frankenstein complex ⇢ q.k | ✔

three

Dejun shooed you away from helping to set up camp despite already knowing that you had no physical injuries, finally giving you a task of making sure all of his emergency canteens in his medic packs had fresh water from the river nearby. You knew it was busy work, but did it anyway, glad to feel useful.

Loaded up with canteens slung around your waist and shoulders, you took the paved pathways between the acres of crops until you reached a crystal clear river. There were some areas that were sandy shores, and others that were grassy drop-offs. Stopping at a grassy drop-off, you sat down, the canteens clanking against each other. You took them off and poured out the water in them one-by-one, making a pile of empty canteens. Then you leaned over the edge and filled them up from the cool, gentle current, starting a second pile of full canteens.

You could feel the thud of heavy footsteps in the ground, and knew who was approaching you before Captain Qian even spoke.

"Mind if I join you?" He asked, and you looked over your shoulder to see him holding a large, empty water jug. "You seem to have grabbed the best spot."

"Not at all." You jerked your head towards the empty space on the other side of your full canteen pile.

He sat as well, grabbing an apparatus the size of his hand off the side and lowering that into the water instead of the entire jug. It was connected to the jug by a tube, and you watched as it moved water up from the river into the top of the container.

"Dejun didn't tell me about ZEN earlier," you said abruptly, trying to vouch for the doctor who so far had been the kindest person that you could remember in your life. "Really, I was guessing just from how you guys were talking—"

"It's okay, Y/N, we weren't being very discrete," Captain Qian assured you. "Xiao isn't one for lying to cover his ass, either. I believe him when he says that he didn't tell you who exactly ZEN is."

"There were a lot of questions I was asking that he couldn't answer. Just kept telling me to ask you."

"Like what?"

"Don't you already know? His earpiece..."

"ZEN isolates comms as necessary when the unit is split up. The other five of us needed to hear each other more than we needed to eavesdrop on you two in here."

You gnawed on your bottom lip nervously. "...He told me to take it easy, with my brain and the amnesia."

"Maybe we can gently jog your memory," he suggested.

"How?"

"That woman in the hall, in the yellow top. Did you know her?"

"I don't know..." You replied regretfully. You were apparently the only person alive in this building, and couldn't identify that woman. Were you friends? Should you be mourning her? Did she have a family? Was there anybody to tell to mourn her? It felt wrong that nobody would. And there were even more like that who you didn't look at, who you hadn't seen.

"It's a big building. There were probably a lot of people working here. You might not have known everybody," he replied casually.

You pushed one of your hands against your eye, against the pressure that was coming back. "No, I don't... I don't know anything. About what this place was for."

"Alright, alright," he held up his free hand in surrender.

When your head hurt less, and you had filled up a couple more canteens, you changed your focus. He had asked you a question, it was only fair you asked him one.