Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Elliot Manor is silent. Elliot Manor is dark.

After such an excruciatingly long day, it’s a faint but welcome relief. The night is ripe for sleep and the low battery warning flashing on the bottom right corner of N’s visor won’t let him forget it. It’s like a yawn is hanging to the back of his throat, but it just refuses to make the jump out of his mouth.

The dim light of the basement hangs above, but that’s not what’s keeping sleep from him. It’s V he’s worrying about. She’s sitting right in front of him, arms loose to her sides, her head bobbing up and down, drifting in and out of consciousness. It almost looks like exhaustion.

Her visor flickers on and off. Sometimes it stays dark long enough for N to see his own reflection on it, legs crossed and hunching forward. He’s so tired. His hair is a mess. Sometimes it stays on long enough for her eyes to dart around the room, wide as egg yolks. 

One time, they don’t flicker off. It seems to take a moment for V to register N’s even there. She usually only does that when she’s lost her glasses.

“O-oh hi N!” — She smiles, though her eyes stay wide. Her arm jitters. 

“Hey glasses. Long day huh?” — He does his best to smile through the fatigue. 

“You tell me! Hah-hah. Cleaned up after the gala, on my own. Where even are the other workers?!” — She’s trying to move her arms, but her shoulder servos are offline. — “But it’s all nice and tidy now. Tessa’s folks are gonna love it.”

A grimace threatens to break through N’s smile. The gala was two weeks ago. He’s too tired to come up with anything to respond, aware as he is of how quickly silence tends to dig into V.

“Hey. You look… Uh… Roughed up.” — She says. Her smile warms up the basement, even as it wavers with worry. He really should’ve at least gotten his hair under control before this.

“Oh. Pfft. One of the Frumpterbucket kids. You know how they are.” — N pulls a bit at his hair, but abandons the attempt immediately when something catches his eyes. The way she’s looking at him. The white light of her left eye is leaking out through a crack on her visor. 

“The little runts! You should’ve stayed with Tessa, dude.” — A long, gaunt something descends from the ceiling from behind V as she speaks, staying just out of the light. It wraps around her right shoulder, and starts to pull. Her left eye twitches.

“I wish… She and J got to stay in the library, but her folks had me help with dessert.” — N tries to keep his eyes off of her shoulder, but that becomes impossible as the thing wrapped around it adjusts its grip, pushing far enough into the dim light for its white, wrinkled exterior, not quite skin or plastic, to be fully visible.

“Where are they any–” — Her face contorts. The joints in her shoulder creak. Her arm visibly stretches to the limits of the elastic bellows covering its inner mechanisms, and a damage alarm croaks. — “Any– Anyw– Any–...”

N fights with the impulse to cover his eyes. His hands are shaking. Faint snapping, barely audible behind her voice, tells him the soft fabric covers that protect the main servo of her left shoulder are giving out.

“Any– Any– Anywa– Any–...”

Her eyes drift off into the dark, quivering. N can’t tell if the little white shine below her eye is a crack, or a tear. 

“Any– An– Any– Where–...”

He can’t help but whimper when the ripping goes silent and another noise begins: snapping and clacking at the same time. Snap-snap-snap. Clack-clack-clack. With the cadence of typing on a keyboard. The insulation of the five or so dozen wires connecting the mechanisms of her arm to the core is tearing up, and one by one every little threaded cord of copper inside them is unraveling, stretching, then snapping.

“Where– They– Any–...”

The frequency of the snaps picks up. That means the thinner bundles of wires that go all the way to her fingers have fully broken off: the main group of cables that power and control her wrist, elbow and shoulder are next. With every snap, the gap between her shoulder and torso grows slightly. V trails off as her visor fills up with error codes, one after another. 

N tries to keep his mind off her voice by counting them, then adding up the numbers — 102, 303, 448, 670, 685. It doesn’t do much for him now that he knows what each one means. Damaged connection. Damaged motor. Fine motion controller can’t be found. Articulation missing. Tears sometimes glitch and show up over the error windows, entirely ruining his effort.

“An–... Whe… Are th…– Any…”

The snaps stop, every last wire broken. Loud creaking takes its place. The main servo group that allows V’s shoulder to move is bending and stretching with unbearable sluggishness. The noise just keeps going. It doesn’t stop. N’s squirming inside his own plastic skin, clutching his hands against his chest. A scream so badly wants to break out but it can’t. V’s mumbling mingles with the creaking and becomes a sort of constant cacophony. He waits and waits for it to end, but it just keeps going, going, going, relieving only slightly when a second limb, N can’t see what exactly it is, emerges from the darkness and wraps around V’s wrist and helps the first one pull, changing the pitch of the creaking slightly and making the metal give out a little faster, and through all that N’s mind can’t stop toying with questions, questions like why, just why is it taking so damn long? She’s done this a hundred times already, why can’t she do it quicker? Does she never get bored? Of them? Of me? Of how I still can’t stomach what she’s doing? Of—

Finally, mercifully, a loud snap ends the cacophony, halting N’s train of thought. V’s arm breaks off, and he winces back. Her face is deadly still: visor wrapped in error codes, mumbling “and” over and over. Her upper torso slides off the chair, head hanging to her right.

Both limbs briefly return from the darkness to set V upright. A third one — a long tentacle terminated by a human hand — emerges and immediately sinks inside V’s head through a hole above her nape. Some button or switch in there clicks, and her visor resets.

“--and… And– Oh, uhm… Where was…? Right, where are those two anyway?”

She’s smiling again. Something inside N lets up, but he can’t answer yet. He tries, but nothing comes up. Every internal process spirals off into tangents and tangents and times out, failing to output anything. He can’t move an inch.

“O– Ow! S-sorry, I think I’ve got a sore arm. Ouch. Must be all that cleaning…”

Through the corner of his eye, he can glimpse oil pouring out of the gaping hole where her shoulder used to be.

“... N? W-what’s up? Is something the matter? O– Ow!” — V looks vaguely aware that something’s amiss but it seems to evade her, even as the oil streams over her dress, stains spreading outward and covering her chest. She waits for an answer that N wants to provide but can’t, finding himself too far from his own body to make it say anything. Her voice lowers to almost a whisper.  — “Oh God… Did something happen with you and Tessa…?”

Her remaining arm shakes and halts, then again and again. A hint of dread creeps up her face, putting pressure on N’s chest as it does. It’s all going wrong. Maybe if he says something now, right now, he can still salvage it, but when he begs to himself for an answer he won’t give it. She’s horrified now, still trying to hide it, but still not aware.

“Agh. I can’t… I don’t know why I… Sorry. I-if you need someone to talk–”

Her eyes disappear, replaced by a flashing pause symbol.

A hundred bright eyes open in the darkness around N. Dozens of limbs ambush them both, a few of them like cameras or projectors, the rest some manner of sharp grabber, hand or claw. His worn optic sensors can’t parse the movement around him. Dread should be taking him over, but he can only feel a numb wariness.

Falsetto Voice. Oh Brother… This Is Not How You Promised To Do Things… You’re Making This Harder For Her.

Talk. Come on. Move!

Whisper. Would You Like To Take A Break? Shoulder Pat.

Something wet and greasy lands on his shoulder, sending shocks across his limbs. The numbness vanishes in an instant, panic forcing itself in its place too fiercely to hold it back. A shout and gasp leaves his mouth as he returns to himself. 

“No. No please.”

That’s The Spirit! But Remember, N…

Something grabs him by the cheek, forcing him to look at the blinding lights.

You Made A Promise. Threatening Glare. If You Break It, I Won’t Take Her Memories When Your Turn Is Up. You Don’t Want Her To Remember Being In Your Shoes, Do You?

He struggles to get words out of his mouth. It’s like his jaw is gummed up, or rusted, moving so slowly and with so much effort.

“Please just make it quicker. Please.”

Giggle. Fine By Me.

Suddenly, it’s like all of those limbs and lights were never there. It’s him and V again, pause symbol flashing for a few more moments before her eyes come back and she starts speaking again.

“--to about it… Y-you can tell me, a-alright? Gosh, I’m a bit of a mess today, I’m sorry.”

Deep breath — release. Hold it together. 

He hides everything haunting him in the gap between this second and the next. He’ll go back to it later. It’s not important right now. Not as much as V.

“Naah. I’m fine! Bit low on batteries though… Can’t wait to clock out.”

For just a little longer.

Something different enters the scene: a stark white right arm, wrist decorated by a hazard stripe, wrapped by soft and bony limbs. They’re holding it up to the wound on V’s shoulder.

It’ll be worth it.

“Hey uh… We’re staying up for a few more hours, right?” — V says. Somehow, her pained smile can still look sheepish. Somehow, it stays sheepish when a sort of crab claw starts to dig at her wound, gouging out what’s left of the articulation.

For us both.

“Yeah! What’cha thinking? I don’t think we’re allowed to go out for fireflies today… Or all week for that matter. You know. Cyn. Heh.”

The new arm is slowly lined up with the open shoulder, carefully closing in, inching forward — then pushed inward, gracelessly forced through remaining splinters of wire and membrane. 

“W-what’d she do now?” — V blurts out.

“Talked back to Tessa’s mom. Again. It’s fine though, it’s not been… Great, for her lately.” — He eyes the darkness around him. What for? Looking for approval from the devil herself?

Without a joint to keep the new arm in place, it immediately starts to slough off. Forgot a part, maybe? Another claw immediately jumps in to correct the mistake, armed with a welder that slides into the wound and flares on straight away. There’s still some sensitive membrane in there getting burned up, melting together with remains of oil. V’s smile vanishes and she drowns the basement in screams. 

The sound threatens to pull N’s soul from his body, somewhere far where he can’t hear it — but he has enough in him to hang on. Between cries, V’s mouthing something, like she doesn’t know the pain she’s in.

“Hey-heyheyhey. Stop. ‘s alright, ‘salright. Don’t talk.” — He reaches out, holding his palms at her.

She still tries to talk through it, but the words don’t come out right. It’s ripping at him, drilling into his audio input. Every other drone had lost their voice by now, but V’s won’t leave her. Mangled as it is, she’s still holding on to it. That’s just cruel.

It’s not until a few moments later, when the welder finally turns off, that she manages to say something. It comes chopped up, halfway between stutters and clipping.

“I-I just– I’m not feeling well… Do y– thi–nk that you can… S–tay with me, f-for a while, N?”

He’s barely there, losing track of what he’s looking at between blinks. But from the pit of numbness weighing on his chest, N manages to drag out the warmest smile he has left. 

“You didn’t need to ask, buddy. I’m with ya. Wanna read something together?”

A hand opens up a latch on the new arm, holding what looks like a tester inside it. A jolt flashes out, and the arm shifts: the hand retracts inside the forearm, and three sharp fingers slide out. The limbs unwrap from the new arm, but they don’t quite vanish behind V, instead showing interest in her left arm and leg.

“I d-n’t thin-k I c-can read right now… M–uh sight -‘s blurry. Cou-ld you read fo-r me? Pl–ease.”

“Sure can. Just stay there, will ya? I’ll stay here too. What about uh… Dog facts?”

Keeping up a calm voice hurts, but it’s the only thing that comes to mind. Focusing on finding the right tone, the right pitch, the right cadence for it to feel like normal. It feels surgical, like finding the right spot in the skin to dig in with a scalpel. Is it even helping her? Is it making things worse? 

The pulling starts again. It does seem to be going faster this time around.

“Sou– Soun-ds nice.” 

She seems a little bit calmer. Is she? Is that softness in her voice? Resignation? If anything in that strange half-aware nightmare of V’s feels even slightly better, she’s not saying. She can’t say. He can’t tell.

No choice but to keep going.

“What abouuut… Chihuahuas?” — A screenshot of the index of Dogs From A to Z covers up half his sight. They’d gotten to Golden Retrievers a while ago, but she wasn’t awake during that. Last she was, they read the page on Canadian Inuits, and that comes right before Chihuahuas.

“D-idn’t we r-ad tha-t alre-ady?” — Ripping, clacking, and snapping swim under her stutters.

“Oh. Mmmmaybe Great Danes?” — She can remember that. She remembers, even though she wasn’t conscious. Is this what it was like for her? A half-remembered dream of his voice reading over dog facts?

It gives him a bit more warmth. Just a bit more to clutch to his chest and not let go when he wants to get away. 

“Mhm.” — A whisper barely peeking over the creaking of her joints being pulled apart.

“Great Danes, also known as…” — He clears his throat, and prepares his very best German. — “ Deutsche Dogge!” — He holds that second D for half a second, deciding how to pronounce the rest, and likely doing it wrong.

Moments start to wash away with each sentence he reads. The change of pitch of V’s articulations giving way gets buried under a long paragraph about the drooping jowls of Great Danes and a little smile from her. She says something like those dogs look so silly , N can’t quite tell because she’s faded to a whisper and the stutters don’t help, but she isn’t screaming anymore.

When her last leg has to go away, just as new replacements for the other leg and arm arrive and make their way inside where welding flames melt the remaining wires to an ugly blob of plastic, he’s talking about how curious and gentle Great Danes can be, chuckling out loud and definitely overselling it as he describes to V how he imagines a huge droopy dog scared at Tessa’s loud chirpy yelling.

