it's funny i accidentally hit post before i finished typing the above, furthering my point

alright, to preface: 
- this is 'post canon' & mixed timeline kinda like "language of my heartbeat" was
- it takes place before that one, but post CD war
- i think i started this in march, didn't touch it for six months, and rewrote half of the end
- it's not done but i'm not sure where to go next, so ig i'm gauging interest to see if it's worth finishing
- needless to say:  micah angst, questionable science, half-baked conlanging, the occasional curse word, you know the drill
- involves some XE background stuff [sorry i haven't done anything with the XE files, i have zero motivation to work on it and am tempted to ask a mod to yeet it] and how it affects him post-CD wars. 

here we go i guess

-------------------------------------

Micah doesn’t think twice when Damian mentions it.

“You know, you slide your socks on the carpet and then touch something metal,” Damian shuffles to demonstrate, and Micah grins. “See if you can get a big enough shock to see.”

“Shock?” He doesn’t know why his head feels a little fuzzy when he says it, brushes it off as dehydration and sips on the Gatorade that Damian brought him earlier. He’s been struggling to remember anything as of late, much less stay hydrated, and the sports drink is both motivating in its sweetness and replenishes the salts he’s been losing, sweating from nightmares and then training all day. Damian laughs when he sees how it’s turned Micah’s tongue blue. 

“Spark, more like. Static electricity. It’s dumb, but it was fun when I was a kid.”

“Electricity?” 

“You’ve never heard—“

“No, no, I know what it is,” Micah shakes his head. “Just...never mind.” 

Damian stares at him for a moment, then shrugs.  One of his hands brushes a library-style bookend—metal—as he walks closer to Micah, and there’s a tiny snapping noise. He jolts back. “Ah...like that.” 

“No spark.”

“Nah, not enough contact,” Damian sits down next to Micah on their bed and offers a hand. Micah tries to lace their fingers together, but another sharp snap and a shock stops him. He jerks away. 

“Oh, shit, sorry,” Damian holds up his hands. “Looks like I’m still charged up. Shocking.” He wiggles his eyebrows, but Micah’s brain is too busy trying to figure out why that sounds so familiar to notice. His brain grabs the sentence and puts it on vinyl, spins it around until the turntable breaks and it’s just repeating shockingshockingshockingshockingshocking. 

“Hey, you okay?” Damian bumps Micah’s knee gently with his own and Micah jumps again. 

“Yeah, yeah, just spaced out for a sec,” Despite the shakiness he feels in his spine at doing so, Micah leans into Damian’s side. Because it’s fine. He’s fine. 

Right?

***
They’re out on assignment a couple days later when it happens again. This whole “spy/agent/soldier” thing is new to Micah—he’s used to the event of being on assignment ending with someone’s death [with killing someone, really], and it leaves lead in his stomach. He thought he’d be done with this once the Corruption debacle was over, could finally settle down and breathe for a moment, but that hasn’t come yet. They’re not even sure that the Corruption is over, or if there’s some rogue out there, spreading it like a plague. So he’s off-balance already. 

They’re lying flat on their backs on a roof near a power grid in a cyber sect city, trying not to be seen as they wait for new orders. Micah doesn’t remember why this mission is important, can barely remember why they were sent here in the first place, he’s so high-strung. Damian takes his hand gently and squeezes it, murmurs an are you okay? in his ear. It’s barely audible past the humming of the transistors below them. 

“Yeah,” is his reply, so quiet it’s almost a sigh. “Ready to be done with this.”

“Me too.”

“I don’t like waiting.”

“Same here,” He squeezes Micah’s hand again. “Baby, you’re shaking.”

“I’m fine.” 

He’s not fine, and both of them know it, but Micah has no idea why he’s rattled. 

They end up having to abort the mission—mostly because the people in command can’t make a decision [Micah doesn’t even know who they are, they’re not deities he knows and all their voices sound the same, bickering in his earpiece], but partially because Micah’s trembling so hard he can’t shoot straight, let alone hang on to a knife. Back in Fireon, it takes a long, long time for him to stop, even after Damian wraps him up in a thick blanket and tries to rock him to sleep. 

His nightmares are blanketed by an electric buzz, and he can’t turn his head to see where it’s coming from, no matter how hard he tries. 

He wakes up gasping, whipping his head around, but the buzzing is gone and is replaced by the soft whir of the fan and Damian’s groggy repetitions of his name. 

