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“Well,” said Duck, sighing out the word as if it were deep and cold as its namesake. “It's dead.”
Red Guy looked up from his notes, past Duck, and through the glass of the small tank against the wall. Indeed, the creature inside wasn’t twitching as it had been last night. Even from a distance he could see the lack of movement, the sickly, wide eyes fixed in a cracked doll stare, the slack, gummy mouth frozen in an eternal gawp. Never again to squelch out another heedless cry. It slumped still and silent as a flesh-coloured rock. Red blinked.
“Are you sure?”
Duck clicked his teeth. He opened his beak—perhaps to complain, perhaps to shoot down this small questioning of his authority—then he closed it with a gentle clack, considering. He poked the experiment. He found up the taser and jabbed it into its side. Electricity sparked madly, and there was a slight shudder of movement as frayed muscles were fed with false power. Then it went stiff again.
“It's dead,” repeated Duck.
“You don't sound too happy,” said Red Guy. “I thought you'd at least be…fascinated? If not happy.”
Duck laughed once, dryly. “Happiness is the last thing on my mind at the moment.”
He reached out and picked up the creature by a clump of its flab, as if it were contagious. He held it to eye-level.
“But we wanted it to die, didn't we?” Red insisted. “That's why we've been experimenting on it with the shocks and the scalpels and all that.”
A long pause followed. Duck was frowning furiously at the experiment.
“Uh…that was what we wanted right?”
At last, the bird-thing snapped out of his aimless glower. “Ugh, how am I to remember? Anyway, it doesn't matter. Whatever. Into the bin with you, useless corpse.”
With an almost clinical efficiency, Duck dumped the wad of hole-coated waste where he was so sure it belonged. One deep thud resounded like a final heartbeat. And that was it.
Duck dusted his hands and turned back to Red, who was now frowning at him as he had frowned at the creature. Yes, frowning without a mouth was an incredible feat, but they were far beyond physical expressions of emotion. They'd spent enough time with one another by now to just know .
Know most things, anyway.
“I don't understand,” Red sighed. “We both hated that thing. Plus it was getting really boring, with all that screaming and wailing. And it ran out of blood, like, months ago. Aren't you glad we're rid of it? Sometimes I sort of miss when you'd get glad…”
This last part was softer. Much softer, and perhaps scarcely audible to the average ear. But Red knew perfectly well that Duck's auditory processing systems were just as keen as his own. The volume was, it seemed, more of a carefully chosen emotive feature. Something in Duck’s chest twinged a little, like some tiny power surge. It reminded him of a fuzzed-over memory lingering in his mind’s recycle bin.
And he rolled his eyes so hard it hurt. “Oh. Clueless as ever, you. Utterly clueless.”
“How am I the clueless one here?”
Duck let his gaze linger on the bin. Rather, the miniature metal graveyard it had become this morning. He was tempted to throw back his silver throat and laugh at how ridiculous this was.
“Just look at us,” he snapped instead. “We have nothing left!”
Red huffed. After a beat, he looked away. “That's not true.”
“Then what? What do we have?”
“We still have…well, we have each other. Surely that's all we need. Look, don't tell me you seriously saw that gross little pink thing as a frien—”
“No, I mean we have nothing left to experiment on, you sentimental idiot! Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Look around you. Go on, actually look! Put that ridiculous head of yours to use.”
“It's not ridiculous,” Red retorted quietly, a little wounded. Still he obliged, scanning their ice-coloured box of a room. A dull whirring sound buzzed out from his detached, hovering skull. It had always disturbed and excited Duck, that sound. Now it made him feel faintly ill.
“What do you see?” he asked shrilly.
“Nothing,” admitted Red.
“Exactly. Nothing. We're the ones who ran out of blood here. That hideous little ball of meat was our only activity!”
“Can't we just, I don’t know, make a new thing to do?”
Duck rolled his eyes again. “Oh, of course. How obvious. Any ideas?”
“Ummm…”
“Exactly.”
Red folded his hands over his notes. They were scattered across the table like mad, monochrome butterflies, so unlike the lonely, neat clipboard on Duck’s side. He picked one of his pages and began to silently read.