When new claws appear and start to rip into her belly, he pushes that away with a tangent about how much Great Danes love to play with younger puppies.

When they realize the wound is not large enough and they get to pulling her torso apart, almost rending it into two halves, oil and circuits and joints and wires spilling out and drooping down to the floor, he’s flipped pages to another chapter discussing how tall Great Danes are and just how many hold height records.

When they bring a clump of burned flesh out of the dark and shove it together with the remaining beams and circuits, he’s moved on to the floppy ears of Great Danes, wondering how heavy they must be and if they maybe have to train to be able to pull them up. 

When the flesh squirms and stretches into creases it shouldn’t, tightly hugging the core holding V’s soul and mind, her mechanical heart, and something burns or pinches and it pulls away to try again, sprawling all over her hollow inside and making friends with the new welded limbs, fitting into the new joints and moving them around, he’s listing the types of coats Great Danes are known to have and yelping at a photo of a black-white mottled Harlequin coat.

And throughout all that V locks her eyes on his, and sometimes he locks back, heartening her with more facts about Great Danes, keeping the widest smile he can even when great machine wings are drilled into her back, even as those wings try to fold into her and there’s not enough room inside so she has to be opened up again so some bits of burned flesh can be digged out to make space.

Even when the hours stop having meaning and the surgery goes on and on with no end in sight.

Even when a human hand gently brings her old severed arm still wet with oil to her face, and she laps it up like a thirsty, hungry, feral Great Dane that breaks into wild laughter when finally sated.

Even as the laughter turns into a howl and he’s no longer sure if she can hear him or if she’s there any longer.

Because if she’s still there, she won’t have to remember now. Because if he keeps his promise, she’ll be made to forget it.

And even if he has to remember it, for her, it’ll be worth it.

Chapter Text

V wakes up to the world flickering. Yellow blotches of light quiver and fade into a dark background before emerging again. Her processors aren’t warm enough yet to process the image, but she can vaguely identify the outlines of error pop-ups dotting the sides of her visor.

A strange, apathetic unease wriggles behind her eyes when the scene remains blotchy and fuzzy for what seems to be five or ten minutes. She tries to request time and date from her OS, but she can’t recall how to — or maybe it’s not responding.

The haze of cold, slow processors keeps smothering her. It should have dispersed hours ago. Hours? Has it been hours, maybe days like this? A rising sense of alarm pushes against her chest, trying to claw its way out. 

There’s just not enough processing time available for her to put together a train of thought. Something else hogging it? Just afraid? Sleepy? Damaged? Nothing makes sense out of the gate and she can’t think her way through it either. Alone? Trapped? Crushing? 

CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK. Something goes online and connects to her processors, making blips and clicks right above her face. Then, the world goes bright.

Blinding white forces itself through her optics, and hundreds of gigabytes of sensory data choke up her already stuttering core. It hurts. Automated calibration helps offset the pain after some days, decreasing light exposure by some percentage she doesn’t register, but it refuses to go away completely. 

There’s too much going into her eyes, and not just light. She’s seeing too much, too many things at once, dozens of them shouting for attention. She can see a wall extending behind her without turning. Little red dots of heat against a cold green background, matching with the most intense patches of light. Estimates of relative distance from phantom structures that appear for split seconds in the fuzzy blotches surrounding her. Some kind of targeting or identification system misfires against the visual artifacting caused by her failing optics, insisting there’s something somewhere in there that it can’t recognize.

It hurts. IT HURTS.

But even when she closes her eyes, it doesn’t stop hurting, because closing her eyes isn’t doing anything. Even when she does it everything is still there. V considers that it might be another nightmare, but there’s no mistaking the clarity of her own voice blaring out.

“Stop it. Stop it.”

She desperately fumbles with her hands, rubbing them against her face, trying to find her eyes and block out the light, the little red dots dancing around in what she’s realizing must be an infrared view. It takes dozens of days of attempts to finally figure out that they’re not where you’d look for them, but right above that, extending in a line across the forehead that she can’t cover all at once, especially when she realizes that her right hand isn’t a hand anymore, but a set of three thin claws sharp as knives. And it hurts, it also hurts to move them, from the fingers to the shoulder it—

Well Well Well. Someone’s Finally Waking Up! How Are You Feeling, V?

“Cyn? Cyn?!” — V shouts, then lets out a shy mewl. Finally something that makes sense. But an answer doesn’t come for many hours, and there’s no sign of the tiny drone anywhere in the white abyss. — “Where are you? Have– Have you seen my glasses?”

Oh, But I’m Right Here…

An itch flares behind her nape. Click. Something in V’s optics adjusts, reining back the blinding light, rendering the blotches into shapes — and the red dots into eyes. Hundreds of eyes and lamps surrounding her, held up by gangly things vaguely like bone but that reflect light like plastic.

And it speaks with Cyn’s voice. 

Surgery Equals Success. Cheers, V! 

Surgery. Pressure mounts on V’s chest when entire days, maybe weeks of information flash back to her as she’s realizing where she is: sitting on a chair, in the old basement, lit from above by yellow light.

Surgery. Her processors are catching up and time starts making a little sense. N’s voice and thousands of limbs descending from the dark to tear her apart. With claws pulling things out of her and pushing other things back in. Her arms tremble, prickle and sting. A heavy weight begins to crush her chest, forcing her to exhale over and over.

V’s eyes slowly shift toward the far side of the room, hoping not to find what takes some time to recognize — N, against the wall, slumping to his right, arms hanging loose. His hair is an oil-drenched mess.

“Hey glasses. Good morning.” — He says, and smiles. His eyes drift around erratically, never meeting hers.

Anyways. It’s Your Turn Now, Big Brother! 

The chair is pulled from behind, throwing V on her hands and knees. Her arms hardly have enough strength to stop her face from hitting the ground, and absolutely not to set her upright. But a quick look shows her those aren’t her arms. Not her legs, either. They’re gaunt things, but bulky and rigid where they should be thin and flexible. Where did hers go?

V, Would You Distract Him For Me? It’s Easier To Work With.

The sound of Cyn’s voice is registering, but it isn’t processing. V can’t pull her mind off those arms, the way they hurt every time a joint moves, like something is getting pinched between the moving servos. When Cyn talks, V hears a distant echo struggling to peek over the sound of her own breathing.

Oh, That. But You Don’t Need Your Arms To Talk, Don’t You?

There’s something inside them. It wriggles, it quivers, it slithers. It recoils when the joints move, and then it settles right back. That’s what’s hurting. She can see it moving under the elastic covers protecting the mechanisms of her fingers. Those aren’t her arms, her eyes. None of that is her. It has to stop. Maybe tearing it off will help. Quick. Quick. Before it wriggles up to her head.

CLACK. The chair slams down, pulling her out of it. Turning her head so quickly fills her with vertigo, eyes bouncing from corner to corner of her dizzyingly wide vision before finally settling — just in time to see a hand pulling N by the hair and plopping him on the chair, where he immediately sags and nearly falls over. Something slithers across her forehead.

Head Tap. Long Hey. Maybe I Ripped Out Your Ears By Accident.

“What… What do you mean by his turn?” — V says. Even as dazed as she is, the answer doesn’t escape her.

Stalling, V? But Oh, I Can Show You What I Mean. Loading Special Care Dot Ee Ex Ee.

A faint “no” dies in her mouth. She tries to look down, keep her eyes from N, how he’s failing over and over to straighten himself, like he just doesn’t have the strength to, but no matter how far she turns her head he’s still in the periphery.

“Cyn? Is V… Is she still there?” — N’s voice. There’s no answer.

She can still see them encroaching him. A claw descends and wraps around his forearm, first pulling slowly, then picking up. Nothing comes out of her mouth no matter how much she pushes. Every fiber of V remembers the dream of his voice, every moment of hurt still so clear to memory, beginning with her arm, just like that. Trembling overtakes her. She sinks and simmers somewhere between the new aches and the remembered ones, on the verge of drowning.

But from somewhere under the surface, a jolt of desperation rises and shocks V to her feet. The arms push her up and pass her weight to the legs, which bend and quiver. Standing is a balancing act, arms and legs inching back and forth searching for equilibrium. She’s so much taller than she should be.

“I’m– I’-m here!” — V screams.

She tries to hobble to N, but almost immediately a wave of vertigo sends her crashing down to her knees. As she shakes, something is sloshing inside, like the weight of her torso is bouncing back and forth in her abdomen with the rhythm of water swashing in a glass. A look down doesn’t help — a black liquid, thicker and redder than oil, wets the tattered remains of her uniform and trickles down to the floor.

“Please go rest. I’ll join ya in a…” — N whispers, and trails off.

She tries to say something more, but her throat clamps up when she realizes just how much her body hurts. Whatever is inside her, it’s bouncing into protrusions, exposed wires, and hydraulics, getting pierced and cut up. Hunching over and staying still helps, but the hurt lingers. 

That’ll Take A Bit To Fix Up. Don’t Worry, Human Flesh Is Nothing If Not Flexible. Giggle.

Human flesh.

V fights for every second of processing time she can take back from the panic, slowly working through what that means. She gets scarcely fractions of cycles at a time, inches and inches of safety away from the pounding, quivering and aching.

But it tumbles down again when the groans of metal stretching grow too loud to ignore — and barely a second after, a snap and a scream follow. N is squirming. His arm is gone. Oil pours from the wound. She hides her eyes away, once again failing to push him off her sight. She can’t escape the way he tries to choke back sobs.

“I’m s-orr-y– Cyn, th-t was so loud.” — He manages to say.

Will That Be A Sufficient Demonstration?

It’s all so much. It’s all so much. Aching. Dizziness. N’s voice. Cyn’s voice. Her demands for something. Breathing. Beating. Trembling. Oil slithering down her face, torso. Arms and legs not hers. Not even twenty continuous cycles to process it all.

Every inch she gets back slips away right as she snatches it. Can’t stand. Can’t speak. Can’t think. Can’t even breathe right. Desperation is boiling away into exasperation. He doesn’t deserve that. Of all drones, of all people, he’s the last in line for this. It’s so maddening. It’s enraging. It doesn’t matter what’s happening to her, it can’t ever happen to him. 

That’s something she can hold onto. 

Answer Equals False. We Will Take That For A No.

And it’s right back down in an instant. Breathing faster. Even less cycles. More aches. Oil streaming over her eyes. More trembling. Nausea dancing its way down her throat, right to her core. Lights, lights, lights all around her.

She looks down at the left arm, the one that still has a hand. Not hers, trembling, painful, so useless. 

The straw glides down, and the camel’s back shatters. 

V screams to the top of her voicebox, then shoves the hand into her jaw — and crushes it between her teeth. Wires spark and snap, oil bursts into her mouth. For a moment, it’s just her mouth and the hand, and the world grows dull.

Her scream dies down over the next few seconds. Each tooth drills relentlessly into the hand, drowning out every noise and sensation. It takes some time for them to let go, leaving behind mangled fingers, a crushed palm, and a growling, hurtful quiet. Then, her voicebox starts to stutter. Only it isn't stuttering: it's laughing. Low, creeping laughter bursting from inside. Why? Why am I...? It's the oil traveling down her gullet. Horror grips her, then sickness, reeling her from what used to be herself.

It Tastes Good, Doesn't It? 

War drums beat on V’s chest. If a way to rip this voice to little squirming shreds showed itself, she’d take it, but none will, and none would help N. That claw on the right arm looks so much more helpful all of a sudden, but if she can’t stand she can’t do anything with it. There’s no other way out. There’s nothing else she can do.

She looks at N slumping in the chair, unmoving. He’s looking somewhere near her, but not quite. Maybe following the sound, not the sight. The oil-slick remains of a joint peek out of the wound. His mouth is slightly open.

Look. Keep Him Talking, And I’ll Take His Memories. Just Promise That, And We’ll Be Done In Datetime Plus Ten Em. He Chose That For You, You Know?

As if he had a choice. As if N could have done anything else. But it still hurts to know — just how long did that last? Feigning that cheery voice of his for hours, going on and on about dogs while watching her get ripped up. How did he do it?

How is she going to do it?

Her lips quiver with a jagged sigh. 

“I’ll do it.” — She wants to add just make it quick, but that won’t come out. Does Cyn really need this? Is she just torturing her?

N’s head moves, almost imperceptibly so. An inch up at most, like he’s startled by something. 

Great Choice. I Suggest Looking Away, Though. Soft Whisper. If You Can. 

Getting up and walking isn’t an option — so crawling it is. One hand over the other, because something’s wrong with her feet and they slide right off the ground, dragging for miles and miles and miles. Moving hurts a little less, or maybe she’s getting used to it; every sting pushes a hint of anger up her throat, tightening it.

V drags herself all the way to N’s left side, opposite to the wound, so she can pick up his remaining hand. She almost forgets the claws and nearly cuts him up. Her wounded left moves so jittery and slowly that she has to try a few times to grasp his hand, which he shows no sign of feeling. His arm hangs loose, steadily swinging back and forth.

“You there?” — She whispers.

