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[graffitibible]

He knows there's abstract song spilling out from the broken-apart places in him, and he knows no one else can hear it. No one save the god who left him like this. Maybe, if he were a more vindictive person, then this, too, is something he would resent. He feels that many people would. Maybe, if he hadn't been dragged through four years of bleached-white hell and then killed and then resurrected, he would be the sort of person who'd hate them for that. But he's not. Because as terrible and raw and overwhelming as everything is and has been ever since Destroya curled up in his soul and took flight back into the world, he wouldn't trade any of that for the rolling, subliminal song that suffuses him and everything else. He wouldn't trade away any of it. Not the pain. Not the fear. Not the torment he and the others endured. He would not trade that pain for anything, because despite all that they've weathered, collectively and individually, they're alive and they're together and they're free.

This is the concluding part of this fic and, in fact, the whole series. Anyone who was waiting for the whole work to be finished before jumping in now has free rein!

[graffitibible]

Hospital rooms. Holding cells. Scalpel blades plying apart the folds of his skin, needle plungers dropping, lights beaming into his eyes. The ability to retain memories of that time is less welcome than Miles would like to admit. There are some things that even death managed to spare him, however; blank patches of void in his memory where he must have blacked out or gone into such a supreme state of shock that nothing could penetrate it.

The point is that he was never given the chance to grieve for all that he left behind.

He doesn't know what it says about him, that he misses it. Dying and resurrection has done this to him, injected him with a dose of swelling memory, untempered and eidetic and he's pretty sure human minds are not supposed to retain things like this. Not with this level of clarity and precision. He thinks if anyone lived their whole life like this they'd go insane.

Given enough time he imagines the vividness of those memories will fade so they're no longer trapped behind his eyelids with every blink. Their wingbeats will flutter and weaken and he won't have to be greeted with the kerosene surge of every latent thought he's ever repressed.

That's a new thing now, too. Thinking about the future.

[graffitibible]

Warren catches his reflection in the mirrored dome of a helmet of some kind, set on the shelf opposite him. He looks...tired. Bruised, worn, eyes edged in red. He looks like someone who's fought his way through hell and come out the other side a chewed-up, ravaged thing. More to the point, he looks like a scarecrow. He's got that eerie animal shine to his eyes, the long scalpel tracks down his arms too neat and too regular to be ordinary. He wears the evidence of where he came from on his skin.

And he knows, looking down at himself, that he'll never fully be able to scrub that away. What option is there for a scarecrow, when it comes to forging a second life? How does he become someone new, acknowledge his history, and denounce the system that built him all in one breath?

Warren runs his fingers over the scars down his arms. He supposes the others are asking themselves the same questions. But they don't have the same physical markers that he does.

Some of them don't.

[graffitibible]

They stagger out of that tumbled war machine and into the open air and it's only then that Tony can goddamn well breathe again. The air's thick and hot and cloying but it's better than being stuck in the crackling mist of ozone, fading in between fractured realities edged in song and starlight.

He's alive. They're all alive. Which is a motherfucking shock, considering they've run afoul of a metallic monstrosity hellbent on ripping the desert apart, multiple shades from their fucked up pasts, and two full on fucking desert gods.

Relief is a narcotic bleeding into his system once he stumbles out of the remains of the Silence the Noise Project. That might also just be the exhaustion, the adrenaline high fading out and taking all his remaining strength with it.

There's no walking away from some things. There are some experiences that, no matter how hard you fight against them, are destined to scar.

[graffitibible]

Going in, he wasn't sure what to expect.

Not like there's a manual for this kinda thing.

Go ahead, he told the Zone god of droids and electricity and destruction. Jump into me. Piggyback my nervous system, inhabit my neural signals, and do what you gotta do. It's to save the Zones, and it's the reason that he's still alive even if he shouldn't be, so that's a small price to pay for not having fully kicked the bucket back in that hospital. Right?

Should've died a whole hell of a lot of other times, actually has once, so sure, he can handle this.

He was overdue for destruction.

