Chapter Text
Life had been shitty to you as of late.
It all started when you'd lost your arm. A pretty dramatic beginning, but your life was nothing if not a story of extremes.
The doctors called you lucky, lucky to have even survived at all. You didn't feel very lucky, as you stared at the empty space to your left. And you doubted your friend, the now deceased driver, was feeling very lucky either. Or feeling anything, really.
Anyway. It was kind of hard to continue your passions with only one arm. Sculpting clay wasn't easy with a single hand. But, prosthetics were out of the question. Your family didn't have that kind of money, and you weren't about to put them into debt just for an arm that couldn't move. Maybe a hook hand or something would work.
So it came as a surprise when the government showed up at your hospital– okay, not the entire government, just some guy in a suit, but still– and offered you a new arm. A fancy, amazing, dangerous arm. You knew it was dangerous because you'd been the one to sign the waiver, and the waiver had been so long it almost bored you to tears. Then they came back the next day, put you under for surgery, and when you woke up, you had yourself a new left arm.
You thought your new arm was a sign that everything was looking up. Sure, you'd just lost one of your friends to a car accident, and then your arm, and not to mention the hospital bills, but...new arm! Fancy, super awesome arm! It was red, with black accents, and looked like it could punch through a submarine. You promptly named it Red, as you were on pain meds at the time. You could still feel with it, but mostly only pressure and sense of heat and weight. No pain, which you learned when you accidentally closed a door on it. The government agent made sure to inform you, in very firm words, just what having a badass robot arm meant. Very boring, in retrospect. Something about new plates in your spine, and how you now possessed a government secret. Oh, and that occasionally, very rarely, trust us, the arm might just release an incredibly minuscule burst of super strength.
Rare your ass. Your school days were tough enough without having to deal with the 'rare' and 'minuscule' super strength of your arm adding new holes to the already crumbling building. The day you leaned in to give your crush a shoulder squeeze and instead fractured their entire collarbone was also, coincidentally, the day you decided that maybe you should finish up the rest of school from home. And so through some finagling, you graduated high school. Without many friends, but, well, whatever. Robot arm.
Try as you might to run from your past, you could never run from the robot arm itself, as it was attached to you via your spine and thus was impossible. But boy did you run good. Ran away to college clear across the country, where no one even knew your name. You were so excited to finally be free that not once did you consider your worst nightmare and looming foe: college debt.
Ouch. Coupled with your apartment costs, and then everything else, and you had a recipe for a Bad Time. You couldn't even afford to get a dog or something to keep you company. Just a cactus. A cactus that you named Fred, but still. Fred couldn't fill the void. And Red wasn't exactly a talker.
Which leads us to where our story begins, late at night in the rundown apartment of you...