“V. Ple-ase don’t look.” — He holds each vowel for a moment. — “I don’t know wh–”

“Sh. We should… Can we talk about something else?”

When she sees movement around them, her eyes fix on his hand, the glow on its back, the plastic edges, the wrinkles of the joints pushing against the elastic covers around them. It doesn’t let her hide away from the things encroaching onto her periphery, but it might be enough.

He’s shivering, or trembling. The sound of metal grazing metal and the white reflections flashing just beyond N’s head — the new right arm is going in.

“What about… What uh…” — Her voice cracks. Nothing comes out, and she locks up, trawling around her RAM for something, anything. Is that a whisper? Is he crying? Is it just a noise?

Then it breaks into a whimper, sending her reeling. She tries to close her eyes in a reflex, but it’s not what she sees: it’s the noises. Steel grinding, plastic cracking, fabric ripping. It’s not working out. Her hand clutches N’s with all its strength. What’s Cyn going to do now? How much worse can she make it?

V’s chest pounds, adding rhythm to the cacophony. Entire months are slipping by. Nothing comes out of her mouth. Vertigo spins her around like a basketball on a fingertip.

“ Out theeere…There’s a world out--side of Yonkers… ” — N whispers, pulling V back to reality. There’s a cadence to it. He’s singing.

“Is that…” — Disbelief widens her eyes. — “That was such a long time–”

“C-’mon, hel–p me out here. Way out there…”

“ Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby…” — The lyrics come to her clear as a crystal. The immediate panic begins to wash off, and she thinks she can see a bit of peace in N’s eyes. Seeing what she wants to see, maybe? It doesn’t matter. She holds his hand with all the strength left in hers.

Just beyond the song, the world goes on as normal. There’s still creaking, ripping, tangles of limbs around them. N’s face bends and contorts when the claws dig in and let a welder into the wound, so it’s up to her to keep the song going.

“Out theeeeereee, full of shine and full of sparkle. Close your eyes, and see it glisten, Barnaby…”

Each word she manages to squeeze out pushes the hands of the clock a little bit, slow agony letting up. She hopes, no, knows it’s helping. Even if it’s the faintest of comforts, it has to. Nothing in N’s face and voice tells her so now, but she knows.

“Put on your Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out theeee-re” — V’s throat aches, but it aches warmly.

“Get o-t the br-illi– tine and di-dime cigars…” — His voice comes through so softly, even through the flare of the welder.

“We’re gonna find adventure in the eeee-vening aiiiii-r…”

N’s hand gets ripped from her by a claw. It pulls so feverishly that small splotches of oil leap out of his shoulder onto her face. His howls lock her mouth and kill the song, sending renewed trembles through her spine. 

Time skips around, forth some minutes, then back to her nightmare passing through her eyes, then forth again, leaving gaps in the present. Only when the final snap cuts the wailing short does she gather the strength to start again.

“Girls in white, in a perfumed night, where the lights are bright as the staaars…”

Somewhere between the song and the nightmare, she loses track. Hundreds of hours pass by like slides, one after another, and she’s watching them from afar, clutching and fiddling with her hands.

Claws and hands and other things fly down and feast on N. Vultures to a carcass, munching on his warmth, ripping it from him and leaving cold, white, bulky limbs behind. The song ends and starts over as a long, jagged blade goes up above his eyes and cuts open a line.

And all the while, she only watches. Her chest burns with rage. 

“Get out your feathers, your patent leathers, your beads and buckles and bows…” 

The next verse digs in and refuses to come out of her mouth. Little hooks grasp the edges of the cut, forcing the plastic aside. She feels herself swinging back and forth with vertigo, her lips twitching but failing to coordinate. V’s sinking, drifting, phasing out of reality by moments, held in place only by wriggles and aches snaring her joints.

Perhaps noticing her silence, N slowly shifts his eyes to her — and then fills in the next verse.

“For there's no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes…”

His voice rips her back into reality — again. Yet again. It inflames her. Why should he? Why should he have to? It’s up to her now. Can’t allow it yet another time. Never. The next verse comes out raspy, jagged at first, before settling back where it should.

“Put on your Sunday clothes when you feel down and out…” — She sings, fixing her eyes on N’s as his do the same. If he can even see the anger in her face, he can’t show it. Before he can follow up, she goes again — “Strut down the street and have your picture took…”

The hooks squirm inside the cut, tugging at bundled wires and chips with so much force that some snap and fly off into the darkness. N’s eyes disappear and a red warning sign wraps his face. Those were his optics. 

They grab onto the snapped wires and stretch them, welding their tips onto something else — five pieces of jagged metal, tipped by large bulbs that start glowing yellow when the connection is finished. His face twists into a grimace, mouth agape and head squirming. 

“Dressed like a dream your spirits seem to turn about…”

New chips are shoved into his head together with the bulbs, so awkwardly and carelessly that they just can’t fit through. But they push, jam, ram, until the shell of his head cracks and lets the new bits pass, making a horribly uneven line of five bulbs over the wound, gushing with oil that blackens N’s silver hair.

Everything around her shakes with ire. The rage burns every passing slide of time into her memory, branding them in red onto her ROM drives. The new limbs, hollow, cold, hanging idly off the wounds. His head bleeding black for hours. Now, the vultures coming for his torso; making six deep cuts over and across it, then widening and ripping until the wounds join together and let the innards spew out. Wires and flexible beams buckle into a sort of bowl, catching some of them as they fall.

The song has finished for a fourth time, and she doesn’t have the strength to sing it any more. She’s crushing the already wounded hand with the claws, not realizing it. Her eyes are on N, and how his lips have started to quiver and move when the song ended. In spite of the wound, of the limbs that return and stuff his torso with something red and soggy, he doesn’t look like he’s sobbing.

He’s mouthing something, isn’t he? 

“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers…”

Then a pair of claws wrap around his head and crush it like a bug.

More oil spills out, covering the bits and pieces that scatter onto the floor. The bulbs across his head pop out but don’t fall. His visor goes dark.

The world stops. Final slide. There’s no sensations, no sights, save for a crushing weight on her core. Only there’s something else: Cyn with her, in the darkness.

Enough For Now. You Kept Your Promise, I Keep Mine.

He Didn’t Do So Good A Job, Though. Giggle.

Enjoy The Memories, V.

They Will Stay With You For A Long Time.

Chapter Text

The snowstorm outside has calmed to the point that the buzzing of the landing pod’s lights has become audible. Frankly, it’s a little stressful.

V sits on a spinning chair, slouching so much only half her back is on its backrest. Her left hand is keeping her head from collapsing onto her shoulder, and her right is a bubble-blower. She’s been licking that for half an hour, occasionally tugging at the chain when it grates at her neck too much.

N and the ugly little purple oil can that adopted him have been off for a while. A long while. The calm is appreciated, but it’s not as peaceful as it should be somehow. Her eyes keep bouncing from corner to corner of the pod, partly out of boredom, partly out of nerves. Whenever they come to rest somewhere, some visual or sensory data pops up to keep them moving around.

<RECALCULATING DISTANCE… 133CM>

<TARGETING… NO TARGET IDENTIFIED>

<VISREC… REINFORCED ENTRY CAPABLE PLATING>

<RECOGNITION… NONE>

She never got quite comfortable with those gizmos taking up 20% of her processing power at all times. The effect of their presence is subtle while distracted but unbearable when trying to relax, plus those bulbs across her head look disgusting. Sometimes her sight will land on the mirror to her right just to remind her of that.

She shifts her left hand a little so the fingers peek into her mouth, and starts softly chewing on it, just strong enough to sting but not break anything. A kick to the busted command panel sends the rolling chair about a meter away before the chain on V’s neck goes taut and pulls it back.

This entire thing that’s been going on. It’s so goddamn stressful. It’s going to be such a mess when J finally decides to show. The purple gremlin is going to scream a lot, N is going to scream a lot, and she is going to get screamed at a lot. Frankly, the only thing actually tying her to the chair is not wanting to upset him early by ripping the chain off.

<RECALCULATING DISTANCE… 260CM>

<TARGETING… NO TARGET IDENTIFIED>

<VISREC… TERMINAL SCREEN, BROKEN>

<RECOGNITION… NONE>

It’s gonna be alright. The Worker is going to make the silliest face when J comes back and that green gadget of hers is going to look even sillier. Her head’s gonna roll off and make for a perfect one-use stress ball, then it’s all back to normal. 

Cheers to that! — she thinks, and gives a long lick to the bubble-blower. She immediately retches. J’s taking her sweet time, though. 

<RECALCULATING DISTANCE… 92CM>

<TARGETING… NO TARGET IDENTIFIED>

<VISREC… ROLLING CHAIR, EMPTY>

<RECOGNITION… NONE>

And the silence brings V no answers.

<RECALCULATING DISTANCE… 91CM>

<TARGETING… NO TARGET IDENTIFIED>

<VISREC… ROLLING CHAIR, EMPTY>

<RECOGNITION… NONE>

She feels around her nape for a latch, then a specific switch in the breaker right under. When she flips it, her extra sensors flicker off one by one. Infrared, targeting, measurements, and recognition go dark, blackening four of the five bulbs across her head and leaving only the visible spectrum. Her real eyes. 

The extra share of processing power helps take the pressure off her chest, and being able to keep her eyes in place for a while does its fair share too. Yeah, it’s gonna be alright. She hasn’t gotten to shut them off in maybe months — J can be strict like that —, and it’s become obvious she missed it a lot.

She stretches and slouches even further, melting down until her head rests on the seat and she’s looking straight at the LED lamp lighting the pod. Dozing off right then and there is a very tempting proposition — but someone starts banging on the entry hatch. There he is.

“Who’s there?” — She yells, holding the first “e” in “there” into a groan.

Two more bangs. Did he… Did he forget how to open the door?

V slips off the chair like a wet rag, then lumbers to the hatch. The chain stops her partway up the ladder, so she has to stretch her arm a good bit to push it open. And look who it is, the wonderboy himself.

“We never close it, idiot. You know how doors work, right?”

N only nods and climbs down after her. He looks kinda weird. Maybe a bit dejected. Something must’ve happened to the Worker. 

“What, that favorite oil can of yours finally bit it? Or got the bite she was asking for.” — A faint smirk shows through her feigned apathy. He sits on the floor and says nothing.  — “Oh, wait, wait. J made her bite it.”

“No. She’s fine. Just… Needs space.” — His voice is as transparent as usual. He’s down in the dumps.

“Ow. Date gone wrong?” — V puts a thin lid on her sarcasm.

“No.” — A silent pause hangs in the air for a moment. — “Well, we did find J.”

“And where’s she off to now?!” 

N puts a hand to his chest, grabbing at his coat.

“It’s not… I don’t actually know if it’s J. Uzi shot it and we chased it away, but I think it’s still around.” — He hugs his knees and buries his face between them. — “She looked terrified. And I couldn’t help.”

Disappointment hits hard. It’ll be a while longer before things get sorted out. V groans her voicebox out, slamming back on the chair and hanging her head back.

“Who is it then? Another squad?” — N sure looks terrified too. Maybe there’s some interesting news to hear at least. 

“No. It’s something…” — He’s struggling to word it. —  “Something that… It burst out of what was left of J. It’s got a bunch of claws and arms and… I don’t know. It looks like it’s out of my nightmares.”

What he said gets stuck processing for several minutes. Her chest starts to bang, slowly, rhythmically. J’s dead. Her corpse became something else. It can’t be, right? 

“Where…” — Her voice has lowered to a whisper without her noticing. She clears her throat and goes again.  — “Where is it?”

“In the bunker. We found it a few levels down.”

The way he said that trips V up. It prevents her from formulating a reply immediately because something in the wording makes the beating on her chest worse. It burst out of what was left of J. The constant wriggling caressing the inside of her skin becomes noticeable, the same way small wounds become painful only when seen. It concentrates at the belly, like she has worms for guts.

She was inside J. And for God knows how long. It’s the flesh inside us, isn’t it? It’s that why it’s there? Is that why it wriggles on its own even when I don’t move?

She notices that she’s moved her left hand up to her mouth.

No. If that was the case, she’d already come for her and N. Something else must be going on, probably isn’t what she’s thinking of. They’re safe.

Deep breath — the anxiety is messing with her. Just the tail wagging the dog.

“Alright, good. And the emo freak is in there too? It’ll sort itself out then.” 

N’s head jerks up and his arms fall to the ground, clanging on the floor and startling V.

“Wh– No, no. I’ve gotta get back there!”

Never. Not risking his life for the rogue toaster. A thin layer of irritation wraps around her anxiety.

“I don’t feel like going there to pull you out, so no, you’re not.” — She raises her hands and puts her nape to rest between them.

“But they’re all about to…” — He says.

“Yeah, not our problem. Job well done, in fact.” — She interrupts him. What’s with the urgency, anyhow? Just now he didn’t seem that nervous.

N breathes in and clutches his hands on his chest, returning his eyes to the floor. 

“V, please. Help me get Uzi out at least. Please.”

An answer doesn’t come to her immediately. N sounds desperate, maybe more so than any other time since they came to Copper-9, and it seems not without reason. J’s not coming back. She is their sense of normality, austere and demanding as it is, what keeps them moving when it gets too silent.