[graffitibible]

There's a familiarity in running. In the rhythm of it. Kinetic memory worked into the tendons and nerves, easier to recollect than his own parents' names. Maybe that's why Miles found it so easy to mark that course, time and time again. He's spent so much of his life running from the things that would end up defining him that he's not sure he knows how to be the type of person who faces down whatever's coming for him. This isn't how he makes his stand. In the Analog Wars he was a field medic and in the city he did his work surreptitiously, stealthily, without turning heads. He's someone who keeps to the margins. He is, intentionally, someone who seldom enters anyone's crosshairs.

He's spent so much of his life running and dodging visibility, and now that he's at a point where he has to turn around and fight, he realizes that he's not sure how to do that.

[graffitibible]

Warren is fortunate to be waking up now, before a scalpel can part his old scars anew. He brushes at the ridge of old keloid arcing down his sternum that once cleaved through the canvas of his skin. His fingertips tingle at the barest touch of the Y-shaped incision that branches to his shoulders and runs down his belly. He's already once been split open like a corpse. It's this that marks him a scarecrow as distinctly as it would mark him an autopsied cadaver.

He doesn't have time to adjust to the sensation of waking, breathing, living again. His hand travels up to his throat, and he can feel the rough texture of the tissue at the place where the hook tore it open. The fatal wound has been healed, but not smoothed over. Not entirely.

Like the evidence of his upbringing, it's likely that he will carry the moment of his death with him for the rest of his days.

[graffitibible]

If dying tastes like static inertia, all the frantic afterburn left in the human body going into overdrive once it realizes its days are numbered, then waking up after that tastes like a body that's been left to rot. The papery, greasy cling of it coats Tony's mouth and the back of his throat so completely that this is the first thing he notices.

Every muscle seizes up all at once and even if he was prepared for it, the understanding that he's been packed away into a bodybag doesn't feel great. It takes several long, heart-pounding minutes before he manages to work his stiff fingers into the catch for the zipper and start easing it down.

The Phoenix Witch was true to Her word. They're alive.

[graffitibible]

He doesn't need to breathe anymore. That's pretty cool. Blinking, breathing, sighing, speaking - those are all instincts that are kind of like holdovers from life, and there's no discomfort if he doesn't do them. There's no discomfort at all. There's no pain, no bone-deep ache from the killing cold of the desert, no deep-seated fatigue from days of nonstop running. As a trade-off, his whole body doesn't feel altogether there. Because it isn't. It's like a bit of a loose projection of his body or something, maybe the closest that he can conceptualize his own soul? Nothing he says or does feels as though it has any weight to it. He can see the world passing around him and it feels so starkly removed from him that he thinks he gets why, if someone were to be stranded in this state indefinitely, one might go insane.

The problem with being dead is that you feel the things you feel all the more intensely. The problem with being dead is that you can recall everything in absolute clarity where you couldn't before.

[graffitibible]

SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE. SILENCE THE NOISE.

SILENCE THE NOISE.

[graffitibible]

Here's how a scarecrow is made.

He's a Class Two pull, meaning that when he's in year four of the Battery City education system and about to turn ten he takes the mandated city-wide evaluation, a gauntlet of mental and physical tests and forms his parents have to fill out. He takes the SCE3 and a week later he's informed that he's passed and is therefore transferred to a new school in the Central Sector. He is enrolled in the SCT Program and participation is compulsory.

So he embarks on a much more rigorous curriculum that includes everything from history to geography to physics to war strategy to medical biology. His class consists of some forty other kids in his year but by the time he finishes finals there are only twenty-three.

He's approved for the next stage of the SCT Program just before he turns fourteen. He and twenty-two other prepubescent kids are entered into a roster for a series of bio-augmentation procedures that will drastically improve their effectiveness on the battlefield.

There is a point to all this. The point is that Battery City is fighting a war and it's losing and he's going to be what turns the fighting around. This is what they tell him before he is stretched out on an operating table, squinting beneath surgical lights.

This is what they do not tell him: that equipment failure is the number one cause of death among scarecrows.

[graffitibible]

Cherri Cola watches Tony and Jack with hollow, haunted eyes. They've seen a peculiar reversal of each others' positions, and now Cola is the one who carries all of Tony's context. Tony doesn't remember in any great detail what it was like to encounter the cored-out, mnemonically gutted Gary Levko who they once risked everything to save. Tony can't miss him because he doesn't know him, and in so many ways, the Mr. Fame that once saved Cola's life is long dead. And now here he is, walking out of that guy's life again. Ready to run towards the fire that will most likely swallow him whole, without an inch of regret. Again.