He didn't look defeated so much as unbothered. This faintly annoyed Duck, and it annoyed him because it confused him. They were meant to know each other inside out at this point, weren't they? And yet the inevitable rotting of a dreadful little clump had ruined everything. Now the red one couldn't understand Duck’s disappointment, and likewise Duck couldn't understand the red one’s apathy. It was as if a wall had been forced between them. An ugly wall. A well.
Inside out. An odd idea blossomed in Duck’s brain. It was the kind he usually shoved in a folder or deleted entirely; a remnant of when he was foolish, brainless flesh and his thoughts were scattered and simple and entirely selfish. He'd never had the heart, so to speak, to replace his brain with complete metal like the other one had. This was a consequence, and one he rarely had to deal with: funny ideas.
Ridiculous ideas.
And yet…
“We could always leave,” Red offered at last, shrugging his great shoulders. Not looking up.
Duck stared at him. “What.”
“I don't know. I mean, we've been here a while. It was getting kind of boring, if you ask me. We could just get out of here and see what else there is to do.”
“Leave? The nerve! You're just like you've always been, you know. Always wanting to run away. It's…it's very frustrating!”
Run away from me, more like! Duck thought bitterly, and perhaps with just a sprinkle of actual sorrow.
Red hummed a flat, dead note. “I don't remember asking to do this before.”
“Oh no, you certainly have. Countless times. It was always a pain, trying to stop you.”
Red looked at him blankly.
“Whatever,” Duck said through gritted teeth. “I don't expect you to understand or remember. That's what happens when you throw away important stuff like your brain. Figuratively and literally in your case. Stupid thing.”
Red shrugged again. “I still think we should give it a go.”
“Please. Trying anything out there gets us nowhere. We're safe here! If we step one foot out of this room, I suppose we'll end up being…rubbed out of existence all over again! We may be stronger now, but those wretched things always find a way. And then all of this—all of our work—will be for nothing. What are you, suicidal? Actually, don't answer that. But you're being terribly, terribly silly. Wanting to go back to that hellhole…ha!”
“Okay, I get it,” Red deadpanned, waving one hand as if to calm a wild animal. “I wasn't too bothered anyway. It’s not like we could go back to how things were. We don’t belong with them anymore. Besides, I don't think we'd even fit through the door with, uh, how we are now.”
Duck followed the other one’s gaze to the door. Indeed, it was quite tiny, now that he mentioned it. Had the foolish thing gone and shrunk? No, they…well, they were quite a lot larger, now that he thought about it. Why hasn't he been thinking when they made these new bodies?
Why hasn't the red one warned him? Even if they never actually planned to leave, an escape route in case of fires or other emergencies was obviously important. Why was it important again? He thought, and the answer obediently came to him. Yes, of course, some singing, bar-shaped thing had told him about this topic once, back when he was still small and excitable enough for doors. It had told him how important they were. A thousand years ago, it felt like. The memory drifted over his brain like a handful of acidic fog. Duck winced.
“Oh, great. Just great. We’re trapped here with nothing to do.”
“We could experiment on the dead thing?”
“No fun,” huffed Duck. He waited a moment. “But, oh, fine. If you insist.”
He peered into the bin, then groaned.
“What?” said Red.
“It's already gone! Disappeared!"
Like everything they tossed into that stupid bin. It had seemed a clever idea when they invented it—a good way to keep their room clean and odourless, a good way to forget about or at least ignore the more disturbing things they had performed tests upon—but now it seemed plain old stupid. Like the door. Like their too-tall, bulky bodies. All of this suddenly seemed so ridiculous. Pointless, even. At once, another rush of wretched feeling: he hated how this body felt, he hated himself for finding the staircase, he hated and hated and he missed his blazer quite a lot. Was it always so cold in here?
With an electric screech, Duck surged forwards. He shoved the bin over, letting it clatter harshly across their flawless floor. Bits of lingering body-fluid oozed out, tainting the shining whiteness. Bits of pink and crimson and muddy, miserable brown. It all left a mark like a slash-shaped, patchy scar.