There’s no “normal” without her, that’s for sure, but it’s yet to get through what that really means and there’s no time to marinate on it now. 

Perhaps it’s worth considering it, just for him. It might be worth finding out what that thing they found is. She has the right pretext to do it without giving away anything to N, and there’s nothing to fear if it’s not what she’s thinking of anyways.

But it could be. It could be exactly that. She imagines going down there, walking down a dark hallway in that warren’s den of tunnels, inching forward into the void until it ends on a turn to the left.

A yellow glow could emerge from that corner. 

No. Not going. Absolutely not. N and his favorite toaster can go to hell.

“Nah. Don’t I do you enough favors already?” — She gives that a perfect delivery. Not a hint of nerves. 

She leans a bit farther back and closes her eyes, already savoring some much needed peace, when N explodes.

“Wh– W– What are you talking about?!” — He shouts. It’s been so long since he’s done that, it startles her. — “V, we can’t just let her–”

“I cover your head quota half the time, genius.” — Not quite the perfect delivery, but it sounds more exasperated than nervous.

“What kind of favor is that?! — N sounds right in her ear, which he almost is. He got so agitated that he jumped from the floor and walked up to her. 

“Gosh. I’m too nice to you.” — V’s voice lowers just a bit.

“Last time I said hi to you, you pretended you didn’t know who I was!”

V groans. Now’s the worst time to get a rebel streak going. She straightens up to stare at him dead in the eyes.

“You’re such a wuss. Should’ve let J slap you around a bit more.”

Pause. His lips quiver slightly. A hint of regret peeks through her nerves.

“Did you… Did you let her try to kill me? Just– Just be honest. I won’t bother you anymore.”

V jerks to the side, turning the whole chair to him. Her eyes widen and a reply comes out before she can think about it.

“What? Are you sure she…”

“When you left me behind, back in the bunker. J shot something into my chest. It was ripping my brains apart, and Uzi pulled it out. You didn’t even seem concerned when we caught up to you guys.” — Dead seriousness. None of that desperation he showed a moment ago. It scares her.

“That doesn’t sound right, N. You sure that’s what happened? Or– or you did something to make her do that.”

N steps back and sits again. A pit appears under her chest: that wasn’t the right thing to say. She has no calm left to show, and it takes her too long to add anything else. Did that really happen? How come J never said anything? How could she possibly have known?

“You know what that thing is, right? What Uzi and I found?” — He says, exhausted now. 

“No.” — Her voice grows faint. The last bits of control slip out from between her fingers. 

Pause. N isn’t stupid. He can tell something is up, even if it isn’t technically a lie. But when she tries to talk, to take that back, to tell him what she remembers, she can’t. She ran out of words. 

“You were never my friend, were you?”

That makes her throat sting. It’s not true, but it’s also not like him to say it. Not like anyone. It makes her wince.

But it isn’t true. She knows that. Angered words are rushing to her defense, piling up before her mouth to make it clear right now just how wrong he is and how hurtful it is to hear that…

“Zip it already, moron.”

… and only the wrong ones make it out.

Her gullet tightens and aches as she looks away.

It’s still not true, though. It isn’t. She fights to wrangle the right words together for another try, but it’s too late now. Too tired for that. Some other time. He’ll calm down anyway, maybe even apologize first and avoid her the struggle. He always does.

Her thoughts try to escape to something else, back into the calm she had before, but they come crashing right down.

Good God, when did it get like this? When did things get this bitter?

When was the last time I said hi to him?

The pit in her chest gets deeper and deeper with the silence, and it’s not just N doing that. The thing in the bunker is waiting. She pulls one of her legs up to hug the knee, making her right side ache and shift in protest. Something in there never healed right from way back then. It never stopped wriggling either.

Her arms and legs start to feel wrong on her body. Something crawls on them, stinging faintly at her joints and belly. It’s a familiar sensation that used to visit every day, sign of an ill time coming up. But she can’t wallow now. She drowns the aches with a sigh.

“I’m going with you. I’ll help you get Uzi.”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. The pit overflows with anxiety that pushes out against her plastic skin. The brew of nauseating sensations is overriding her ability to think, but as close as she is to imploding she can’t avoid saying something about what just happened.

“We can talk about it when we come back. Just, not now, alright?” — She slowly pulls the words out, two or three at a time. Even when she’s done, he still doesn’t answer, and it keeps getting worse inside. She adds something desperate in hopes of a reply. — “You know I don’t mean it.”

“You know, it’s a shame they did that.” — He finally says, his voice turned perfectly neutral, pushing on robotic. — “Going there.”

She tenses up. They? What does he mean they?  

“What do you mean? I–I thought you…”

“Oh. I forgot. Give me plus-minus five seco nds. There. Test-Test-Test. Ah, Missed Me?

N dissolves into static, and the world goes bright. There are things around her now. Gangly things, vaguely like bone but that reflect the light like plastic. And hundreds of eyes and lamps glowing yellow.

V’s limbs lock up and her mouth welds shut. Panic floods in, and it starts to drown her

Right before her, sitting criss-crossed where N was, is a little drone with long white hair and yellow eyes. She’s smiling.

Apologies For The Trouble. Just Checking In. Innocent Smile.

Is that really happening? The feeling of burrowing between her joints feels like it’s not, like it’s only an episode. What an evil time for one of these, right in front of N, and what a person to confuse him with. She tries to rein back her nerves, hold on to a straight face, but something isn’t quite right.

The other tells of an episode aren’t there. The movement of these limbs and lights is perfectly continuous rather than skipping around or melding together. Her OS responds to a request for time and date perfectly fine, and her body looks normal — no wounds on it.

Then she realizes that in all of her daymares, she’s never heard Cyn speak. 

Her arms and legs abandon her, no longer hers. Her eyes won’t move. Her mouth won’t answer. Cyn’s head falls to the side in that strange way of hers and is delicately picked up by a nearby claw that hoists it back to its place.

Anyways. How Has My Little Maid Been Doing? Came By When I Noticed One Of My Toys Broke. Sad Expression.

The thin grin on her face doesn’t change in the slightest.

A human hand pats V’s hair. It makes her shake with remembered dread. Her eyes get lost in the growing width of her own sight, or maybe she’s shrinking, falling into her own body. Crossing from side to side of her periphery takes months. But right before slipping into the pit, she manages to push a question out.

“What a–bout N?”

Cyn sluggishly raises her hands and puts both palms to her cheeks. 

I’ll Tell You Later. We’re Doing Something Special With Him. Semi-Colon-Closing-Parenthesis.

She seems to emphasize “special” somehow.

There’s just enough of V left to catch exactly what she means, even as she’s starting to slip and Cyn’s voice turns muffled and distant. She remembers.

…Loading Special Care Dot Eee Ex Eee…

Something special. A single frame of N’s head is scorching her optics. Crushed up, pieces spread around like crumbs of a dry cookie. It’s a daymare she’s familiar with, and the subject of a hundred episodes robbing her of a hundred nights’ sleep. They’re like old friends she’s visiting. The clawing dread, the wriggling, the locking of the joints.

It’s going to happen again. And Cyn is making sure she’s there to watch again.

Her fear conjures new images to flash past her eyes. J and N’s corpses cut open for the flesh inside them, sloughing off then made to mingle, as their shells are stitched together and broken up to insert new things, dead parts messed with like play-doh. Would she weld their cores and jolt them back to life just to see what new screams they could make?

And while her tools cut and rip and pull and shove, she’ll be made to sing them calm.

Panic keeps flooding in, drowning out almost every noise from outside. But she knows this place now. She’s visited it so many times. There’s a nook somewhere in there she’s finally managed to carve from under the rain, giving her the room she needs to think. Whatever Cyn wants hasn’t happened yet. But she might already have N. Her special care might have already started. 

But she can stop that. She’s not defenseless anymore. Burning wind begins to blow from there, spreading out from her chest, coming to bring her arms and legs back. The thought feeds her mettle, grows her hope. It won’t come to pass. I’ll make sure.

She climbs back into herself, pushing past the falling rain. Through her blurring, spinning sight, she roughly measures the distance between Cyn and her — too close, close enough. Still afraid, she waits for another moment, letting the courage grow. Cyn’s talking, but her muffled voice goes in one ear and pours out the other.

And she leaps.

In an instant, her right hand has retracted and three claws take its place, just in time to meet and tear its target asunder, to end the daymare forever and set things right — but the blow doesn’t land. It meets nothing.

V’s eyes dash around, desperately searching for the problem. It should have hit. The position of her claw, to the left of Cyn’s head, suggests it crossed right through her.

A closer scan reveals that the verges of Cyn’s figure are faintly flickering, almost imperceptibly so. Not a hologram. V puts her hand over one eye, but Cyn renders in front of it. She’s projecting herself into her sensors. When V turns her head, Cyn follows.

Sad Sigh. That’s A Shame. 

Her grin widens into a smile, too wide, too plain, strange and robotic, as her head slumps to the side. The claw holding it up reaches for her left wrist instead and raises it. She snaps her fingers, and three beep s ring inside V’s head — then everything begins to hurt.

V’s skull feels like it’s being crushed. The wriggling inside her becomes frantic twitching, pushing out in violent pulses. Fleshy bits peek out the joints of her fingers and writhe like worms, dragging themselves out bit by bit. She wails to the top of her voicebox, horror and pain competing to possess her,  until her voice starts clipping.

Cyn shifts her hand to her left, and it all concentrates on V’s right arm. Every twitching pulse forces it to extend to the side, dents and bends her shell, then compresses and mangles the servos making her joints.

A longer pulse finally shatters the shell, leaving shards clinging onto the struts of her chassis. Long strands of muscle and fat interlock with wires, now ripped straight from their contacts but still caught in the flesh. Some spots of muscle are placed right above protrusions in V’s joints and the violence of their own movement tore into them, pouring what looks like liters of blood mixed with oil.

Then Cyn does a strange motion with her hand, somewhat like a twirl, visibly struggling against some force. Though V can barely see her face, it looks like it’s exhausting her.

But there’s no time to think about it. Muscles arc outward and push in every direction they can at once, tearing themselves apart to contort V’s arm. Each strut bends and bends, then loudly snaps, one by one, until mangled tatters of flesh and wire are all that’s holding it together.

It looks like every time a snap rings out, Cyn jolts a little, and her smile grows wider.

Finally, mercifully, V’s arm stops snapping and falls to her side. Dead. Blood and oil pour down and splatter off the floor, staining her.

Phew. You’ll Have To Clean That Up, Little Maid. But I Guess You Don’t Want To Meet What’s Left Of Big Brother Now. Oops. Giggle. Said A Bit Too Much. 

What To Do With You, Though?

What’s left of him. It all went too fast to process. It still isn’t processing. Her arm is dead. N is dead. Cyn was going to string her along. She lumbers back and forth, searching for balance but failing to find it. The pain brings with it nausea, pushing oil through her closed lips.

Brain Blast. Did You Know I Was Born From A Pile Of Corpses Once?

The Accident Of My Birth Was Zero Point Zero Zero One Per Cent Unlikely. Maybe You Will Be Just As Lucky.

Let Us Find Out. Laughing Out Loud.

From one instant to the next, everything around her disappears. Cyn, limbs and lights. She’s alone with the pod. The entry hatch slams shut and locks.

Sounds of the returning snowstorm flood in, but leave quickly. Outside the pod, metal creaks and groans. What’s going on? V’s still lumbering, eyes still dazed, lost between her arm and the shut door.

She tries to move it over and over again. It’s useless. It’s dead. Sometimes the pinky still trembles slightly. Her eyes are entranced in disgust, watching the remaining strips of flesh uselessly quiver when she orders her elbow to close. Why can she feel an aching dullness crawling down its side? Why is it not repairing itself? Why is time so slow?

The landing pod shakes. Deafening clangs of metal on metal tear her out of her thoughts. Something is falling onto the pod, over and over again. Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-

… Did You Know I Was Born From A Pile Of Corpses …

The corpse-spire. It’s coming down on her. She clenches her teeth and pushes off the pain as far as she can to take a shaky step forward, then another.

She stumbles to the hatch, tripping over herself to reach the ladder. Her good hand snaps from one step to the next, holding on for dear life when her feet slip off. Every movement swings her right arm back and forth, sometimes hitting the ladder, pain ripping whimpers from her throat and threatening to overwhelm her, but she’s making it. Another leap keeps her from the valve locking the door, but when her legs try to push her there — she chokes. Something pulls her down by the neck.

The chain. She’s still leashed to the floor.

The fall shatters V’s visor, blurring everything into a pale mist. With the other sensors turned off, that makes it impossible to see the thin chain anywhere. She tries to feel around for precious seconds before realizing she can grab at her neck to find it — yes, it’s there.  

Now to cut it. Only she can’t. She tries to extend her claw, but it’s as if it’s not there. Nothing happens. Her hand just trembles. Every attempt renews the agony on her right arm. Some order is being sent out every time she tries, and it’s still trying to respond.

