Chapter Text
Normally, his body would dematerialize and send him back to his frame. There was that feeling, of course, of sudden agony and then burning nothing, but it was always momentary.
This lingered.
Then, as it not only remained but intensified, he realized he wasn’t in his frame— he’d collapsed onto his back, loose-limbed and trembling. His lich was right there.
One more hit was all it would take. Just one more good hit to break him apart and send him back. There would be static, of course, an odd and clinging sensation that made him feel slow and sickly, but only for a few moments.
Makto paused instead, letting his Karak fall to his side.
Of all the times to decide not to kill him! Nitzan cried out and tried to provoke him, ending up succeeding only in increasing his own pain. They had an audience, now, the lich, his lieutenant, and a few other Grineer ringing the makeshift arena. Nitzan was left there on the ground for a full minute, whimpering and twitching, before Makto realized the battle was truly over.
“Where has your fight gone, Adversary?” The lich stalked over to him, Kuva-strained voice scratchy and low. Nitzan could barely react; his head was spinning and splitting, the rest of his body stiffened in staticky confusion. Makto stopped at his side, standing over him as if waiting for him to snarl; curl his lips back to show his teeth and unleash a counterattack; but Nitzan didn’t.
The lich leaned down to grab him and pull him up by the front of his vest. “I should bring you back as a spoil of war.” He examined Nitzan’s wide eyes, the agonized twist of his face, a sharp edge of amusement clinging to the usual roughness of his voice. “I could keep you on my galleon as a footstool.”
He let Nitzan hang for a few more moments as if he were expecting him to retaliate.
Nitzan should have, but couldn’t, and didn’t want to— he would have gladly let the lich use him as furniture if it meant the awful, repressive sensation keeping him limp and disoriented went away.
Whether the lich realized that or not, he picked up that Nitzan wasn’t going to defend himself and lowered him back to the ground, though he did not release him.
“You are a worthy Adversary. I’d hate to see you die like a drugged kubrow.”
Nitzan would hate to experience dying like a drugged kubrow, he agreed. He didn’t answer— he was too busy trying to remember to breathe instead of scream.
“I won’t leave you here.”
Wait, what? He couldn’t make any noises besides the ones already coming out of him— pain. Confusion, and fear, intensifying by degrees when Makto picked him up again.
“Is everything in order, captain?” Someone, distantly, speaking clearly. High-level. It must be the lieutenant. Nitzan tried to move, and couldn’t. He tried to sink into the Void, and the impulse immediately hurt, sent him crying out and making weak thrashing movements that did nothing to dislodge Makto’s grip. The grip was sure, but the tightness of it spoke of unease. Nitzan couldn’t place it— not concern. Not worry. Something else.
“Something is wrong with my Adversary,” Makto growled. Nitzan half expected to be shaken, but Makto was holding him still as if he knew how much pain movement caused.
Maybe he just didn’t care.
Makto lifted him fully and set him over his shoulders, one arm over a leg and the other securing one of Nitzan’s arms on the other side of his body, like Nitzan was a lost lamb, or maybe a side of meat.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Nitzan could agree with Makto’s lieutenant. This was not safe, for him or anyone, and it was shameful and agonizing besides. Makto snarled— snarled!— at his lieutenant.
“He is my Adversary. I will deal with him.”
The lieutenant took another look at Nitzan, now trying and failing to retch, judged him harmless, and turned to snap a command to the troops milling about in the hallways.
The return to the galleon went quickly, periods of blinding pain interspersed with insensate darkness. Every step Makto took made his body shake— the Void inside of him was revolting.
Makto slowed down eventually, and so Nitzan was able to lift the shroud of pain for just long enough to actually see where they were going.
Nitzan vaguely recognized the place as a Grineer brig. He’d broken into more than his fair share of them, usually at the behest of Cressa Tal, and this one didn’t appear to be much of a challenge.
Wouldn’t have been much of a challenge if he wasn’t in his state. As it was, he couldn’t even free himself from over Makto’s shoulders. He drifted in and out of focused vision for the next few seconds, too disoriented to try anything, and only realized he’d been put down when Makto pushed him fully onto the metal cot of the cell.
If he was in slightly less pain, he might have thought to transfer back to his frame.
He didn’t, though, just trembled where he’d been put as Makto shut and locked the door.
His body was maintained almost entirely by the Void; he didn’t need to eat or sleep, or do any of the things that came with eating or sleeping. Still, his body could react. He was crying; there were tears, stinging and hot against his cheeks and eyelids. It felt like something was writhing under his skin. He wished there was something for his stomach to throw up, despite knowing it wouldn’t help.
Makto came to check on him intermittently, sometimes accompanied by his lieutenant or another relatively high-ranking officer. They said some things to each other and left, and Makto usually said something to him, but he was far from being able to decipher it. Sometimes Makto touched the metal of his somatics, or the furrows in his skin from where Void energy burned him from the inside out; it caused the pain to intensify every time, sending him into involuntary fits of thrashing, and then spasms when he became weaker. When he wasn’t too agonized to acknowledge Makto’s presence, he begged him to kill him; when he was too agonized to recognize if he was alone or not, he was begging to die regardless.
Trying to, at least. He was mainly making crying and keening noises.
