Crude Exaggeration notes

title from THINGS WILL GET MUCH WORSE FROM HERE by kill bill and rav. and miku is there. the song is about how shitty generative ai is. so there's that

so before i start i realized a long time after i wrote this fic that i had a misunderstanding of. how exactly the explosion happened. and what all went down at providence headquarters. but the beauty of fanfiction is i can just pretend i meant for it to be uhh slightly reinterpetative of canon. that's all! that's what it was

White Knight wasn't a stranger to nightmares, but for that better part of a year away from Providence he had been blissfully dreamless, too exhausted and out of focus to have more than the occasional night of the same predictable dream, of being buried sweetly alive, comfortable and cool inside a dim white coffin.

i think. in a cruel and horrible way. being at the dam base as a defector was the best 8ish months of white knight's life. it was the most unmoored and the most uncertain and it was also undeniable the best for him, because for the first time in years he was outside of his damn office, he had this open freedom (within reason), he had closeness to people he cared about. he had a real and tangible goal. 'solve the evo problem' is such a huge and unattainable dream, especially for someone who - really - was never intended to be in the role of figurehead or leader. he was meant to be the shoot monsters guy.

so he goes into the dam base with just a handful of people he can trust (and. the monkey) and it's about fighting for his actual life and you know what things make sense again.

and then he has to go back <3 i think about if maybe he would have preferred to be killed out there

He was in no position to petition to their meager funding opportunities that neutralized wasn't enough, that any nanite was a danger

i distinctly remember at the end of the last episode being like Wait theyre not even gone. WK is neeeever getting out of that suit. yeah ! i don't actually know if he would be able to do it! and can you really blame him?? there's a lot of suspension of disbelief going on in this fic just for the idea that he would get out of the suit at all, let alone on this kind of timeline

The first day he'd watched it half-warily for a long stretch, almost expecting to blink and be back inside it, and then he'd been swept into a mess of blood tests and immunology panels

i think there was a fic or two that pointed out that soon as wk got out of his suit he was going to basically acquire every illness ever. the first like month after getting out of the suit has to be him just getting constant vaccinations and god's most evil cold

That night he dreamed that he could reach a hand inside himself and pull away globs of muscle and fat like wet handfuls of snow.

sometimes you have dreams that are terrifying and then you wake up and think back on them and nothing was really happening to be afraid of. sometimes you have a dream that seems find and you think back and it was a horrific situation. i think this was the latter for wk. in the moment it wasn't so bad. it was almost right

He reasoned with himself that the day he put it to rest would be the day he needed it again, so he didn't put it away.

well. ok. so.

when i like a character enough i start applying self harm analogies to them. unfortunately this has happened to white knight. and in a way this whole fic is about self harm. which is something i've only come to realize three months after publishing it.

the thing about self harm. uh. this'll get a little intense for what this is supposed to be. the thing about self harm is sometimes in the moment it is both the awful thing you know it is and also it is only stable thing in the world. and it is an addictive substance. you do it and you think ok, i'm never doing that again, it's done now, but you keep the tool nearby. or else the tool is part of your daily life anyway and now it has this new connotation and it sits in the back of your mind every time you have to pass it or use it for its intended purpose. and besides you don't want to put it away somewhere. because that'll be the day that you need it

wk has hated being kept in the office and he has hated being the figurehead of providence until the time that he did it to himself and then it became... something else. and now that he's finally out there's that haunting sense of, well, i might need to do it to myself again. there might come a time that doing it to myself will be the only thing that fixes the problem, and that might be soon

so he leaves that tool available

Six came into his office, uninvited, the way he always did: not there one moment and there the next, quiet enough to make White Knight jump.

anyway, this is the section where i realized aw fuck this isn't gonna just be horror smut. fuuuck there's gonna be an examination of his relationships with others & the world around him

White Knight couldn't claim to have ever understood him.

this is a lie

Six hummed a noise, and he at last looked away from the suit, gaze narrowing down on White Knight, but he stayed quiet long enough that White Knight almost relaxed. Nearly, anyway. Close enough to it that he got some work done, even with Six still there in the space with him.