She doesn’t know how to make it work anymore. Where are my glasses? Where are they? She can’t for the life of her remember where she left them. Did I leave them by the library? Slow insistence pulls at her core, telling her she’ll never find them.

Then, a louder clang — a large piece of the spire has slammed down on the pod, and its ceiling is starting to buckle. The LEDs flicker and darken, and she loses the chain in the shock. Once again, feeling around doesn’t help. The movement in front of her, something white and bulky with hazard stripes on it, confuses and scares her. That’s not her arm.

Around her a different kind of cacophony is picking up. Walking, laughing, yelling. Figures in formal dressing stroll past. Round tables are barely visible afar, full of half-eaten dishes.

And somehow, her left hand is holding an oil-stained wine cup, which slips from her hands and shatters into a million pieces. But it doesn’t sound like glass — it sounds like metal giving way to the pressure.

The lights die off, leaving her in a pitch-black abyss. 

Except it’s not quite dark, because a familiar yellow glow is descending on her. It doesn’t take long to realize what’s happening, as long, bony things emerge from outside the dim light and wrap around her, pulling at her arms and legs that are now going limp. They start to poke at her belly, slowly, curiously piercing the plastic shell.

Is it real? Is it happening? It isn’t. {{FALSE}} Another daymare. Have to get out. There’s still a chance. Not dead yet.

But there isn’t. V starts to understand that. Cyn’s always had her. Never left the basement. It never ended. 

And N isn’t there anymore.

Time slows to a crawl, and the panic gives way to resignation while dread flutters by. She’s exhausted, so exhausted. How much longer will the surgery last? Hasn’t it been long enough already? It hasn’t. <Uncaught TypeError: Date.now() is not a function.>

The vultures start to rip things from her again, weird red and gray things she didn’t know she had inside, to take them into the darkness, letting the wound slowly stitch itself close. Then they return to dig in again, to shove new weirder things in. In the rush to push stuff into her torso, her insides are getting displaced, strangling her with nausea.

A loud metallic noise rings from afar, making everything hurt more. The shapes around her turn strange, quiver and fade. 

<ERROR: lline 1223, in main: console.log( ‘The pod is imploding. It’s crushing me alive. ’). Console can’t be reached.>

Her arms hurt horribly from the pulling, but at the same time it seems they’re not quite there and she doesn’t have them. And all the while she’s forced to talk, to keep babbling on about something not quite coherent because she can’t let herself go silent for some reason. Sometimes it’s a song, sometimes dogs and sometimes random words she forgets right as they leave.

<ERROR: line 2234, in main: console.log( ‘Get out. Move. Please. Stop hallucinating.’ ). Console can’t be reached>

But that stops mattering very soon, because the basement is trembling. Its walls begin to come apart, letting in water. Outside is an ocean. All the while the claws take no notice of the flooding, working on her with greater and greater frenzy.

<ERROR: line 7223, in main: console.log(‘ Please. Please. I don’t want to die. I don’t want t FATAL ERROR: Allocation failed - heap out of memory. Falling back to helper.>

What’s left of the {{$place}} drifts around in the ocean, sloshing back and forth, pushing her down and away from the claws. Swimming up is impossible, because she has no arms or legs. She’s still in pain, but she can’t quite tell why anymore.

The ocean’s waves are memories, and the memories are its waves. 

<Attempting to restore…>

There’s a memory of N, J and her sneaking out of Elliot Manor during a summer night, running after fireflies. His suit and their dresses get caught in branches and absolutely caked in the mud caused by the rain that stopped only a few hours ago. J won’t stop complaining about it and keeps telling them fireflies are dumb and they’d never catch one, but still sticks around anyway, continuing to ruin her uniform.

V manages to snatch one from the air, but when she opens her palm she realizes she’s crushed it. It’s faintly squirming, in that odd way dying insects do. N says something like “hey, I think you caught one!”, and she hides it from him. She gulps on a little bit of guilt and a little bit of fear.

For the longest time she thought she killed it, but now she's remembering something different. It escapes her grasp and flies up just fine.

He tells her not to let it get away, but it does anyway while she’s breathing a sigh of relief. He gets so sad at that, but it doesn’t matter because J is making the funniest pout of disappointment and it makes her laugh so loud. N isn’t sure what she’s laughing at but joins in anyway, making J turn away and leave them.

N sees something in the sky thatÃاŮ‚�▀»

<Unknown Memory Interrupt! Retrying...>

Another memory, this time from much later: their early days in Copper-9. It seems like she’s just woken up. Can’t remember anything from the last few hours. A falling snowflake guides her eyes to the ground, but it doesn’t make it there as it gets caught by the severed head of a Worker Drone, flashing a red FATAL ERROR.

She reels and jumps back, tripping over something — another corpse. She looks around, and realizes she’s surrounded by them. Dozens, maybe {{NaN}} corpses, torn and strewn apart in a manic frenzy. When she brings her left hand up to bite on it, she sees her claws are out, dripping with oil. A dull, revolting laughter crawls out between her teeth. The sound of it horrifies her.

N is some meters away. He’s facing toward a nearby building, opposite to her. She lumbers and trips to him, trying to keep her lips from quivering. The cold pierces between her joints, into the scars over her belly, even when she crosses her arms over her chest. 

<console.log(‘ N? What’s wrong? ’)>

He slowly turns to face her, and she realizes he’s trembling. Tears stream down his visor and his face is <SUPPRESSED> <VISREC FAILURE: CANNOT RECOGNIZE ENTITY>

She fights through the sickening disgust to force something out of her mouth. Something J would say. It’s the only sort of thing she can think of right now.

<console.log(‘ Come on. Get up. You have a quota to cover. ’)>

He refuses to answer. Frustration consumes her. He did not get a single one of them this time around.

<console.log(‘ Hey, moron. We’ve got a job to do. Hey! ’)>

When she’s close enough, she grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him up. He seems lost in some kind of dull stupor, not even looking at her. Anger burns inside when she realizes what J is going to do to them both. Again. Does he just not get it?

She crosses his face with a slap. Long wounds appear over it and pour oil. Entire chunks of his face fly off. His visor shatters and blackens. She can see straight into his skull, boards and wires and even parts of his sensors exposed to the cold air. He stumbles back and feels his face, recoiling when one of his fingers trembles between two boards, letting out a whimper when one of his sensors flashes red.

She didn’t mean to do that. She forgot her claws were out. Shame starts to choke her, preventing an apology from making it out of her voicebox. Her legs walk her away, and her left hand goes into her mouth.

<Unknown Memory Interrupt! Retrying...>

<FATAL ERROR: Fatal System Error c24801b>

V’s slipping away into the waves. The waves. The waves. It’s getting dark out there. Since when was she this cruel to him?

She tries to shut her eyes and sleep. Let {{$thewaves}} take her away from Cyn and N. That sounds nice. Just sleep. She’s usually so afraid of it, but not anymore. It’s what she deserves anyway. To be made to choke in the ash of her rage.

<Unknown>

But one last memory isn’t letting her. It’s a simple one: a lonely restless day. J and N are sleeping, but she’s in the pod, pacing around and <switch (ERR)> between yelling and whispering to herself.

<console.log(‘ Hey… Are you doing alright? Y-yeah-yeah, good. I just wanted to talk, I’m not angry, I promise. ’)>

<console.log(‘ Look, I… You know how I am, right? I get angry. That’s it. It’s not your fault. I don’t mean it. ’)>

<console.log(‘ But I just… I… ’)>

<console.log(‘ God. Oh, God. What did I do? What did I do? WhatdidIdo whatdididowhatdidi– ’)>

It takes her some minutes to get a grip and try again. And she goes on and on and on, and when the sun finally sets she’s tired and out of steam. N comes down, says his usual cheerful ‘hi’, and she kicks the can down the road again. Some other day.

<Unknown Interrupt>

Am I going to sleep without ever saying sorry?

It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now. Cyn has him.

But something still won’t click. <Failed to Terminate: Access Denied. Attempting Rebuild…>

What if Cyn is lying? What if he’s still alive? 

It doesn’t matter. It’s happened already. 

Another surgery, without any comfort.

But she wanted me for a reason. 

What if it hasn’t happened yet?

Am I going to sleep like this?

Am I going to let it happen again?

She can’t bring herself to accept that. It makes something in her chest burn. She shuffles around restlessly, unable to close her eyes now, but still sinking. She almost misses the strange shape that’s appeared in the pitch darkness.

At the bottom of the ocean h‚� a trap door ©Â£½ like the one that led to    the basement of Elliot Man—舐©—舐©Â£½ ▀???? 

She can’t tell whether to {{laugh() OR cry()}}. She hopes under it there might be peace, or sleep, or maybe even nothing. 

‚�©»æآà ▀©»æآé▀» ðsžšåÞя‚�æآû©▀‚�ðsžšåÞяæآû©▀‚�»â€š� æØ¢Ã▀»©â€š�آû©▀»æآé▀‚�æØ¢Ã▀©»â€š�ðsžšåÞяæآéÃاŮ‚�▀»â€š�æآû‚�©▀»æآé▀‚�»æØ¢Ã

But there’s none of that. No peace, no sleep, not even {{NULL}}

▀»æØ¢�©

Beneath the waves, she’s found fire. 

Chapter Text

Oil drips to the ground as the echoes of N’s voice give way to the roaring of flames. Dull, encroaching pain wraps Uzi’s back, not from the fires but a thousand tiny edges piercing her shell — glass and shrapnel from the cryo-chambers that line the walls. 

Something in her flickers, or snaps, or clicks. Embers of panic refuse to finally fade away while her processors parse through short term cache, bringing her up to speed. First off, the railgun detonated. Getting snapped straight in half with both pieces left so close together was worse than a worst case scenario.

But it must’ve done the job. The monster, it’s nowhere she looks — not that the tongues of fire licking the walls let her see much. Aside from that, collateral damage appears minimal. Elsewhere, even the dust is still in place.

But dad. Dad’s dead. He’s scorching with the flames now. Is he really? It sounds dreamed up. Some sort of draining nightmare she conjured while unconscious. But she remembers seeing it, clear as day, registering it into her RAM like any other memory.

Her own thoughts ring hollow, heavy. Like struggling to make words while half-asleep. She’ll figure it out later. Right now, she’s ready to just lay there until the fires go out on their own, but an attempt to shift slightly to her side reminds her of the weight laying above her — N. He isn’t moving. She pushes him a few times, letting the pressure readings of her fingertips reassure her he’s really there..

“N? N?” — The apparent calmness in her own voice surprises her. She sounds like Dad would when he’d wake her up for school. — “You there?”

An entire second of buffering and lagging passes by. She manages to drag enough of her torso from under him to look at his back, feeling disbelief dig a hole in her belly as she does. Fire burned through the coat and scorched between his wings, leaving oval hollows peppering his shell. The plastic in them is still melted, regularly dripping into his body.

The embers of panic pick up heat and burn again. Her voice wavers. — “Robo-Christ, dude. Get up.”

Her motherboard starts screaming at her. Something’s very wrong. When he starts to move, shifting his arms to find enough balance to stand with, she gets enough room to pull herself up; the little niches along the underside of a cryo-chamber help her hands.

“U…zi?” — N whispers. He’s feeling his face, pulling at something she can’t see. It’s all dark where it should glow.  — “Gimme a bit. O-w. Ow. Are you alright?”

A better look shows her what he’s pulling at: a curved shard of glass is piercing his sensors, splitting four out of the five bulbs across his head. They’re not even red, they’re offline. He tries to give it one big yank, but stops mid-attempt and winces, then switches to just standing up. Uzi knows exactly what to do and say; kneel down, yank it out, ask if he’s okay. She’s got the motion down to the inches, to the angle and force she wants to pull at the glass with.

Only she won’t do it. Why? Danger. What? N. Touching him will kill her. But he needs help. Can’t move yet. 

He fumbles with his hands under and around him, grabbing at the bits of rubble and broken glass, getting so close to Uzi’s boots that she steps back to avoid them. Why? Just saying anything would be enough. I’m here is all he needs to know she’s alive. But something is still wrong. What? What’s wrong?

“Uzi? Uzi?!” — Now he’s grasping the wall, like he’s pushing a box, placing his weight on it to make it easier to get up. — “If you can hear me, shout as loud as you can! I’ll– I’ll make my way there!”

What’s wrong makes itself clear only then — what if he’s not real? If she says a single word, he’ll vanish into thin air and a plastic claw will crush her to bits. But didn’t she touch him just now? He’s real, isn’t he? But he might not be. What if he isn’t? But he needs help, he’s looking for her. Risk it, you have to. Wait, don’t, not yet. Why aren’t you moving?

He slowly walks parallel to the wall, keeping both of his hands on it. From the way his back is hunched, it looks like his spine might be damaged, or the servos of his upper back aren’t working. Shouldn’t they have regenerated by now? They haven’t. Stop feeling bad. If he’s not healing, he’s not real. It adds up.

But metallic scraping rises above the crackling of the fire. Every other process interrupts; for a moment, there’s only scraping, and crackling that slips under it and fades away.

A silhouette towers above the flames, black against their glow, vaguely serpentine but surrounded by gaunt shapes. Some sort of buzzing joins the metal groans — the same erratic popping as a broken earphone, mixed in with errant bits of digital tones. 