“There was a….noise,” he mumbles into Damian’s neck, a couple minutes later, after he gets out of bed and splashes his face with cold water. “I didn’t know where it was coming from.” 

It doesn’t make any sense, and gods, it’s dumb, but he’s scared out of his mind anyway. This would normally be the point where he’d get up, turn on a lamp, and find a book to read until daylight. But Damian rubs soft circles into that forever achy spot between his shoulder blades and hums a lullaby, and he slips into sleep before he can stop himself. 

***
Later the next day, his dad asks what’s wrong. 

It’s a surprise. Xenon isn’t good at noticing things, especially if those things aren’t glaringly obvious. Plus, he’s got those weird opaque goggles on [despite the fact that he’s not even welding anything; they’re sitting at a table and talking] so when he says, “You alright? You look tired,” Micah’s knee-jerk response is “you can see me through those?”

“No,” Xenon says, but he pulls them off his face. “I can hear it in your breathing.”

“Huh?”

“It keeps hitching, when you breathe in,” Xenon lets the goggles sit in his hair, pulling his bangs away from his face. His eyes are concerned—which is startling, given that Xenon hadn’t seemed to care much about Micah before his corruption. “What’s wrong?”

Micah tells him about the nightmare, how he’s felt on edge since the mission in the cyber sect when he first heard it, and how the buzzing noise feels like it’s replaying in his head.

Xenon’s eyes get more and more worried. He asks, finally, after a fair amount of lip-chewing. “What was making that sound?”

“I don’t know, maybe a power station.” 

Xenon slumps in his chair, breathes a ragged fuck, and covers his eyes with one hand. 

“Xenon? What’s wrong?”

“This is my fault,” Xenon’s voice shakes. “All of this.”

“How is it—“

“Because my corrupted half hurt you, Micah, and you can’t even remember what he did because of how bad it was.”

“That wasn’t you—“

“But it was.”

“Dad, I’m—“

Xenon shakes his head, and Micah’s voice dies in his throat. It takes him a moment to get it back. 

“Why am I afraid of the buzzing noise?”

“Because that’s the sound the machine made right before it shocked you.”

His mouth is dry. “What?”

“That’s how they’d wipe XE. And he thought….thought that for the serum to really take hold, he had to activate it somehow.”

“Serum? There was a serum?”

“You don’t remember?” 

“No, I—“ He doesn’t. Not at first. But then he pauses, pulls up the sleeve of his left arm, and looks at the puckered scar in the crook of his elbow, the one he’d noticed recently and couldn’t remember where it came from. And then it stabs, like it’s being cut anew, and Micah clamps a hand over it, sucking in a breath. It’s trickling in now, just like he’d watched that thick, purple liquid trickling down the tube and into his arm. “He...he shocked me? But I….I don’t….what?” His voice is small, and it takes all of his breath to use it. “What did it do to me?”

“I don’t know why you don’t remember, if it’s from head trauma or mental trauma or something else,” Xenon says. He stands. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about it right now. I’m making tea, want any?” 

“Yeah,” Micah closes his eyes, nods slowly. “Yeah, that’d be great.” 

He listens to the background noise, kettle filing in the sink, being set on the stove, the click of the burner igniting, glass clinking as Xenon gets mugs out of the cabinet. He’s struck suddenly by how much more like a house Xenon’s lab feels—and wonders if he can still call it a lab. All the machines and tools are in the back room, out of sight. A couple minutes later, the kettle whistles and Micah opens his eyes to see Xenon pouring boiling water into three ceramic cups. 

“Three?”

“Damian’s on his way.” 

“Oh.” 

Damian comes in a little bit later, and Micah accepts the hug he offers without hesitation. It’s a tenuous balance sometimes between the fear and the desire for contact, but right now he’s feeling cold, and very alone, so the arms around him are welcome. Damian and Xenon make small talk, and Micah listens, breathing in the steam from the tea that he won’t end up drinking. 

***

He’s not sure what’s worse, the fear or the confusion. 

He steps back from spy duties—actually, he’s taken off the rotation after Damian, Xenon, and several other people who weren’t named say he needs a break. He’s grateful, maybe, but it leaves more time for him to sit alone in his own thoughts, which isn’t as great. While he’s no longer on duty, everyone else he knows is, so he’s left to wander around Fireon with just his brain and a couple books for company. 