“Agh! This is so…hopeless !”
If he still had his odd little legs, he'd kick the bin again. He thought about this, and his skin parts were suddenly consumed by something like longing. Loss. Want.
It was the same feeling that had clogged his otherwise genius brain since he came up here. Maybe before that? Since he first saw the teeth? Or was it when he saw the red flashes of kindness, of passion back then, bleeding through the bored apathy? Crackling through the phone?
Too many non-scientific thoughts today. Too many.
“This is what happens when we run out of stuff to do,” he panted, throwing up his wings in defeat. “I lose…control of myself! Agh!”
He didn’t even have to look away from the floor to know that Red was smiling. Oh, that smug bastard.
Then his voice, practically gloating. “I told you, you should have gotten the full treatment. Like me.”
“Like you?”
“I never have to worry about feelings.”
Duck glared up in time to see the red one tapping on his drone-head. He snarled.
“You little liar. Boredom is a feeling. And you're going to start feeling an awful lot more of it soon, once your ego runs dry.”
“You bringing up ego seems extremely ironic.”
“Oh, shut up!”
“What, are you going to cry ?”
The red one began to laugh gently and mechanically, the bladed fans of his head joining in with the sound like another layer, another laugh. A chorus, dry and poisonous.
Duck’s head ached. This was not supposed to happen. They weren't supposed to be malicious towards one another—only the other things. The smaller things, the weaker things. The naive things. The things which wandered up here, jaws hanging open, lost.
He was not lost. Not yet. And yet he was spewing out such awful words himself. He really had lost control. Lost all he had, then. His experiment. His life. His friend.
Friend?
Something cracked in his chest. His heart was malfunctioning. Of course. It all made sense. Malfunctioning.
“Wait, are you actually…?”
So were his eyes, it seemed.
“No,” said Duck.
His remaining sensual receptors tracked the beads of wetness as they crawled down his cheeks. A long forgotten feeling. He'd grown so used to the heat of spilled blood; the comparative ice of saltwater had been rendered a dream.
“You are crying,” Red stated, voice lifted with surprise. If he had eyebrows, perhaps they would be raised.
Duck shook his head on its tube-ish neck. “No, I’m not. I'm…I'm just cleaning my visual receptors out. Or maybe it's oil. It's tricky to tell. Just–stop interrogating me!”
Not helped by the way Red was looking at him, Duck felt a wave of helplessness. They were the ones on top, the best ones, and here he was leaking like a broken thing. Like an experiment. He probably looked so truly pathetic. He buried his head in his chest, which was not a particularly comforting feeling, if a feeling at all. All these pesky memories. Of fluff and feathers and felt. He’d buried his head in someone else’s chest before. It had seemed so much sweeter.
“Hey,” eased Red.
Duck didn’t look up. “What?”
“It’s…probably going to be okay.”
“Probably?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. If we wait, maybe something will show up?”
“Maybe?” Wow. He’s just terrible at reassurance.
Still, Duck admitted he appreciated the attempt. He finally met eyes with the red one, who was trying to smile. Even after all Duck had said? It felt unearned.
“Maybe,” Red echoed, and the smile didn't leave his face.
Duck closed his eyes. It was going to take a lot of strength to say this. He imagined he was someone else. Someone who wasn't him. Someone better and kinder and smaller, with a funny voice and a funnier face and eyes that were sometimes green. He couldn't recall their name, but he needed their vocabulary.
“I'm sorry,” he said at last. The two little words felt like bricks, crashing out from his beak. But when he at last opened his eyes, Red was still smiling.
“You? Sorry?”
“I lost control. I panicked,” confessed Duck, attempting to hide the fact that his remaining blood was rushing to his facial area. “And I have acted in an inappropriately cruel manner this morning. I don't really understand why you always try with me. Why you're always patient with me.”
Red shrugged like it was all—
“No big deal, really,” he said, eyes growing oddly soft. “You’re my friend. You're not usually like this, anyway. I can tell when something’s really bothering you. No hard feelings, yeah?”