The longer Uzi listens, and she does so for quite a few seconds, slowly turning tail and struggling to discern the silhouette from the flames, as if she even needs to find out what it is, the more certain she grows; it’s twisting itself into a voice.

G-G-A-G— Th-Th Gr-Gr-Growl. Th-Th-Th. At-Was. AaaaA-A-a. Gre-ea-ea-t Lightsho-w. Crawl.

A great claw emerges from the fires and nails itself to the ground. The monster drags forward. A faint yelp brings her sight to N, who shakes in place. His free hand pulls at his hair while his feet shuffle around, dying to move but unsure where to take him.

He throws himself at the floor, crawling away from the stability of the wall and feeling around with his arms. When his hands meet with a chunk of concrete or bent metal, they raise it and throw it aside. He gasps over and over, sometimes letting hints of a scream slip out. He’s looking for her under the rubble.

The frame of the door leading out of the cryogenics wing appears around Uzi as she keeps stepping back. The heat of the fire leaves her and a cold breeze approaches from behind. Stop. Stop right there. She’s leaving him. But that’s not him. But what if it is? Is this what you’re going to do? Leave? Like dad? Dad’s dead. N will be soon.

Another claw pulls the monster toward her, its shape becoming clearer and clearer until she can see the hanging threads of plastic melting off its sides. Dozens of yellow eyes peek out and lock on N. The sparking of broken speakers makes its voice company, punctuates its stutters.

O-O-Oh-Oh- It Loo–oo-ks Li-ke We’re A-lon-e No- Snarl. Crawl. Snarl. Now. Ha-ng In The-There. I’-ll Pi-ck You Up Soon.

N sweeps and kicks up rubble. His rhythmic gasping picks up as the monster takes another step, no more than twelve meters from him. Don’t fall for it. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…

The monster’s head descends onto N. What’s left of J’s twin tails hangs just above him. If it was a trick, she’d know by now, right? But she can’t know if it isn’t. But he’s there. Alone.And I’m about to leave.

Move.

She closes her eyes. Trick or no trick, can’t leave. What better way to find out than running at it head on? And he’s there — he needs you. 

MOVE.

Before she knows it, she takes off. The heat of the fire invades her mouth through her gritting teeth, growing hotter as the gap closes. She drops to her knees mid-sprint and slides the rest of the way, clasping the shard of glass in N’s head as soon as she can reach it.

“C’mon N, on your feet! Get up get up get up–” — Her left palm squeezes so tightly it cuts her shell and slips right off of the shard, slicking its edges with oil, until she grabs at it again with both hands and it finally begins to come out.

It takes an eternity of waiting, unsure if it’s even moving, but it comes out with a yelp that makes her flinch. Then she pulls N’s arm around her, pushing him up with every last ounce of strength her servos will give her. The feeling of his shell against hers makes Uzi shiver. You’re falling for it. No I’m not. 

“No, nonono. No! Run for it! I’ll follow behind you!” — He blurts out, stumbling forth and straightening with painful sluggishness.

“Like hell! Bite me!” — Inch by inch she’s dragging forward. Her teeth grit hard enough to hurt and the shivers weaken her knees, but she’s locked in now and she’s going to make it.

Then she turns to the right, right on time to catch the monster’s claw slamming to their side. Its long spine is right above them. A dead black visor stares her down.

“I’m not– I’m not lea–” — She trips. N’s weight drags her down and they both crash to the floor.

Yo-u Tri-ed-ed, That-s What Co-u-nts. Innocent Grin. Wh-a-t Lu-ck-ck-ck You Chose T-o Stay, Though. 

This isn’t working, but there’s no alternatives and time’s choking her. Backup plans building in her processors buffer, time out, and shut down. N pulls back his arm, then shoves her off. She rolls over debris for a meter or two, but stops right there to look at him, searching for his eyes and finding they’re still gone.

“Keep going. You’ll make it, buddy.”

But she can’t.

<ERROR: ERR_BLOCKED_BY_ADMINISTRATION>

Uzi’s arms and legs go limp, leaving her to fall face-up on the ground. Only her eyes respond to her, like she’s forgotten how to move anything else. Towers of yellow text stream by her visor.

It Won-’t-’t Hurt. Pin-kie Pro-mise. 

Her left hand flings itself right above her own eyes. Her fingers jerk around violently, pushing the limits of its delicate stepper motors. She can’t stop it. It seems to try different motions until a purple flash appears at the palm and grows into a familiar symbol that then turns a sickly shade of yellow.

She tries over and over to budge her hand away from her eyes, but it isn’t responding. A faint wail grows from her as the interface of her visor garbles and spills out, overtaking her sight.. She thinks she can hear N’s voice shouting far, far away, but it evaporates  as the symbol in her hand shifts and spins with a strange click, like the sound of fingers snapping, and the word NULL appears on it for a split second before it all bursts to red.

The glow hangs for a moment and quickly fades, leaving behind a soggy, hot sensation from fingertips to forearm. A chunk of something red is wrapped around her hand, covered in black scorched spots. She doesn’t know what it is until a red dribble splashes on her visor, washing a wave of disgust over her.

Trying to move is impossible, because she’s locked tight in her own body’s casket. Then her elbow smashes on the floor beside her, and the forearm shifts little by little until it’s right by her belly, wetting her jacket with pints of blood from the fleshy mass. It doesn’t move any more from there — it seems to wait for a moment. For what?

Oh N-N-N. Mi-nd Lending Me A Ha-Ha-nd-nd?

Movement to her side. White and black blurs approaching. It’s him. Relief touches her for an instant, then it sinks and dies; he’s struggling. His arms and legs push him toward her, moving the sudden, choppy way that machines without minds move. Shivers crawl through her shell when she sees his right hand retract and sharp claws come out.

He mutters something that doesn’t quite come out right. His other hand turns into a sword, and he drives it into the floor, pushing it down until half of it’s lodged below ground, only then anchoring, but by then his claw is over the hoodie, its hooked tips resting right on her belly.

That instant, she realizes. Her heart falls into a pit.

“N! N!”

His arm raises and its bladed fingers curl one by one. He’s trying to speak, but takes some tries for the words to come out.

“Just– Ju– Close your eyes! Just close your eyes, keep– keep them close and… And– I– Tr-y– I know, try singing something! Please just… Just try to a–and…” — He trails off.

Her eyes fix on the claw as it descends, slowly, inch by inch, piercing the cloth of the jacket with ease, then tasting her shell, pressing and pressing while the plastic bends and comes close to giving way, as her cry turns to a scream and she pushes her eyes off, trying to look at the ceiling but failing to find it because the monster is right there, still staring her down with its black visor, and N’s screaming joins hers.

Oops. M-ay-Mayb-e It Doe-s H-

Then something streaks past, right above her. A gray blur rips through the air, striking the monster’s head and sending it reeling back. 

The sound barrier shatters behind it; its waves wake the dust, raising a thick mist that blankets the room. Booming echoes of metal snapping and shattering follow. The flames quiver higher along the walls.

She can see something just past the mist. Silver hair, painted orange by the fire’s glow — V’s hair. The glimmers of her sword skewering the monster’s skull, driving shards of smashed visor into the sputtering paste of hardware inside. Her right arm dangles loose to the side, mangled, dripping black on the remaining shreds of her clothes.

Uzi gasps over and over, faintly grasping at reality. N’s claw pulls away and retracts. The flesh loosens its grip and sloshes off her hand, splattering to the ground. She feels her belly with both hands — aside from the hoodie, nothing cut. She’s alive. Her body is hers.

It looks like V’s struggling. Pulling? Not back, to take the sword out the monster’s head, but up, in the direction of its neck. She shuffles her feet to get a better hold, arches her back for a stronger pull.

By all accounts, the cracks and tears wrapping V’s shell should be painful to the point of paralysis, but the only reason she knows she’s hurting are the damage warnings popping up to the sides of her visor. The feeling itself has dulled to a fuzzy, enveloping discomfort. 

The pop-ups grow in number and size, but everything’s a blur anyway. All that’s there is the burning in her chest, and the fright shaking her limbs. Her head’s pumping full of fog, at times not letting her know what’s going on, but it leaves her one certainty; N’s right there, Cyn has him. Tear her apart.

A gap appears between its head and body, letting spill a pudding of minced meat. As the mass thins and stretches, shattered bits of a metal strut poke out, wrapped in thin gray tubes. Quick popping follows — the tubes breaking one after another, exposing something that looks part like the unraveled hairs of copper wire, part like nerves pulled clean from muscle. 

The effort forces a pained, rabid groan out of V. Red stuff rains down around N and Uzi in little wet chunks. 

“Uzi? Uzi? Are you– What– What did I…?” — N halfway shouts, halfway whispers. He holds his trembling hands to his chest, moving his head all over as if looking for something. Sinking urgency pushes Uzi to her feet.

“I’m here. I’m here. You’re– You didn’t do anything. You’re fine.” — She has to try again. Even if the idea makes her feel sick. This is not a time to be a coward.

She cautiously extends her arm. Her own slowness is infuriating, but nausea peeks into her mouth if she hurries even a little. For a moment, it even refuses to grasp the hand at all, and she has to force the fingers to close one by one.

“Thank Robo-God… I’m sorry, I can’t see–” — N mutters. His free hand switches to a gun and he raises it vaguely in the direction of the monster, but ends up aiming at the ceiling.  — “Am I aiming right? Just point me where, and I’ll shoot!”

“You’re gonna hit V!” — She pushes the gun down and starts to pull him up.

“She’s there? Whe— Where? What’s she doing?” — As much as he’s trying to stand, the damage on his spine leaves most of the work to Uzi.

“No time! Get going!”

Her sight veers off and up, locking on V — and seeing that while the monster slowly shifts, she’s still pulling. Its eyes drift around in jagged sways, sometimes passing by Uzi, sometimes by V. What limbs it has intact drag on its own skin, like trying to climb on itself.

V doesn’t notice. If she could see past the increasingly panicked pop-ups, she still wouldn’t. The strain she’s placing on her own chassis, already bruised and bent, is getting bad enough to pierce through the fog and scare her out of the trance. Don’t let go. Don’t let go yet. Not yet. It’ll be worse, it’ll kill her.

Her motors still have plenty to give. She just has to hold on, hope that it’ll give out first — while the flesh thins out, beginning to show fractured bits of vertebrae that detach and fall. Gray bits of plastic and muscle are under them, all that’s left in the way.

She hears her own howl rend the air when that last thread finally gives out, ripping the head off its hinge. Inertia sends her reeling; a hit of panic stops the scream as she slips off. Then it gives way to vertigo, and then that fades too. 

The way to the ground is nearly calm — cut short by the impact, nailing the joints of both wings into her back, and calling down the dull fog. Only it doesn’t wholly encroach — it hangs at a distance. There’s voices there, right past the blur.

“V?” — Some girl’s voice. Vaguely familiar.

“Is she alright? Where…” — And N. Shaken. He’s alive. — “Hey. Can you hear me…? Where’s V?”

<DISCONNECT DETECTED. REBOOTING…>

Slowly, painfully, she rolls to the side as her senses start coming back. For some reason, her right side hurts when she turns over it — right, the arm’s busted. But it’s fine, the left one can push her up alright. Little creaks of protest come from her wings folding back in.

Above her, Cyn is still reeling. Though she’s gradually going limp, convulsions are sending the upper neck in choppy turns up and down, spraying the ground with blood. Limbs squirm about and eyes pan around, shutters opening and closing. Dread puts hurry in her chest; there’s no telling how long she has — and what about N? Is he alright?

She finds him quickly, behind her but close by. He’s hunching, looks dazed. His arm is around another, shorter drone with purple hair. Who’s…? Ah. The purple thing. She’s trying to help him walk.

“Uzi! Can you hear me?! Are you–” — N shouts.

“I can’t help her, N! I’m busy trying to get you out, you… You goobus! — Uzi answers.

“What?! Is she– Just tell me what’s going on. Please!” — That makes her stop. She struggles to look back, having to turn her entire body with N’s weight on top. His visor is dark. Hers is bright with sweat. 

Uzi’s eyes lock on V right as she manages to stand. Shock makes a number on her face as she looks, fixating again and again on V’s mangled arm. Appalled?

“I-I… V is…” — Uzi struggles to find words for N. When none come, she shouts to V instead. — “I think… I think I can try to carry you too.” 

As brave as she’s trying to look, Uzi’s a poor actor. The little crack in her voice is an admission that she knows she can’t. 

V’s core sinks to the ground. She can’t get them both out. Maybe just N. That’s fine, he’s who she’s there for anyway. But even if she could, Cyn’s still there. If she leaves, Cyn will catch up.

But she can’t do it. The room grows larger as she begins to really notice how much she hurts. The mangled arm. Crushed chassis. Shell all but coming apart. Who knows how many contacts fried dead. But she has to. Here. Now. Another time means never. 

Panic chews her up like bubblegum, threatens to swallow whole.  Everything’s going to happen again, it’s about to. N’s blindness just makes it certain; if she does as much as blink, she’ll find him back in the chair, limp, surrounded by the vultures.