in the original outline, six was supposed to take the role of calan later in this fic and have the moment of physical touch, but i wanted to separate the parts of the story a little more - make it feel like it lasted across the span of more days - and i think anything that has six touching wk is going to be very differently charged than someone like calan touching wk. instead two awkward men, one of them trying to quietly beg the other to come outside. like, man, the door to the cage is wide open. why are you still sitting in here?

plus six gets awareness of what's happening, and wk doesn't fully internalize that six knows. he feels judged but he doesn't realize that the judgment here is out of concern

Now that the light had gone out he couldn't help but think of the suit as dead, and when it died, he was meant to have died, too.

yada yada wk is dead but he's alive. you know this at this point. i am always saying this

Any lull in his work and he'd pick himself up out of his chair and come to this spot ... There was something magnetic about the wrongness of being outside of the exosuit, the same way as putting your tongue in the hole of a missing tooth.

again: this is an addictive process. eventually it becomes part of the routine.

Sometimes, when they had been at the plant, Six would rest a hand on his shoulder or back - had it been warm, then, nearly alive? Or cold like this, the inhuman metal offering no purchase?

was he a corpse all along? was he ever alive? was he always in this cycle?

He was close enough his breath could fog against the armor. It was the safest he had felt in days.

this is that moment when you get dangerously close to the relief of doing something terrible and pull yourself away because you know you should and then it hangs in your imagination for days on end because maybe it would have been good. to do it.

That night he took himself in hand and fucked his fist too-dry and too-fast and didn't, very carefully didn't, think about how it was the first time he had touched himself in months and how when he closed his eyes and curled into it he could only picture the massive looming white of his exosuit, the pale yellow of his visor, the sense of being too small and being too grand.

the vulnerability outside of the suit is really hard for him to adjust to. he can be touched and hurt now. he's human now. and it's very exciting and very frightening. he misses the power of the exosuit and he misses the sense of being 'taken care of' by something greater than himself and having it stand there in his space is a little overwhelming as a reminder of it. and it gets categorized in his very repressed emotional understanding as jerk off moments

He didn't care to get much closer to the Petting Zoo than the observation room, neutralized nanites or otherwise.

this part... idk about it. i just wanted another segment of 'real life' to give the sense of time passing, and i wanted wk to be seen by another person again, and i wanted to have him feel a physical touch and not be ready for it, but this whole part is a little forced i think. it doesn't REALLY fit. but it'd be empty without it?

it was kind of the only scenario i could come up with to have a lot of moving bodies and yet still have wk not be the center of it. he's only there for his image, basically. look, he's doing just fine. he's better. he's also been cured. (he is not doing great)

(Then there had been the few humans who had escaped their detection in EVO form; they were fortunate there hadn't been any serious injuries.)

i refuse to believe there's a particularly easy way to identy human vs animal evos lol they definitely just had some regular guys locked up with the wild beasts

his only, deeply far fetched idea so far was to hand it over to Salazar and let him run wild.

I think i was gonna have caesar show up at one point which would have been so scary

Everyone he crossed paths with gave him that same surprised kind of look, like they'd forgotten he could be there, physically, human.

he gives himself this look when he catches his reflection

"Not gonna be hosting any EVOs anymore, after all - save for the one, I guess."

don't even worry about rex he's totally fine he's special nothing bad will ever happen

Calan looked at him keenly, something sharp in his eyes. The captain had never been especially ambitious, but he was clever, which made him all the more dangerous. "I know it's a little up in the air right now, but whatever becomes of Providence, if you've got room for me, I'll be there. Me and the men, we'll have your back."

calan wants him BADLY

Six, nearly seven years,

we're going to pretend i know how long it's been since the event

It hadn't happened. They hadn't even made contact - but the almost-touch sizzled on White Knight's skin for the rest of the day, like the churning static of a sleeping limb, the broken promise of it clinging to him.

trying to really convey the sense of god he wants to be touched but god he can't handle being touched. a lot of this was in part inspired by conversation with bamboo hi bamboo. esp their ideas about postcanon wk basically needing training/practice to get used to human touch again

Seven months straight of being more than human

we're also going to pretend i'm consistent with how long they were at the dam base.

He had taken himself out of the cage and locked the door behind him and only realized now, too late, that the cage was a kennel, sweet comfort.

they say that you get worse before you get better when it comes to healing. wk doesn't really have the patience to understand that. he sees himself spiraling a bit and catastrophizes. maybe he should have stayed in the suit after all. maybe he should have actually killed himself with that explosion. maybe he should have just done better and all this shit with black knight would never have come to pass.