“Yeah…”
Beyond the blushing, if he had enough blood to call it that, Duck now had to suffer under the catastrophic weight of such horrifically lovely, adorable words. It was all just so nauseatingly sweet. More bothersome tears dropped down his feathers.
He clanked to the ground, giving up on any illusion of grace. His wings stopped moving. He just sat there, blank, lost. Red, after a moment to process, sat beside him. Back to back.
“You really did lie,” Duck said gently.
“Huh?”
“You can feel. Just as much as me. Your emotions didn't go anywhere.”
“Ah. Well, maybe. I don't really feel much. I only feel things when…”
Duck swallowed. “When what?”
“When I look at you, I suppose.”
Duck smiled. He really smiled, feeling the heat of the thing burning in his chest and in his face and everywhere, really. This feeling was something like accepting defeat. Or utter serenity. What was the difference?
“I feel the same way,” he replied through his insuppressible beam. “Even now that you're a freakish beast with a very annoying flying thing for a head.”
“Same. Even now you're a very annoying flying thing, full stop.”
“Flying is cool,” Duck said, and then he found himself laughing. After a pause, Red joined in.
“I don't know what's funny,” he said, still chuckling. “I definitely lied. Nothing’s going to show up. I think we both know that. Those talking, singing things abandoned us ages ago.”
“I knew you were a dirty fibber. I guess we'll just have to wait for the next cycle, eh?”
“I guess we will. I wonder what will happen.”
By the time their laughter had completely died, everything seemed a little smaller in their room. The lights had dimmed to an off-yellow, and their little patches of machinery here and there had switched to power-saving mode.
“There is one experiment left that we could do,” Red said, voice a good deal quieter now. “If you're keen…”
Duck looked at him. “What's that?”
The red creature cleared his throat. "I'm still pretty fleshy. Aren't I? Neck-down, anyway.”
The bird blinked. It took him a few seconds just to process these words; they were words he had hoped for, a long time ago. But now? After all they'd been through?
As if reading his mind, Red Guy weakly grinned. “Look. If anyone's going to do this, I'd rather it be you for a change.”
Oh. Duck realised. His heart was not malfunctioning. It had just been so long since he'd felt such pure, unfiltered love; the flood gates had fallen, and the warm feeling flowed like a glinting waterfall. He inhaled. He could cry again, he was sure of it.
“The feeling is mutual,” he said. “Fine. Let’s at least make this fun. Come here. Do your worst.”
—
It had once served as a protective measure, back when they weren't both intensely death-seeking and bored.
The rebuilding process was so they wouldn't explode or rot and forget. It wasn't difficult, not with their new big brains. Just a bit of rearranging. The pain was worth it.
Red has settled for just remodelling his head. The rest of him underwent a sort of natural shift, in the same way Duck's feathers had turned white, but the head could be a problem with how often it was exploded or cut off. And, if there were a kind of scale of severity, that was a bad injury; a top-level one, because it meant he'd be reset. In a sense, he'd die. So he swapped his head for a new one.
Duck remembered being a little more nervous, a little more desperate to cling to life. He was less fortunate than Red—his injuries could be anywhere, anytime. His full body, sometimes. So his full body it was. A complete remodel.
Except the brain, of course, and a few guts for good measure. Why not, eh? He wished he'd kept more now. Flesh was so fun. So soft and mouldable.
“You did a good job on this,” Red muttered, running his hand along the dials of Duck's back. Slowly. Agonisingly so, as if he were playing the keys of a piano.
“You helped,” said Duck. He traced the scalpel up Red’s arm, filled with a sick fascination at the dark line he left behind. The welling of the deep, rich blood. He brought the scalpel to his beak and dragged his tongue across the blade, not caring if he bled what little he could. Perhaps their blood would merge together; their little slice of love could be immortalised forever that way.
Red reached around, gliding his hands across the wings. Bleeding a scarlet line across the snowy feathers. They were mostly artificial, but soft. Very soft.
“You should have kept your mouth,” Duck complained lightly, leaning in. “I can't kiss you now.”
“I wouldn't call that thing we did that one time kissing."
"Ah, so you do remember?"
"Some things. You just stuck your beak in my mouth.”