"Good luck," is all that Cola says.

"You too," Jack says in return. He says it easily, simply, like a routine call-and-response and not like these might be the last words they potentially ever say to each other. What do you say to the guy you once risked everything for? Tony and Jack and Leonard and Miles, they once charged headlong into the fight for this man's sake. It was because they gave themselves up that he made it out into the Zones in the first place.

It's arguably because of that self-sacrificial drive that Silence the Noise threatens the sanctity of the whole damn desert now. And how do you fucking live with that?

[graffitibible]

More than anything, he longs for an improbable breeze to come threading its way through the steep ivory-colored skyscrapers and to lift the curls from his forehead, toy with the fringes of his clothes, and give him an excuse to inhale deep and soak it all in.

The arrangement of the buildings against the skyline isn't unpleasing to look at, exactly. On a pure aesthetic level, he can appreciate it, even admire it. But it's not enough. He's got one foot on the edge of a windowsill and he knows that if he takes that step, if he commits to the instinct that vibrates deep inside his bones, if he entertains the wanderlust that's pooling under his skin and in his chest and buzzing in every atom, he might summon up something he'll never fully be able to dispel.

Whatever happens, he'll leave it all up to chance.

[graffitibible]

It's for the best that he ran. Better to run than to allow BL/ind further access to him. Because they made him into this.

He's thinking now. He's thinking a whole lot. And he thinks that this is what they want to turn the desert into. Something worse than draculoids, because if they succeed, they won't need a mask to make it happen. They won't need to get their hands on anyone in person. All it took for Miles was the spark of some kind of sound, some buzzing in his head, and he couldn't think after that. His memories of what happened precisely are patchy, inconsistent. He remembers the noise burning up in his skull and the way it flooded his veins like a poison. It drummed at his inner ears, bored its way into his heart, made the very act of perpetuating his own existence untenable. He needed, more than anything, a way to just - stop. A way to make it stop.

A way to -

To Silence the Noise.

[graffitibible]

In the open air and daylight, it's easier to track his features, to measure and compare them with the ones Warren knew. It's been four years since he was Gary Levko and he doesn't much resemble the scared, simpering B-Cell that was too afraid to step out of line in Battery City. The sun has darkened him, seared away some of the anxious pleats and gathers in his expression in favor of deepening the worn lines at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth. Laughter lines, worry lines, taking up equal amounts of space in his skin. His frame has filled out to suit the breadth of his shoulders and the barrel-like build of his chest. His hair is longer, his eyes clearer. The old sun scars that the city worked so hard to erase are clear and pale in their discolorations, but he makes no effort to hide them.

Warren didn't need to see the end result of their sacrifice to decide that making it was worth it. Seeing Cherri Cola alive and clear of mind wrenches a little in the pit of his gut regardless.

It was worth it. It's always worth it.

[graffitibible]

Couple days ago, Tony was just a grunt with a gun and the inability to give a damn about literally anything aside from whenever he got his next break. He was a nobody guarding an impotent hunk of metal being built out in the dust. Then with a bolt of memory, everything changes. Everything's unraveling. He's only getting it in pieces but he is starting to get it, and it's coming with the worst, fiercest pounding headaches imaginable.

Though that could also be the withdrawal.

[graffitibible]

"Oh, fuck." The thoughts are coursing hot beneath Leonard's skin, sending his whole head prickling. He knows this. He figured out the blueprints. He knows how they fucking think, these BL/ind bastards. That's his problem. He knows too fucking much for someone totally helpless to do anything about it. "He's the goddamn demo track."

"He's what?" Tony says sharply.

"He's the fucking prototype! He's what they want to turn the desert into!" Leonard answers, one hand flying out to gesture vaguely at the point where, behind them, Miles is still in snarling pursuit. "Death Adder turns on the radio and he goes fucking berserk! Killjoys blast music all day! They literally conditioned him to go after everything BL/ind hates!"