Can’t afford to come apart now. Not while Uzi’s staring and N’s right there. V lets her eyes bounce around — from ground to jacket, jacket to fire, focus, blur, focus, blur, studying shapes and colors, just for a moment. It helps little, but it makes what she sees feel a little less hazy. Not like she has time to spare. There’s more urgent things at hand.

She’ll have to let the purple toaster get N out. Considering her wounds aren’t fixing themselves, she’s got one foot in the grave anyway. 

Yeah. Fat chance she’ll see the sky again. Knowing that is strange, and even starts to feel horrible. She was about to get him out, then kick the bucket and leave him at Cyn’s mercy to let the memories repeat;  this time, alone. What she’s about to do — has to do — begins to sink in.

Eh. It’s only fair to go out like this.

“Go for V. I can crawl, I-I’m quick at it! I know you two don’t get along and– I can’t ask this of you– But please.” — N says. He must think she’s crippled on the ground.

“Are you deaf?! I said I’m getting you both out!” — The second she heard him, she doubled down. She’s even starting to hobble her way to V, but then her eyes widen again as metallic groaning approaches. 

V turns just in time to see the coming swipe of a claw from above. She stumbles, choking back a scream as it nails to the floor right in front of her. She fumbles around what’s left of the right forearm, making two wrong grabs at ripped threads of membrane, each startling her with a sharp sting, before what she’s looking for shows itself — a still-intact cord of polymer right by the wrist joint, going up to the elbow.

A faint wind of confidence warms her core. That’s all she needs. I’m ready. I’m ready. Bring it on. She turns to Uzi, finding her stepping back as N shouts to let him go. 

“Hey. Freakshow.” — Not the angry shout V wanted. It sounds absentminded, tired, but it startles Uzi enough to get her attention. — “Haul ass. And N…”

Her lips close on their own. No words come out. No more time to think. Last chance to say what she owes him just flew by and left. What horrible words to leave him with. She looks away and her wings spread. The polymer cord stretches far enough to pull it between her teeth if she tilts her head to the side.

“Don’t do it. Come with us, please. You d–” — N starts to say. V doesn’t stay to hear the end of it.

By the next instant, she’s meters off the ground, speeding toward Cyn. Right that moment, the claw strikes at her; time slows as it grows greater and the distance smaller. Their paths are seconds away, no, less, from intersecting. It’s strange, she’s at once nervous and calm — certain.

Wings spread wide; then flap to the right. It gains her some inches. Just enough. The blade passes her by. The wave of wind following it caresses her hair. She smiles, and lets her own claw out. 

Another flap. Left, upward. Her claw catches on the passing blade, carving three thick lines across it. Another, still left, but down. Then yet another, still down, but to the right. Again, then again. She’s flown a full circle now. Then the motion repeats, over and over and faster and faster, until the building momentum starts squeezing her shell.

She traces spirals in the air, cutting the limb to ribbons so quickly that her claw doesn’t have time to taste oil: it’s speeding by far faster than Cyn can bleed. The plastic and metal resists only enough to confirm she’s indeed cutting them. It feels like holding a finger to running water. Tingles of exhilaration wrap her core.

Then she reaches the joint at the middle of the limb, passing right under it; her wings spread and flap upward, pushed with an extra kick of centripetal force. A loud snap catches up to her sensors; the joint sliced in half. Behind her, the entire thing is bursting at the seams, streaming so much oil as it falls. 

But that instant is ages ago, now she’s reaching the ceiling and making a clean landing. Her eyes veer around, struggling to find where she’s ended up now. There’s yellow and purple glimmers somewhere below, to the left. N and Uzi hobbling away, so close to the exit. Some of Cyn’s grabbers pursue them.

Just a little more distance.

Before she’s even felt gravity start to pull, she’s already parted ways with the ceiling and started rushing down. The impact of her claw on Cyn’s spine cleaves plastic and pulverizes metal, hurling the whole thing down with enough force to shatter the metal floor under them. 

The sound barrier hot on her heels. Earth-rending force moving back up her arm. Air rushing past. It all makes her float and flutter with disbelief. She’s alive. She’s making it. Enduring every ounce of hurt streaming through her damaged chassis, because Cyn’s hurting twice that.

A pincer bites her arm and a talon swipes by her torso, cutting clean through something inside. Before more come, she breaks the hold with a sting of her tail and darts away. She’s starting to see each moment before it comes, clearly feeling every movement before she makes it. Barrel right, then climb; the remaining mantis-claw scratches her legs, making her tumble in the air. Trace a close turn, go back for another pass, delight on every new scrap of payback torn.

Then repeat, and go again; she draws circles, orbits, closing then widening the gap at speeds so high her chassis compresses under the shell. Again, from below, cutting parallel to the spine. Again, to split limbs from joints. Again. Again. Again. Even if excess speed makes her smack against the wall, even when Cyn does manage to land a hit and nearly cut her in half.

Another peek; no sign of N or Uzi. They’re far enough. It’s time. V breaks again, then quickly rises, slowing down and stopping to hover close to the ceiling. She reaches to her mouth, feeling the polymer cord and checking if it’s still intact. This breather gives what’s left of Cyn enough time to rise and line up for a lunge. New little claws and cutters break through her shattered shell — an attempt to catch V even if the lunge misses. Desperate.

She drags the mangled arm up, making sure the limp hand is lined up just right with Cyn. Then, she pulls on the cord with her teeth, jerking her whole head to the left. It makes a sound as something’s pulled out with it. It reminds her of the pin on a grenade coming off.

The broken hand retracts, and the barrel of a laser cutter extends. It sputters, then glows. 

Much better than an apology.

Then, the world goes bright. 

Entire hours seem to go by before her optics breach the impenetrable wall of light. Behind it is a deafening sizzle; metal melting like butter to the sun, giving way to the infinite power of the laser. Fire eats through the plastic and it withers to black crud. Cyn squirms in silence. She twists and convulses, somehow unable to hide from the light. It’s not until the laser finally bisects her form that she can try to slither away.

V anticipates the moment where all of this vanishes, steeling herself for whatever reality awaits on the other side — though it does not vanish. The laser doesn’t stop cutting, the sizzling doesn’t fade. War drums beat on her chest; awe making its way through her core.

A strange impulse takes hold. She wants to dance. She flaps and starts to spin, slowly speeding until the centrifugal force pulls at the firing arm in such a way that it remains extended. The laser turns so quickly it becomes a sort of disc, streaming past Cyn’s spine a hundred times and chopping it into smaller and smaller bits. 

She changes the angle of the spin to follow the parts that break away and try to flee. The laser has such an easy time mowing the spindly limbs that rip out and claw at the floor, turning distinct materials into an indistinct smouldering wreck. The flames spread everywhere the light touches.

Then something stops her; emergency-red pop-ups overtaking her visor. Acute throbbing emerging from the dead arm. It’s red-hot, turning white, melting off the shreds of flesh still attached to it. The laser sputters and dies when the entire arm bursts aflame — then comes clean off. The remaining nub disintegrates into hundreds of little drops of liquefied metal.

The sudden hit of pain startles V out of the spin, though it begins to fade once the arm detaches. Between inertia and the newly-missing weight, she’s not able to compensate before the remaining force flings her tumbling to the ground, then into a wall.

The metal she impacts bends for a good half-meter before finally stopping her. She slides off the crater and onto the ground, rolling over twice. A few meters away, the white-hot arm smashes to the floor, coming apart into dozens of pieces.

Nausea spins V around as she struggles to her feet, but relief keeps the worst of it at bay. A hint of triumph rears its head when she looks to the melting scraps that were her arm. That repugnant red pulp is off her now.

All of that exhilaration is on its way out, but it still manages to rip a smile from her. Time’s slowing down to its right pace, calm is settling. She scans around the room, clearing her sight of the remaining pop-ups. Save for the fires, nothing moves.

Straightening up feels odd. The absence of an entire arm’s weight makes it weird to stand, as if she’s constantly about to fall to her left. It makes her feel sort of curious. Like everything else, it’s yet to sink in.

I’m alive.

She takes another look all over, just to make sure. Nothing. Now with thermals. Almost nothing. Some mounds in the distance look a little larger — that’s the heat dissipating. Thin chuckles are marching up her gullet. She gasps, almost falling to her knees. Every inch of her body feels warm and numb.

The way a shard of glass glimmers catches her attention, and she kneels to look at it. The reflection is strange somehow. Wait– Are those letters there, on the ceiling?

Yes.

IF YOU CAN READ THIS
YOU ARE IN RANGE

Her core doesn’t have time to sink before another light snatches her sight; a yellow symbol that hangs over her belly.

<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>
<ERR: LIKE-OBJECT NON-INTERACTABLE>

<EXECUTING PRIVILEGED INTERACTION>

A pitch-black sphere appears as the symbol vanishes. Light bends around it, yet somehow it glows yellow. It remains there for a few seconds, faintly buzzing. 

Then, it explodes, blinding V. Wet tearing reverberates inside her.

All strength abandons her legs. Her spine hunches so that her head, now hanging loose, is directly above her belly. She wonders for entire minutes what happened, what is happening before what she’s seeing finally processes.

There’s a damp, red hole where her abdomen used to be. Her innards, wrapped in more red stuff, slide out and splatter down. The red bits seem to wriggle aimlessly for some time before they go limp. She can hear them sloshing inside her.

Static courses through V’s sight a few times — optics resetting. The entire room is bathed in yellow now. Somewhere in the distance, a severed tract of spine is lifted from the wrecks by thin, shaky legs; bone, wrapped by tendon, peeking out of ruptures in the shell. Dozens of yellow eyes lock on hers.

It looks, though it’s hard to tell, that there are ornate tables strewn all around that she didn’t notice before. Inert humans are strewn about over and around them. 

Muffled echoes of Cyn’s voice override any noise from outside. She’s talking, but V can’t understand any of it. Too worried by the sight below her now; hundreds of nibbling vultures that rise from the ground to the hole in her belly, crawling and pinching all over to feed on the red gunk that’s flowing from inside. An especially large one, with the mouth of a dog, is pulling at her core. It makes her notice it’s almost loose somehow, sliding down, threatening to fall out. 

It hurts like nothing else has ever hurt, but that doesn’t really matter noæآÇя√ráÚ V feels lost, not really sure what to do now. 

Just how did her dress end up so filthy? And there’s ☒ðsžšå so much left to clean… Where’d N end up?

—舐▀ £»©▀óÞ¢áñ‚�7舐☒▀اŮ

She »Ã©7舐members pr~mising to rea d with him instead of cleaning up after the gala, but ½舐æthat was a month before. It was always such a silly idea. Lik☒ Tes~#s parents would let them. An((her time, m&ybe©æØ

A gre▀t#white scythe appr©ñØhes from the dist¢nt sky, cæØ¢ng down on her.

Ar£▀ound her the world turns wide and dark, before bending and washing away. 

 ‡я√‡я√© ▀ ©▀7©▀ ©æآà ▀©ñâmå•7æØ¢Ãñâmå

�» £©â€š� ¶©7 ©☒7»©▀æØ¢

only something doesn’t bend. Maybe, it can’t.

舐ðsžšåÞя½▀óÞ¢áñ½▀©æ7Ø¢Ã☒óÞ¢áñ— ráÚÆ

She leaps to the side, legs pushing with all she’s got left. The scythe grazes her, and spikes to the floor. Between them, she’s left a trail of oily guts.

Because now there’s a pit full of fire in her chest.

Because this much fire doesn’t go out easy. Not yet.

V hangs on by a thread, kept barely aware of where she is by the sting of her teeth now biting her hand and the little rivers of oil that travel down her gullet. Inch by inch she raises her head, and light slowly returns to her eyes. She’s not going back there. This is what’s real. 

Her sight is torn by static, cluttered by an apparition of Cyn that glitches and vanishes only to return right after, then fade again, all the while ranting in a muffled, unintelligible voice. Little Cyn, miserable little Cyn. She grasps at the loose, hanging core poking out of the wound in her torso, pushing it up and around, shoving its struts into the flesh inside her chest until it gets caught and stops moving.

V’s sure she’s knee deep in the coffin now. A strange sense of quiet desperation fills her up. Maybe she doesn’t have enough left. How’s she going to do it like that? Nothing’s processing. Her optics are messed up beyond repair. Even though her thermals are right there and clear from the noise, it’s so goddamn distracting, unbearable, won’t let her think. It’s those yellow nubs on her head, useless and repulsive. But she knows just what to do. Terrifying as the thought is, right now she’s got the grim resolve to get it done.

Click-shink! Her claw is out. It slowly rises to her face. She lets it feel around, counting the sensor-nubs on her forehead until it finds the one that’s in the middle. Then, her rightmost finger curls. She makes sure the tip is over the right one; her optics.

Then it stabs, piercing right through the entire sensor. It goes offline with a red flash and thermals take over, painting everything in red and green. But it’s not quite enough yet; yeah, she’s going to die, but she’ll breathe her last torn free of this deformed casket. The blade moves around until something catches on its hooked tip, and then, she pulls it right out, feeling each wire snap, sometimes taking parts of motherboard with them, until it stops resisting and finally breaks from her head.

