Chapter Text
Fear is a funny thing, hard to define.
The common definition of fear would be the emotion you feel when you are scared. When people talk about fear this is what they mean. You watch a horror movie and feel your adrenaline spike at every jump scare, or you miss a step on the stairs and feel your stomach drop. Fear is when you are scared.
You are scared when your heart rate increases. When your breath starts to quicken.
James’s heart couldn’t beat faster. It would continue to mechanically pump his blood no matter what he witnessed. His lungs were a similar solution, only adjusting their inhales and exhales when the atmosphere changed.
James couldn’t be scarred.
Fear was purged from his body with the rest of his flesh. The subconscious reactions that defined fear were ripped away from him. There was no way for him to respond to fear. No way for him to feel fear.
But James was afraid.
The dread pooling in his gut was creeping up his spine; there was a scream building in the back of his voice box. He wanted to run, or scream, or puke, or collapse onto the ground and never get back up again.
Fear had made him freeze before. It made him freeze and flinch – it made him useless.
James didn’t have time to be useless; he had a job to do. He had a mission. He had a mission and he was going to complete it. Just like he completed every other mission he was given.
That's all it was.
A mission.
Just another mission.
The garrison halls became an echo chamber of his own heavy steps, empty repeating hallways making everything in his head feel louder. He turned a corner and a cadet flinched away from him before saluting him with a shaky hand. His left hand.
This was just another mission. It would end the same way they all did.
James stepped into the elevator and the other passengers stepped back to give him space, their eyes blown wide and pupils small. When the elevator opened on the next floor they moved around him, careful not to brush his plating as they rushed to leave him alone in the metal box.
Only the ticking of the numbers above the door was left to distract James from his own memories – and they were doing a terrible job. The elevator’s blank walls were the perfect canvas to imagine smoke clouds exhaled through chapped lips and short hair pulled by sharp desert winds. Dark eyes danced across the metal plate, crinkled in happiness and so different from the sharp glaring yellow that was found on the arrest warrant James had pinned to the corner of his hud.
He was different now. Alien. James knew that.
This was a mission. A mission well within James’s capabilities. Incarcerating a dangerous criminal that had previously escaped capture before they could leave garrison controlled space. It didn’t matter who it used to be; James had done this before, and he could easily do it again.
He rolled his shoulders as the elevator got closer to the hanger levels and released his scream through the movement of his back plating.
When the doors opened James walked through them without hesitation.
Someone else's dogtags burned inside his chest as he did.