## Preface

Linger()
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/2056272.

Rating:
  Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
  Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Transistor (Video Game)
Character:
  Royce Bracket
Additional Tags:
  drug mention
Language:
  English
Series:
  Part 4 of Become()
Stats:
  Published: 2014-07-31 Words: 646 Chapters: 1/1

# Linger()

by _digital cairn (Schemilix)

Summary

> Like a Flood.

> (Drabble of Royce finding the Transistor.)

Notes

See the end of the work for notes

## Linger()

Burnt-orange skies, sickly. The man is looking down, sees the sky's upside through the puddles at his feet. Was it raining, did he miss it? Or was it only a stray boat lashing at the waves?

Royce hasn't walked in his own thoughts for days - daren't. With a hand tangled restlessly in his wild black hair he walks, aimlessly, going somewhere. So close, so close, this digital Tantalus he knows it, sees the way the code and numbers shift before him, as though written on the page they could be anything but static. Just moving the way he sees, drawing his eye to new places, days and days, nights and nights, countless hours of missing sleep and far too many lenses placed over his vision and thoughts. Veil of curling smoke, tin-on-lighter, needles and white coins of parcelled thinking.

Oh, he shouldn't but - he does. Something is surely in his system now, or perhaps only sleep deprivation. Untangling his mood from the vagaries of his body's reactions to them is too tiring, another expenditure of energy he can reserve solely for this, his magnum opus, his - need. Base animal need. His prayer to the concepts of gods, pleading for them to exist.

The numbers told him here (maybe), but there are so many factors, too many to count, tangled up like straws. He sways, shakes his head like a dog as if it might rattle the thought out. Then he looks up, sees it - the door. Not a simple wood-and-hinge door no, a socket. As if he might be a machine, if he wanted - and he does so want, to shed his skin, step out - his hand is reaching for it perhaps and -

This place? Royce could swear on anything that he has seen it, but then, does anything matter to him enough to make that a promise? Seen the dangling strips, the open spaces, curling blackish veils. And in it like a heart, a red eye, precious as ruby, blood-like as a womb.

A shard of it waits for him - a tool that would be too weighty for giants if it chose fits exactly in his spider-bone hands. Waiting, or only moulding. Does he trespass, was he invited? Only as his hand wraps around the hilt of this - sword this - Transistor does he know that it was sleeping.

Every bruise, scraped hand, every nail bitten to bleeding - every project he poured his heart into to have it broken like a lover's tryst, every affair with the mathematics of beauty. Each attempt to capture quintessence, each loss, each haunting, each nightmare, each night alone sweating and shaking from an unnameable fear - the failures, the standing-on-ashes, the clattered dreams like broken teeth jagged in his thoughts. Doubts - needle-punctures and mint-seething smoke. The mirrors reflecting ghosts of green-eyes searching, searching. An artist of arithmetic, though never admitting - he knows.

So Royce knew, for the first time - anything. No doubting. No mathematically-speakings no - blasted second guessing of desires, factuality, no questioning the reality of his purpose, himself. Just a knowledge. 'I was born for this'. That the last months spent in a broken fugue led his feet here for one reason only.

'I am whole' - unashamed, unashamed of feeling, great enough to feel. No pushing-away of foolishness, or perhaps only that he is too small and malformed a man to deserve the feelings of 'artists'. The theatrics swallowed up inside and hidden in coils, these - these are why he is here. 'I am whole' and I will never be a fragment again.

He wakes, dazed, back on tiles. The sky is burnt orange, and in his hand like a memento from a dream a sword that glows and spills out power-lines incessantly. Its pulse is in him, in his nerves, telling him that these figures in white will obey.

I found you.

Nothing will take you away from me.

## Afterword

End Notes

> If you're confused about the socket, it's from the alpha video.

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