[That’s the consequence of only being friends with assassins, he’ll think later, while he’s alone in the library wearing one of Damian’s overly large sweaters to stay warm. Either that, or the consequence of only having three friends. He buries his nose in the fabric as he reads, rubs his thumbs against the softness of the edges of the sleeves, but still, the anxiety bubbles up in his chest and he can’t focus on the words.] 

It’s not a great situation. He can’t stop thinking about what Xenon said—and what Xenon wouldn’t say. He’s not trying to, but his brain is spinning it around and attempting to break through that wall he’d unconsciously put up months ago. He hates not knowing things, hates those goddamn gaps in his memory, despite the fact that they might be protecting him. But he thinks it’s better to know than not, because if he doesn’t, does he even know himself?

[He’s still shocked by what he’d recently uncovered, from the years in between Hester’s death and finding his father. It makes him sick to think about it, what he’d done, what he’d let other people do to him, and for what….but at least he knows what happened and the consequences that might arise later.] 

The noise jumps out unexpectedly. He’s walking down a hallway with a stack of books when he hears it one day, and he drops the books to cover his ears. It doesn’t make it go away—it must be coming from inside his head, but he can’t focus, can’t function with it buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. MJ finds him in the hallway about half an hour later. It takes her, Xenon, and Damian, once he gets back from an assignment an hour or so later, to coax him from behind a potted plant. He doesn’t make it to his room before breaking down into a puddle of tears, stressed and exhausted and terrified of a noise no one else seems to hear. It feels like he’s right at the tipping point before a fall that never comes, and no amount of hugs or rubbed circles or soft neck kisses from Damian can chase it away. 

That night, he thrashes so wildly in his sleep that he slams his head on the corner of the nightstand and hits it again as he falls out of bed.

Or, he assumes he’s fallen out of bed, because he’s staring up at the ceiling and Damian and Clay [Clay? How’d he get here? Wasn’t he on assignment tonight?] are hovering over him. His head aches, throbs like someone’s hitting it over and over again, white hot webs stretching all the way across his face. Clay’s got one hand pressed to the side of Micah’s head, but there’s something in between it [a mallet? Is Clay hitting him?] and it takes him what feels like forever to realize it’s a towel and he’s bleeding.

“Snmp,” he says, then realizes that didn’t make any sense and tries again. “Blgh?”

Damian looks like he’s vibrating with worry, but Clay is calm and steady. Clay says something, but it doesn’t make sense, so Micah’s pain-addled brain decides the best course of action would be to sit up so he can hear Clay better.

Clay’s hands are on his shoulders before he can move more than an inch, and he’s talking more insistently now, and there’s black bubbling at the edges of his vision, and is Damian crying? That’s not good. Micah tries to say his name, or Clay’s, he forgets halfway through, but what comes out is just “Gnmph.”

Clay leans closer, talks slower—he can only tell because Clay’s lips aren’t moving as fast—and it sounds vaguely like “Cold steel.”

“Aah,” Micah says, and then there’s this horrible crawling feeling right under his skin, and he repeats himself, more urgently, pushing at Clay’s hands. “Aah.”

“Cold steel,” Clay says, more forcefully. “Biker. Fanta Blu-ray.”

None of this makes sense, and his head hurts so much, and the crawling feeling is turning hot and staticky and then his head separates from his body, drops through the floor, and he plummets into darkness.

***
He doesn’t know how much time has passed when he can see again, but he’s no longer lying on the floor. The ceilings are taller, and he’s lying on something soft. And he’s propped up. That’s new.

His mouth feels fuzzy, his eyes like crushed ping-pong balls, his head still hurts, and his neck is stiff, tense. His hands are knotted up in something soft, feathery almost, but he’s not gripping it hard. He blinks, looks down [which takes all the effort in the world, just moving his eyes makes everything spin and pop and fizz], and oh.

It’s hair. Damian’s hair. Damian’s head is in his lap.

He’s slumped over in a chair, fast asleep, and Micah stretches out his fingers experimentally. One of his hands doesn’t respond as well as the other, trembling like it’s fatigued. He lets it relax, strokes the back of Damian’s head where his hair goes from long and soft to bristly. Damian hums in his sleep, opens his eyes after a few moments.

“Micah,” he says softly, and then he smiles softly, [and gods, everything about him is soft right now, and Micah doesn’t know if it’s his slightly-blurry vision or just the fact that he can just look at Damian for the first time in what feels like forever.]. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Micah manages, tongue thick and heavy in his mouth. “What happened?”

