[Imperial Radch] the list of what you've learned to do without (Breq gen)

[storypaint]

Title: the list of what you've learned to do without
Fandom: Imperial Radch series - Ann Leckie
Length: 1005 words
Prompt: A trickortreatex treat for lichaelle. The prompt: "Breq begins to hear the ghosts in the machine: the slumbering memories and agonies of the various corpse soldiers she’s absorbed."
Pairing: Breq gen
Other: PG for psychological horror. Small spoilers for Ancillary Sword. Also at AO3

Excerpt: When I was a ship, I didn't dream. It was a side effect of the conversion process, probably unintentional, but I never complained. Who wanted to take the time to filter out the nonsense of a sleeping brain, anyway?


When I was a ship, I didn't dream. It was a side effect of the conversion process, probably unintentional, but I never complained. Who wanted to take the time to filter out the nonsense of a sleeping brain, anyway?

I didn't know when or why I started dreaming. I didn't think it was right after I lost the ship, but perhaps I didn't remember the early ones. I'd asked Medic about it and she'd just thrown up her hands and shrugged. I was unique, she told me, so who was to say whether or not I should be dreaming? My new implants were functioning fine and my brain wasn't going to split open anytime soon unless there was manual intervention ("Unless you do something particularly stupid and get yourself killed"). That was all she was hoping for.

In any case, I figured out after a while that I wasn't having Mercy of Kalr's dreams, nor those of any of her soldiers. That was a relief. Mercy liked me as a captain well enough but we didn't need to have that kind of intimacy.

It became steadily worse over the next few weeks. The dreams were confusing, overstimulating, half of the time in black and white, with no proper sense of time. I couldn't read. I died a dozen times in my sleep and that was only during the first two nights. I tasted blood in my mouth so strong I gagged and at one point I rolled sideways and fell off the little cot, waking as I struck the floor, so disoriented that if someone had been trying to kill me, they could have done it easily.

Kalr Five brought a strong tea for me the next morning. Ship had probably told her I needed a pick-me-up, but all it did was make me needlessly jittery. Whenever I shut my eyes, the pictures were there, waiting for me. I kept seeing Sword of Atagaris, the ancillary I had saved, but then her face changed again and again. It was my face, and then other faces I had worn, blurring together so that I could hardly pick them out. An ancillary who had died in an accident, another who had been killed in a political demonstration, all of the faces I had lost along with Justice of Toren. I was choking on memories I shouldn't be having.

Kalr Five said I was pale and I eventually consented to seeing Medic, who poked around in my head again and said that none of this should be happening, but again, unique, who knew? She was worried, though. I didn't have time for this. I had too much to do not to sleep properly.

"I could disable the implants," Medic said, watching my face carefully.

I reached out instinctively and Mercy of Kalr answered, showing me my lieutenants about their duties, showing me the tension in Medic's body, the slight elevation to her heart rate. She'd already asked Mercy for all of the ancillary medical texts that she could possibly find, a request that I overrode and deleted. Anaander Mianaai would notice a request like that because it would have to ping medical databases in Radch space. She had done enough interfering with this mission already. We couldn't afford further notice.

I wondered, suddenly, if Anaader Mianaai dreamed.

"No," I answered her. "At least, not for now."

"I'll see what I can give you for dreamless sleep, then," she said.

She gave me several different medications but they all made me horribly nauseous, which made it next to impossible to sleep at all. I found room in my schedule for short naps during the day, in hopes that I wouldn't be unconscious long enough to drop into REM. Of course, that wasn't good for the body either.

The dreams filled me to overflowing and left little room for anything else. I was quite good at dealing with pain in general, I thought, in pushing it down until the job was done, but I had no defense against this. Tisarwat was fine. She didn't have any memories of anything that could help, she said, and she seemed nearly as shaken as I was.

I fell asleep in a briefing and awoke with my hands around Seivarden's neck. At least, I was pretty sure I was awake. Seivarden pried me off carefully and took me down to the medical bay. I wasn't in any condition to protest.

Medic cut me off. I fought out of the anesthetic's fog to find myself finally, horribly alone again. I very nearly screamed. It had been nearly impossible the first time I had lost my ship. Now the ship was here but I couldn't hear voice. Medic was standing there and when I tried to sit up she pushed me back down.

"Sleep," she commanded. "I've just disabled them until I can figure out what's wrong. If you kept going like you were, you were going to kill someone. Probably a lot of someones, Fleet Commander."

Her voice was iron. She was the only person on the ship who had this kind of authority over me and I hated her for it.

When I woke again, my whole body was sore and my mind was quiet. The room was dim but not dark. No one was there, in the room or in my head when I reached out for them.

I hadn't dreamed at all. My mind was my own again, only my own. Thinking and moving and planning didn't feel half as exhausting as it had been before. I sat up slowly and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My feet were bare and the floor was cool.

I started humming. It was part of the Delsig funeral song that the tea pickers had sung for us and it echoed a little in the quiet room.

No voices answered back. No old faces swam in my vision, no voices whispered in my ear. There was no screaming.

Until I started, anyway.