“And I enjoyed it very much.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“You've still got a heart, haven't you?” Duck pressed the blade gently into Red’s chest. More blood dripped down in slow, rainy rivulets.
“Probably.” Red tightened his grip around a lever and, in one swift motion, pulled it out of Duck's side. Wires hissed like furious little snakes. He let the lever clatter to the ground. Duck didn't even spare it a glance.
“That explains your behaviour then, doesn't it? All your sappiness? Your heart never left me.”
“I suppose it didn't.”
They paused for a moment, mid-attack. Bodies woven, as best they could be, together in an awkward dance against the wall. The steadily shrinking wall. Everything was getting darker and smaller. The room was disappearing; its use had run dry. It seemed the two of them were considered useless too. A shame, really.
Duck’s scalpel had left chicken scratch running all across Red's body by now, like a web of thin veins. It was tricky to see the blood, but it was there, seeping into the low fuzz of the body, as if desperate to return to the source. Duck could see the blood on his own hand, splattered up the length of his arm. He imagined his entire face was speckled with the stuff. It should be disgusting, but knowing who it belonged to made the experience thrilling.
He swapped the sad little blade out for its larger cousin, reserved for special occasions and stubborn experiments. He pressed it forwards, then let go to flex his fingers. The blade stayed half-sunk into the spot of flesh at which he had identified a heartbeat. Bullseye.
Red Guy was unfazed. He shivered just once at the dull pain as if it were a breeze, the red sparks around his head twitching like tiny electrocuted things, and that was all. Meanwhile, his hand was semi-sunken in the depths of Duck's mechanical chest, straight through a maintenance flap.
He was groping around for something; Duck could feel it. He could feel that big, bloodied hand crawling through his wires and his circuit board like a monstrous spider, bumping his abandoned kidney, running its hungry fingers over a metal and bone combo ribcage.
“Close,” breathed Duck.
Red swallowed and continued. It seemed quickly then that he reached past the rows of bone and found what he had been searching for.
The walls thudded closer, almost breathing. Clearly angry. Frantic to wipe out the disobedient dolls who were about to commit one of the worst sins of this world. It was a rule: only the teachers could do these things. Only they were allowed. Violence amongst inmates was strictly prohibited. Like love. Best case scenario, they'd be killed and reset. Worst case, they'd be trapped in here, the exits sealed, toys taken away. The solution glowed before them both, unspoken and yet obvious as a lightbulb.
“Count of three?” Red whispered.
Duck looked into those foolish eyes. Camera-eyes. It was so very stupid. He laughed for hours when he first saw them. Now he would give anything to look into them forever.
Red Guy looked into those terrible eyes. Cruel, monster, mad scientist eyes, glacial as Winter. Duck should be horrifying like this, bleached white and fused with metal, wings stretching out like great rows of knives. But, to Red, it was hard not to compare him to an angel.
“Count of three,” Duck echoed gently.
They tightened their grips.
“One…”
The blade pulled back. The hand held tight.
“Two…”
The world began to shake. Blood-loss? Pain? Delirium? Or was this world just shaking them around like a furious snowglobe, as it liked to do? The flakes of snow like a million angry, laughing, caring eyes? Always so hard to tell.
The two fixed their gazes on one another and, without quite knowing why, smiled.
“One.”
It was beautiful really, Duck thought as the world began to dissolve—the sync of their movement. As if it were practised. True love. Or just the product of proximity and enhanced brains. Perhaps there was no real chemistry to this equation.
Still, he found it so beautiful, so wonderful to feel his beating metal heart ripped from his chest and crushed by an oil-soaked hand as he watched, as he stabbed the blade as deep as it would go, watching as the thin red fur around the spot inexplicably peeled away. Watching the heart he had pierced as it slowed, slowed, slowed. He could, if he so wanted, pretend the heart was his own, and that he had left his heavy body for the gratification of watching himself die. Pretending he was not ending the only thing he had loved in a long, long time.
Smiling over the wickedly gorgeous sight of the gushing incision as his own heart was left to die. He was sure he could feel the slick heat of the fingers around his core. It was a shame it was fading so quickly now, but still. A job well done.