He saw the glow, first, yellow dappled with shadows, seeping out across the pale metal, and he heard the faint whir of moving machinery, and he didn't have time to so much as lift his head before the cold fingers closed around his wrist.

so for a long while before committing to writing this fic i was trying to figure out if i wanted this to be actually happening or not. as in, did this physically occur? was it another one of the nightmares? i don't know that i've actually decided one way or another. i think i've written it to be implied to be real, but there's nothing that separates it entirely from the nightmares wk has been having, so there's a very real possibility that he just dreamed this up.

Its hand shifted, pressing a thumb into his palm.

i don't know that i really got the sense of 'terrifying but comforting' the way i wanted to? this is supposed to be frightening if exciting for white knight but it's also supposed to be like... the suit is trying to protect him. he knows he's being protected, which he hates, but which he craves. he is helpless. he wants to be helpless?

the way i put it in the outline was "it has him. it had him. it has him again"

It touched his cheek. Its hands were warming, the live electronics inside blooming soft heat. ... This was touch, too, nearly human, so familiar that it felt like a wound in his gut.

part of the reason i had calan reach but not make contact was because i wanted to have wk's first gentle physical touch be 'stolen' by the exosuit. like he had the clinical touches from doctors and stuff but no one's touched him and now the fucking exosuit is doing it. inexorably tied together

When it put him on his back over his desk - it picked him up, as easily as if he weighed nothing, a show of power he couldn't process

he's the small one now! he's the weak one! he's vulnerable and soft. he has no reference point for this.

he thought for a delirious moment that it was going to fuck him, somehow, that its metal would split smoothly open to show something he never knew was there.

i thought about writing this. but the mechanics (lol) of getting the suit to fuck him were a little too complicated, and maybe a little too intimate for this, and also i couldn't figure out how to write 'the suit has a cock' without it feeling a little too silly for the tone of the fic. better for the sense of desperation and semi-panic and weird devotion to have it just jerk him off

He should have been afraid. He was afraid, breath coming in short stutters while the suit fisted his cock just in the side of too tight, leaning close over top of him, but the alien allure overwhelmed it.

... ok, partly he likes it so much because i really didn't want this to feel outright nonconsensual. it's all very metaphorical anyway but i didn't want it to be something wk was fighting against outright. i ain't really about that

but also! again! in retrospect! this is a self harm theme. it should be frightening. it is frightening. it is also so magnetic and desirable. there can never quite be enough. yearning & wanting & hating. this will hurt him more than it will help him and it will leave him cored-out and wanting it again.

It wrapped his thigh around its hip to brace that hand on the desk near his head, cornering him there, crowding him into the limited space, like he was something small, helpless, like it could protect him there, wall him in with its body.

it's boxing him into a small space like how he was kept in a small space inside the suit, like how he was kept inside the office, etc

It stood over him a long while after, the eerie emptiness of its skull staring down at him, long enough that White Knight started to worry he would have to find a way to muscle its weight off of him.

this shock of fear like. ok wait is this real real. is he going to have to shove this thing to the ground with his dick out. did this actually happen. and then the suit actually moving on its own is almost worse because he doesn't have the confirmation of reality after all

And worse - worse, after long desperate untouched months he was still hard, even with his breath heaving and sweat beading on his skin and his come cooling on his fingers. He curled his fingers around himself again helplessly

hahaaa i forgot i put this in. this wasn't in the outline. but - hey - again - the sh theme - there's no 'climax' that's satisfying, there's no end point except when you decide it and it always feels like too little. a little extra torture for wk realizing that he wants that vulnerability and he wants to hurt this way

Or else he had made the worst mistake of his life letting Salazar work on the suit, months ago, or - fuck, what did it matter.

in the outline "he s going to kill Caesar salazar" this is probably caesar's fault somehow right.

He didn't put it away.

Yeag.

"I've been busy," White Knight said, lying too easily, and though he wanted, deeply, to ask Six to stay, he didn't.

god forbid you learn anything from the highly metaphorical experience of fucking the armor that kept you separated from your fellow men & marked you as more-than-human