a string of useless connections. Feeble, human desire to love and be loved. He does not need it.
The girl proves herself time and time again. Iris was her name, and as loathe as he was to admit it, Abel didn’t entirely hate her.
She had great potential—not just iron, she was unworked steel, waiting for the right smith to come by and shape her into a true warrior. And what a warrior she could be, when the time called for it. Resourceful and clever, and not a bad shot either. She was juvenile, as all her age were—and even most older than her were. A small price to pay to work with what the Foundation had to offer.
Everyone was annoying to him on his worst days—the seething, humming song of Daeva drumming against his skull, eternal bloodlust thrumming just beneath his skin. An aching, ancient call to action held at bay only by the promise of a few more hours in the sunlight, and isn’t it nice to stand outside, and kill and kill and kill and kill and kill and k— instead of being the idiot getting his face caved in by one of those big fancy guns? Days worth of freedom and the reward is killing, killing, killing killing killing ki—
On his good days, the song is quiet and only few people annoy him. Dr. Clef, for example, would always annoy him, bad day or not.
On his bad days, he runs his men through live-fire drills.
On his good days, he teaches Iris to gut fish and start a campfire.
She balks and gags and squeals her way through his explanation of proper technique and cringes when he demonstrates. He has to bite back the urge to scold her immaturity. When he was her age, he was fighting in wars; but she had come from a softer people during a softer time. A brittle, underworked metal. But Abel was once quite a talented blacksmith, and he knows what to do with a blade like this. Work it too fast and you’ll ruin it. On his good days, he has the patience for it. So he pivots to teaching her how to start a fire. Starting a campfire was much more to her liking. Like the rest of her ilk, despite what she has done and seen, the sight of blood still made her squeamish.
She will learn. She takes to wilderness survival well enough.
(when awan first found out he would be leaving, she begged him to let her come with them. i won’t get in the way, i promise, she had told him, you can teach me to fight—you know i am a quick learner! i want to go, abel, let me go; don’t leave me here!)
Iris is skilled with a gun, but only just so. The instant the weapon leaves her hands, she becomes inept. Good for support and nothing else.
“Your pathetic training regimen has done little to improve her ability,” he tells one of her handlers. Their handlers. Some worm whose spent his life trampling other worms underfoot to get to his position. Abel never bothered to learn his name.
“Train her yourself, then.” The old man spits. Old for a human—pathetically young to him.
And so he does. She is unworked steel, waiting for the right hands. Abel is smith, warrior and shepherd. Under his watchful eye, he could forge her into the most ideal warrior, an adept weapon.
“Use your size to your advantage,” he coaches her, words he once told his sister. Awan had been small, and was forever getting into fights with their younger brother Seth. As their friendship had splintered, Cain had taken more to Seth, while Abel spent more time with their sisters. His mother had sworn he taught them all nothing but insolence. “You are small. Most people my size will depend on it to give them an advantage.”
“And what about you?” Iris asks, eyes shining. She brims with questions, he answers one and she has two more at the ready.
“I am not fool enough to rely on one thing or another. I use everything.” He explains. Her opponents will be other humans, or strange creatures bursting forth from the aether, or crafted by some imbecile trifling with powers they couldn’t begin to comprehend. “Do not expect to beat me, girl.”
She never beats him, but she does trip him up a few times. More and more, she impresses him.
“You will learn to use other weapons,” he tells her, “that gun is not enough.”
“But I’m good with it!” Iris protests. She was, she was very good with a gun. She was as good with a gun as he was with a sword when he was eleven. But mastery over one weapon was not enough.
“You are, but I am your teacher now,” he says, “and I say you will learn to use a sword.”
She is terrible with a sword. He gives her the luxury of a dull practice blade, while he spars with a silly foam sword. He’s not allowed real weapons when sparring. He critiques everything—her poor form, her grip, the positioning of her wrists and arms and feet. To her credit, she takes it all with a stiff upper lip, and for that he must commend her.
(he taught his sister to fight. she fist-fought their brother often, so he taught her to use them. she was sharp with a knife too, so he taught her to use that as well.
though, he was considerably nicer to her than he was to iris.)
Swords weren’t working, so he tries something else.
Iris seemed to have an interest in knife-throwing. She watches him do it. She watches her comrades do it. On his good days, when he has the patience for it, he teaches her. He teaches her on his good days because unlike with the others, he cares about whether or not he breaks her. Someone with her potential isn’t easily found again.
“Throw this.” He tells her one day, dropping a throwing knife into her hands. Real edges, sharp enough to draw blood. They wouldn’t work properly if they weren’t. Iris scrambles to catch it by the handle.
“Um... aren’t you going to—”
“Throw it,” he tells her again, gesturing at the makeshift plywood target that had been thoroughly abused in the past few weeks. By others, by him. When he got bored, the poorly-made targets were usually his first victims.
Iris scowled. “Okay.”
She draws her arm back, too far, and throws. Her wrist is too loose, her posture all wrong, and predictably, the knife does not hit its target. It smacks against the wood and clatters to the floor.
“Not like that,” he steps forward, “tense your wrist, you will have more control of the knife that way. Your stance needs work as well—watch.”
He demonstrates for her, reaching into the aether to pull out a knife of his own, black as the night. Dominant leg forward, left leg back. “You put all of your weight on your back leg,” he explains, “and when you throw—” he pulls back and throws, and unlike hers, Abel’s knife sticks to the target, buried deep in the wood. “—you transfer it to your front leg. The momentum will carry the knife to your target.”
Iris watches, and he can see the same inquisitive look in her eyes; the same look she had when he was teaching her hand-to-hand, the same look she had when he taught her how to start a fire. He has her now. She will learn this.
“Now go get your knife and try again.”
Iris runs up to the plywood and retrieves her knife off the floor. Abel’s knife has already disappeared.
She adjusts her stance, mimicking his to the best of her ability. Her second throw is better. And her third even better, her fourth better still. He makes her do it over and over again, until she’s complaining. Cursing him in her head, no doubt.
He claps her on the shoulder. He expects her to jump, she was still visibly nervous around him, sometimes. What he does not expect is for her to surge forward and hug him.
Abel feels himself go rigid—he was not made for hugging. He was sung back into existence to fight. To kill. It was what he was good at. He could kill with anything, even his hands were honed weapons, capable of pulling a man apart.
(he stands at the edge of her door.
she wraps her arms around him and all is forgiven.)
He has no siblings. He is no brother. He abandoned the concept beneath the sun, in a field of barley.
It barely lasted five seconds and Iris is gone. “Thanks for teaching me. It was super cool.”
Awan is dead, Seth is dead. The twins are dead, and he is no one’s brother.
“Go get cleaned up.” You are welcome.
Iris frowns. “Okay. See you at dinner, big guy.”
(”baby sister.”)
That night was the beginning of a string of bad days.