Damian’s expression crumples a bit. It hits Micah like a gut punch when he sees it.

“I’ve already asked that, haven’t I?”

Damian avoids answering, gently moves Micah’s hands out of his hair and sits up. “Let me get you some water.”

He gets up and walks off into the fuzzy distance. Micah hears water running, and then suddenly Damian’s back, holding a plastic cup with a straw in it. He presses it to Micah’s lips, and Micah drains the whole thing. Damian sets the cup aside.

“How long has it been?”

Damian doesn’t reply.

“A while? A month?”

“No, no, just about a day and a half,” Damian replies. He rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry, I was trying to remember….Clay’s been counting exact hours, but he’s elsewhere right now.”

“Assignment?"

“No, I think he’s trying to de-stress somewhere with Calidi. Probably cuddling or something.”

“Aw.”

“Yeah, it’s cute.”

Damian seems to have relaxed a little again, so he decides to try asking again. He blinks slowly. “What happened?”

“You knocked your head pretty badly when you had a nightmare,” Damian’s voice is a monotone. “You weren’t responsive for about ten minutes, then you woke up, couldn’t talk, had a seizure, and passed out again. You’re in the infirmary now, we wake you up every few hours and you ask the same question.”

He doesn’t know how to reply to that. “A seizure?”

“Yeah,” Damian folds his hands in his lap. “It was scary.”

The look on his face is painful. Micah swallows hard. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles.

“No, no, baby,” Damian turns to him suddenly. “Don’t apologize, this isn’t your fault.”

Micah sniffs, nods, whines a bit when the pain flares up, and closes his eyes. He feels Damian take his hands, press soft, slow kisses to his knuckles, then the tips of his fingers. Micah doesn’t know why, but he starts crying, and Damian lays down next to him and rubs slow circles into his chest and his stomach until he falls asleep again.

***
Clay gives him the full rundown the next time Micah sees him, which is about three waking-ups later. Or so he thinks. He asks Damian and gets a slow nod in reply.

“Concussion,” Clay says, sounding tired. He sits at the edge of the cot. “Pretty severe. Gashed your scalp too.”

“How many concussions is this?” Micah asks. He doesn’t really want to know, but it’s important nonetheless.

Clay pauses for a moment, then says, “Five. Not including any you got while I didn’t see you.”

“Seven, then,” Micah tightens his grip around Damian’s hands. “They haven’t been this bad before.”

“You didn’t hit your head as badly before.”

“What was I doing?” He sees Damian wilt a bit at that. “Wait. Hang on. Nightmare.”

“Damian said you were jerking around in your sleep. From what he described, I’m wondering if you were having a seizure rather than a nightmare.”

“But I hadn’t hit my head.”

“I know, but it makes some sense,” Clay rests his chin in one hand. “Given stress and the way you were acting before. I’m working on this new spell–“

“Since when did you take up sorcery?”

“Runeweaving spell, then”

“That’s not the right word,” Micah closes his eyes. “You know this.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Watanirya.”

“Watanirya.” Clay repeats. 

“Means….web, or net, or weave...” Micah laces his fingers with Damian’s. “With a magic prefix, I think. My head really hurts, I can’t remember.”

“That’s fine, take your time,” Clay says. “Anyway, I’m working on a new watanirya with Delphi, to try and see if I can do some imaging on your head and figure out how bad it is.”

“Oh.”

“Aside from your head, how are you feeling?”

“Meh,” He stretches out his fingers in his weak hand experimentally, and his whole arm shakes from the effort. “Right arm’s weird.”

“How about the leg?”

Micah shifts it, but the weight of the sheets and blankets on top of him aborts any other movement. “Dunno.”

“Do you think you could eat something?”

“Probably not.”

“Can you try for me?”

“I guess.”

Clay leaves, comes back with a bowl of applesauce. Micah’s stomach turns at the sweetness, and he can only manage a couple spoonfuls before the nausea makes his head spin. Damian sponges his face with a cool cloth, massages his hand until it dies down to a barely-noticeable level. Then he curls up against Micah’s weak side, head gentle on his shoulder.

“Can I get you anything?” Clay asks, getting up. Micah shakes his head, rests his cheek on the top of Damian’s head. “Alright. Get some rest. I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you.”

Micah mumbles an ‘okay’ and falls asleep as soon as he closes his eyes.