Some time after his last visit, longer than usual, Makto opened the door and came in. He shut it behind himself and came to the side of Nitzan’s cot, surveying his state and finding him predictably insensate.
The situation was novel enough for Nitzan to be half-paying attention. He was surely so hoarse from screaming that Makto couldn’t hear anything but reedy, breathy whimpers.
Makto pulled something out of his hip bag— it was cube-shaped, covered in a blue-and-black grid design. Corpus manufacturing data sat on the top edge.
A nullifier device that normally would be attached to a drone, Nitzan fuzzily recognized, but was in too much pain to do anything about. Makto set it on the cell cot next to Nitzan and hit some sort of button on the side of it, to which it responded with a small, buzzing hum and by generating the hated blue energy field that was responsible for so much frustration. It enveloped him quickly— Nitzan usually escaped the radius of the field as soon as possible, because it didn’t feel good to be in, but he couldn’t do that here. He hadn’t really been reacting to much lately, just kind of squirming and crying, but he certainly reacted to the field.
It was far from a powerful or firm rejection; all he could do was make a pitiful wailing noise and pitch on the metal cot. He was upset but unsurprised when it made him hurt worse.
In response, Makto put a hand on his chest to hold him down. Then, his arm; squeezing, not punitively, but securely.
Nitzan was glad he’d never lingered in the crackling expanse of a nullifier field for very long before. His skin was starting to smoke— blue-white wisps curling up into the field and dissipating, tingling and stinging at their origin, a sensation he knew was happening more than felt. Everything else hurt too much to register it.
His stomach started to turn again. The pain was cresting. What he’d gone through the previous few days— days? Had it been days— felt like nothing compared to this. Something was moving in him, pushing upwards, pulsing against his sternum and then his throat. He swallowed frantically, uselessly, body given over to aimless spasms and jerks. If he’d been more in control of himself, he would have reached over to grab the nullifier device.
Makto wouldn’t have let him, of course, but it would have been better than this.
The twisting, rising feeling of something in his body eventually gave way, and he retched; he recognized what came out as Void energy, in the way he could recognize a limb in the dark as belonging to himself. It was vibrant blues, blacks and whites, lustrous and inky. It was awful and viscous. As soon as it left his mouth it turned into more of the same stuff that was evaporating off of him and disappeared into the air.
Again, distantly, he noticed that he was crying. Each new purge brought a fresh crop of trembling and wailing. Makto was squeezing his arm periodically, and while the slight pressure didn’t distract him much it made the experience the tiniest bit less horrifying.
He had to go through five more repetitions of that awful experience, his guts turning in on themselves and his body rejecting the long-festering Void energy, but when it was done it was done so quickly as if it had never happened. As the last torrent of luminous sickness poured from his throat, the pain ebbed. His mind sharpened. He stopped thrashing and let himself lay on the hard metal of the cot.
He wasn’t crying anymore, just breathing very slowly. The nullifier field was oppressive, but no longer painful. If not for Makto’s hand still on his arm he could almost believe that he was laying in Steel Meridian’s enclave chatting with one of the defectors.
Once assured that he was no longer going to thrash or vomit, Makto turned off the nullifier device and removed his hand. The nullifier device went into a bag around his waist; he tugged Nitzan’s shoulder to make him sit up.
Nitzan wavered a little bit but managed to stay seated. That would be embarrassing— less or more than screaming and crying in front of his enemy?— and more weakness than he could bear to show right now.
He couldn’t even look at Makto. He was tired, though. Maybe that was it.
“I...” Void, his voice was little more than a croak.
“Hush, Adversary.” Makto told him with surprising compassion. Or maybe Nitzan just wanted to hear compassion. He wasn’t sure— it was hard to tell. Makto put two fingers under his chin to lift his head, almost gentle. He was looking for something. Nitzan wasn’t sure what, and didn’t have enough curiosity about how bad he surely must look to ask. He looked to the side instead, avoiding eye contact. Pathetic. “You were sick.”
“Wouldn’t it have been safer to—?” He mimed smashing a head in. It would have made his suffering end much more quickly. Makto pushed his hands down.
“You have fought with honor. I want to kill you with honor. Not like that.”
“Aren’t you worried I’ll try to hurt you?” And he could, probably. The Void thrummed within him again as it should, no longer twisted and curdled. Makto laughed.
“You’ll never defeat me— least of all in this shameful state.”
Right. Like it or not, Nitzan believed him. “So it was pity.”
“You will face me at your best, and be unsuccessful even then.”
“Well, aren’t you a big fluffy kubrodon.” Nitzan tried and failed to not sound bitter.
Makto’s voice twisted, considerate. “Perhaps I liked you better that way.”
It was Nitzan’s turn to laugh, but it soured soon enough. “You’re wrong, though.”
Makto must have caught on that Nitzan was feeling reflective— a sharp sort of reflective, where he could turn it outside of him and onto others, but was much more likely to just hurt himself. He leaned in the slightest bit. “Hm?”
“There’s no room for honor left in the Tenno way.”
Makto shook his head and pushed Nitzan back by the shoulder, barely anything but enough to send him back to the cot. He whuffed out a breath and sat up, by himself this time, swatting away Makto’s hand when he tried to do it again.
“Be glad I don’t believe you.”