Afterburn (Connor x Reader - Connor POV)

Minutes to Midnight

BEFORE YOU READ:
* Tags apply.
* To get the full experience, I recommend having this ambient song (no words) on loop in the background: 

"The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents how close we are to destroying the world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It warns how many metaphorical 'minutes to midnight' humanity has left."

- The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

...

Dark, twisting trees showed signs of a recent fire; their trunks marred and disfigured into blackened, disenchanted lumber. A red, glowing network of circuits settled between the cracks of their charcoaled bark, electric currents oozing from them like sap. Where some of the trees' canopies had been reduced to piles of ash, others remained as a fusion of pixelated fragments and leaves that glistened with a metallic sheen. Together, they filtered the twilight sun through a monochromatic lens, painting the forest floor, the burn scar, with streaks of deep burgundy and bright scarlet in hues of crimson, ruby, and rose. They stretched across a patchwork canvas of earth merged with grids; a ground made of soil and circuitry, where roots tangled with wires.

"'I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: But he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses...'"

She recited those same words to him the night he was guided into deviancy's embrace. Just as they had then, they drifted across his ears as an incantation. Different from then – they were now accented by mechanical vibrations from the quantum machine that housed her soul. Connor called out for her, but his only answer was a choir of murmurs, each pulling a thread from the fabric of his sanity, unraveling it at the edges.

"Can you hear them, crying out in the darkness?"

He spun frantically, his movements erratic and desperate, searching for any tangible sign of her. It was a cruel, dizzying dance – her voice spiraling around him, just out of reach; him seeking, but never finding what he sought. Each turn, each pivot, left him more disoriented. He took a deep breath to steel himself, savoring the natural fragrance of pine and cinder, but recoiling from the sterile tang of electronic ozone.

"I try to answer every prayer, every wish...and no matter how weary I am, they always ask for more."

A low, persistent whirr permeated the forest, the frequency attuned to the reddened, incandescent fluctuations that flowed from a path of cables, capacitors, and semiconductors. His eyes followed that path, and that's when he caught his first glimpse of what fed the technological ley lines.

A skyline loomed upon a virtual horizon, sending forth waves of light towards him that traveled through an intricate network of traces on the ground and up the trees like signals on a motherboard. He tried to get a better view, but his view was obscured by a curtain of digital vines.

Movement flickered at the corner of his vision. He turned, but it was gone, leaving him to question his own senses. Was it her? The uncertainty gnawed at him.

"What have they done to me?"

His voice shook as he called for her again, following the light, venturing into the thicket. He had no survival instincts that'd been honed over millennia of human evolution, and still, a primitive fear stirred within him. It was the glaring presence, the unsettling sensation of being watched that made him tremble. Shadows stretched and coiled; alive, insatiable, feeding from the dwindling hope inside of him. With each step, they stalked him, forever hiding on the precipice of what was visible. Every rustling leaf was a conspirator to his paranoia.