Chapter Text
When he finally escapes (🙏), its the first hurdle that really really trips him up. The mad dash to collect Painter and anything precious to him as the Blacksite's power failures cascaded after the Crystal was removed? Just a hectic day. Piloting a stolen sub out of the Let-Vand zone and throwing Urbanshade off his trail? Please, give him an actual challenge! Surviving the benthic desert as he finds his way back towards land and civilization? Tedious and lonely, but what else is new?
But that first day on the ocean's surface, while having to navigate without technology to prevent pinging nearby vessels or operatives searching for him, he decides he wants to watch the sunrise. He's been caged for so long, seeing it might actually make his new freedom feel more real. And as he waits, while its still an hour until dawn, he realizes with a sinking heart that his eyes won't be able to see at all in that level of illumination. His vision is already whiting out, so he dives down a bit to let the water filter out the brightest of the light. And dives a little further. And further. And further. By the time full daylight is shining above, he's about 200 meters down. He can manage for an hour or so at 150 meters before the splitting headache sets in, but he has to resign himself to resting in a cave on the continental slope until twilight is in full swing.
Once it's safe for him to resurface, he locates a suitably remote island in the North Sea for gathering resources, even setting up camp. He debates if reviving Painter from their shutdown stasis now is a good idea, as he only has so many power cells, but ultimately he can't stand the isolation any longer. Painter of course is ecstatic to be on the surface, demanding Seb hold him up and turn him this way and that to see arund their little site, sighing that their webcam can't see too much from just the campfire's glow. Seb's snarky response overflows with bitterness.
A quietness hangs between them for a while before Painter tries to broach the subject. They were shut down from the Blacksite escape until now, they really didn't mean to poke at any raw nerves, what had they missed? Sebastion mumbles something about it not mattering, but Painter won't have any of it; its obviously important, and it's not fair to lash out at them for something they weren't awake for. Sebastian isn't sure how to explain it, not helped by his emotional communication skills having atrophied to a dessicated husk from all those years being caged like an animal, but he fumbles and circles around the crux of his feelings as best he can. It's just...it wasn't...he thought...
It hurts, he knows that much. Not just the eye-strain or the headaches, its so much more than that. He didn't really believe freedom was possible until it was happening, they were hours away from the ruined blacksite before it started to settle in. And freedom, freedom was supposed to mean normalcy, not having to claw and creep and connive his way through yet another day, through the chaos of the lockdown, through being an "asset" of Urbanshade, even through his days in prison before the experiments. Not being escorted on a mercurial time-table by a platoon of guards with a gun always trained at his head. Finally being free was supposed to mean being able to go places, do things, be able to choose.
And he wanted to see the sunrise. It was such a small thing to want, and next to trivial to achieve, a person just needs to be awake at the right time and then wait, the sun will do all the actual work. But his eyes, his two plus one extra, were genetically modified and bio-engineered to function in complete darkness, built and optimized for the abyss.
His eyes are about as far from normal as you can get.
He's had so much stripped from him, so many forces beyond his control and fights he couldn't possibly win, and just when he thought he was in the clear, his own body smacks him down, ripping away the smallest of victories. Its such a suckerpunch too; as agonizing as it was to be re-molded this way, his physiology gave him the upper hand during the lockdown. His strength and speed kept him safe from the blacksite's boogeymen, both agent and entity, agile and adaptable when he needed to hide and a ferocious terror when he needed to fight. It was almost like his body was becoming his own again, like if he looked in a mirror he could own the face and the movements as the actions of the person he was, instead of being the puppeteer of the world's most freakish marionette.
But he's not normal: not his eyes or his hands or his innards or his lower half or how he moves or how he breathes or how he senses or even how he thinks. Maybe he just doesn't get to have normal human wants anymore, not even mundane ones like this. Maybe he doesn't count as human at all.
He tries to sweep his feelings back under the rug with an offhand comment about how he'll get over it, with enough time. But right now, it just hurts.
Its quiet between them again. Painter starts to say something, but Seb cuts them off. He doesn't need sympathy or platitudes or any of that shit. Though, he's glad they were here to listen. There's no one in the world who knows the hell he's been through, except them. They're the only one he could trust.
The night wears on, and eventually Seb snuffs out their campfire while Painter disables their monitor, but the two don't rest just yet. In the darkness, they banter back and forth a bit, planning their next steps, anticipating setbacks, joking about what might come next. The air here is cold, but Sebastian isn't bothered, Painter even says he thinks it makes his circuts feel faster. The breeze in the scraggly coastal brush, the crash of the waves against the stony shore, even the occasional call of a bird in the pines at their back, it hardly feels real, but it is. And, in the darkness, Sebastian comes to a conclusion.
With as sensitive to light as they are, his eyes make it a truly magical thing to watch the stars.