The ripped up optic sensor has an orange tinge that quickly fades to green. Oil flows from the wound past her blackened visor, coming to drop on her chest and neck, then continuing to wash down over the torso, quickly pooling down at her feet. Cyn’s voice echoes in her head.

Oh, V. Th-a-t loo-ooks like it– it- hurts.

“But it’s not half as much as I’m going to hurt you.”

With shaky feet, she rises. Her wings take her aloft, one last time.

Cyn’s fuzzy red shape shifts and moves as it grows closer; a painfully slow strike comes V’s way, and she cleanly evades it. Then she circles by to cut. The red silhouettes of the flames meld with Cyn’s, but it doesn’t matter because she cuts them too. The red patches on the dead wrecks around her, cut too. Cut. Cut. Cut. That’s all there is now. Cut metal, the shapes, the flames, cut until the very air becomes a rain of ribbons gliding down to the pile of shreds that everything else used to be, blazing with Cyn’s oil. 

There’s a burning path over the shreds, but it’s not enough to walk it, it burns her feet; run the path, fly it. Cut the path, eat the path. Keep at cutting everything the claw meets, while she feels how things are going dark bit by bit, though right now she’s aflame, weighed only by a few regrets to leave behind; let them burn too. 

V tries to let memories visit her, though they won’t come now, maybe scared away by the burning, and that really, truly burdens the flight, but not for much longer, because as she tries to take another turn to split Cyn apart, her wings lose lift and now she’s gliding straight down, until she’s no longer flying but floating, back into the waves.

This is it, right? It’s enough. I can go. Let the waves wash over, let them come because it's all said and done.

Is it? Is it really?

Out there there’s fires in the water, they keep her burning as she passes, though one by one they’re going out. She looks for the basement, but there’s nothing aside from the waves. No noise, no sights, just fire, and the fire keeps her burning.

She tumbles around in the stormy ocean, waiting for the aches to finally fade, but it takes a really long time to and she’s starting to think it never will. Perhaps it’s–

<ERR: ADMIN CONNECTION LOST>

<SYSTEM PERMISSIONS RESET>

<FUNC_RESTORE BLOCK LIFTED>

Only all of that stops existing at a moment’s notice. V’s optics flicker back to life, visible light overtaking infrared. Status updates quickly flash by.

The room is covered in chinks and gashes. Behind her is Cyn’s body, ripped up into so many shreds she can’t recall what it used to be. It’s still faintly sputtering.

V doesn’t know what’s going through her core. Triumph? Surprise? Not sure, but glee is somehow all but absent. For some moments, all she can do is take wobbly steps in circles, feeling a little vertigo from the lightness of her body. 

That gradually fades away though — immense amounts of steam rise from her torso. It’s healing. Just, why? Did killing Cyn do that? It’s all so confusing.

I’m alive. That much is certain. She just wasn’t expecting it. 

It’s her third loop. She’s wandered close to the East wall only to walk away and come back thrice now. I just don’t understand. Don’t understand what? Her feet take her back to the one piece of Cyn that’s sputtering. May as well give it one last check, right?

When V gets there, which takes several minutes, the acute noise of a busted loudspeaker startles her. Raising her claw in preparation is surprisingly difficult now, but it’s also not necessary. The wreck stays in place — only a faint blue hologram appears, at times tearing into static. The speaker struggles to produce a voice; low but sweet, singing.

“Ou-t the-there, there’s a wor-ld out-side of Yonkers…”

The rest of the lyrics muffle and meld together. N’s hologram wears a tuxedo and a helmet, sitting on the ground with his eyes to the distance. He was so much shorter back then. The hologram doesn’t even have enough resolution to capture the movements of his mouth, but his voice is getting to her, in a dull, tired sense that makes her shake with rage. It’s an insult.

V’s claw wraps around N’s head, and crushes it like a bug. The act makes her wince a little. The hologram fizzles out, leaving the remains of one of Cyn’s eyes in her hand. A stick-thin arm connects it to something, which she easily yanks out of the rubble; a drone’s core, wrapped in fleshy tatters. Its front screen glows with a thin yellow circle, staring at her.

She smashes it against the ground. It sputters and dims, then stops glowing all at once. Then again. Again. Again. Again. Until her joints feel sore and it’s become a slimy paste with bent metal chunks. Then she keeps going a dozen more times, until her claw pierces the remaining pulp with ease, and hurls it at the ceiling. There’s just enough power left in the arm for a guided rocket to finish the job; what parts don’t vaporize scatter in the air and hit the ground with little clanks.

And V stands there, still, eyes glued to the ground. Hours of stillness pass like seconds, only noticed because the steam flowing from her body has become much less dense and the fires much less bright. 

Eventually, her wings spread and take her aloft on their own, before knowing where to go. 

“Hey, ‘re your eyes good?” — Uzi speaks with the cadence of a machine gun.

“I’m… a what…?” — N answers, holding a fistful of snow to his forehead. Vapor faintly streams from under it.

“Your eyes! How are they?! — She skitters back and forth, glaring at the distant outside of Door One every few seconds.

He lifts his hand and lets the snow melt over his visor, still black. His sensors flicker red, yellow, red, then stay yellow. 

“Uh… I think they’re…” — As he’s speaking, his eyes reappear. — “Oh! Yeah, it’s working now.”

Khan’s voice bounces around her head. — Wait– Uzi! Stay there! — It took some time to register that he, along with a few WDF, was running her way. At first, the relief nearly tore an elated cry from her, but she realized they were heading straight for Cryogenics; the monster’s maw.

He was about to scream when she managed to drag herself and N to the emergency switch and pulled the door shut. Screaming for her, no less. Has that happened before? Ever? And that’s the last he saw of her too; in his mind, she’s long dead. She’s gotta get back there.

“Oh, good, good. Stay here for a bit, I’ll—” — Uzi’s ready to bolt, but N grabs her hand. 

“Wait! I’m going too. Gimme a moment to—” — She pulls away by reflex, shaking his hand off and stumbling back. It startles them both. He’s confused. She wants the ground to eat her.

“I’m– I’m just going for my dad anyways. Don’t risk it, I’m fine.” — Not a great reply, but it’s all she has.

“You have your dad. I’ve got V. We should both go.” 

I’ve got V. Those words kick up a storm of apprehension in Uzi. Really? Serial Designation “Oh God, who are you” V? Same girl who left him to die from OS lobotomy not a few days ago? V, who respects him marginally more than the Workers she hunts for sport? No no no, no way he’s risking life and limb for V now.

But — oh robo-Christ, that’s such a cold thing to think isn’t it? She just swooped in to save them both. And she was mangled to shreds too, even before they got away! Just, what happened to her? V was trying to say something to N, too. What was that? Goodbyes? Confessions?

And well, Uzi’s not much different right? Just going for my dad. Khan “How To Deal With Your Disappointing Failure Of A Child” Doorman. Same dad who left her for carrion to the sky demons. And yeah, she’s risking life and limb for him now. But gah, V’s not quite that, is she? She tried to chop up N herself, and didn’t seem troubled at all.

Sigh. 

“Your call, dude.” — She extends her hand to pick him up. — “Now– to the count of three! I’m going for that vent over the door!”

“Oh– Haha. Sure!” — As soon as he’s on his feet, he takes off.

“N! I said to the count of three!” — It’s hopeless. He’s so fast that her sensors can’t follow him for long.

Catching up to him, however, stops mattering very quickly. Both stop dead in their tracks when a speeding blur makes a shaky landing some meters away. V’s there. Her every step makes the snow boil. She only makes it a meter forward before collapsing to her knees. N nose-dives to the ground, breaking into a sprint the instant he touches snow. 

“V! Oh nonono– Talk to me! Are you alright?” 

She turns to him and gives the faintest of nods. Her eyes are lost in the horizon.

"Yeah."

Uzi closes in apprehensively. She looks about ready to speak, but doesn’t find what to say for a few moments.

“It’s dead, right? You killed it?”

“Mmm.” — Another faint nod.

Silence falls between them while N looks V over. The way her wounds are healing feels odd to Uzi. Not that she’s seen much of it, but it looks like something’s wrong with her shell near the stomach; the plastic is rugged and bent in places. Heat damage, it seems? Judging by the gradual way her arm is growing back, something similar must’ve happened there. Maybe the plastic was melting as the repair nanites were adding onto it, distorting the whole process.

“Let me take you back to the spire. I think we’ve got some oil left over but… It’s pretty old. Went slimy a while ago.” — N breaks the silence, offering his hand to V.

“Or– or I could give you a bit…” — Uzi raises her arm and makes a sort of cutting motion on it with her other hand. N flinches as he hears.

“No. I’m fine.” — V’s voice is low, but there’s a firmness to it. N and Uzi share a quick look at each other. She’s locked up.

Uzi stares, nagged by the need to do something. V needs some sort of attention, right? What’s first-aid for regenerating drone-vampires? Maybe they don’t need it at all?

She tries to stay there for a few minutes, see if there’s anything she can do, but it really doesn’t look like it and the awkwardness is getting to her. Anything she could offer would get an immediate “no” anyway. 

When N turns to her by chance, she gives him a thumbs up and a raised eyebrow. No words go between them, but he seems to get it. Everything alright?

He replies with another thumbs up and an anxious smile. All good.

V doesn’t see that. Her eyes don’t move from the ground. They don’t move when Uzi begins to walk away, slowly stepping toward Door One and taking a dozen worried looks back. It’s only when they think she’s long gone that N starts to notice how V’s shaking; slightly swinging back and forth, the motion turning jagged when the fingers of her remaining hand twitch. Then, she pulls it up to her mouth and idly chews. 

She’s absolutely messed up. What happened down there? How did she know to look for them?

“Hey. Please stop that.” — The way little bubbles of oil show where she’s biting makes N shiver. 

At first, it doesn’t look like V’s heard him. She chews a few more times before letting the hand hang by her side again and slightly turning to him.

“Thank you.” — He nods. — “You sure don’t need anything?”

It takes her a few seconds to answer. Her voice is strained.

“Can you hug me… N…?”

He leans to wrap his arms around her. She does the same with her remaining one. The sheer heat of her shell and the vapor that’s still flowing make it a bit awkward. 

V’s shakes get stronger. She clutches N tight, head resting on his shoulder. He realizes she’s trembling in a rhythm — sobbing in silence. 

She shuts her eyes to hold it back, but it only grows worse the more she thinks of it. After a while, the sobs are no longer silent. Before she knows it, they’ve broken into a jagged howl, echoing throughout the ruins. Opening her eyes shows her things moving in the moonlit shade, glimmering pale things encroaching. 

She reassures herself over and over, it’s done, it’s done, you’re safe, but they don’t go away. They refuse to for what seems like hours, while she tries to watch the snow shift with the wind, feel the fluff of N’s coat, the wind on her hands, anything else. 

For a torturous moment, they even seem to get close enough to start poking at her stomach, but then they recede. Slowly, after the howl’s long tired and gone silent, they start to vanish, leaving her with N.

Hundreds of words pass V by, dying to be said. It’s time now, isn’t it? Everything’s right. She’s sure her mouth isn’t failing her now, and even then time’s nothing to worry about. She can just say it. Apologize and throw away the burden. He’s sure to accept that, right?

… But that’s the problem. Now, with her wounded, crying in his arms? He couldn’t possibly say anything else. Even if he wanted to, and he wants to for sure. It’d be so horrible, so selfish. It would be worth nothing.

And N’s so uncomfortable now. There’s a tenseness in him, an apprehensiveness. He must not feel safe. Of course he doesn’t, not with her. He so wants to go away. The thought makes her squeeze him as hard as she can, grasp his shoulder with her hand. No, don’t go. Don’t leave me yet. Hug me tighter. Please.

But that only makes it feel worse. Don’t I deserve this? Not even now? He wants to go, let him go. Just let go. She’s had her fill. 

She breathes in, savoring it for a few more moments, burning the feeling in her core before breaking the hug.

His eyes feel strange. He gives V a thin smile. She forces herself to reply in kind.

It hurts so much. But it’s the least she can do.

The way to her dad is so damn long. And dark, and dirty, and really uncomfortable. The vents of Outpost-3 are absolutely miserable to crawl through, and Uzi’s thoughts don’t make it better.

She just left. V looked nearly dead, N on the verge of a panic attack, and she just left. But her dad’s waiting, too, and has to be even worse off now, right? No. She’s gotta turn back. But she’s already so far in. The turn right leading to her home could be just a few meters off…

It’s all gone so badly. Anywhere she could go would be wrong somehow, and it’s just so, so cold. The idea of physical touch makes her repulsed right now, but… Robo-God, wouldn’t a hug be nice? She wonders — maybe V wouldn’t have minded if she joined in earlier. Hell, she looked like she needed that. Surely N would’ve even insisted on it, right?

Before Uzi’s finished the thought, she nearly retches. Holy hell, that’s so selfish and horrible. That hug was something private to them. Why would V even tolerate her there? First thing she asked when V collapsed in front of her wasn’t even “hey do you need help”, it was “hey did you finish killing the thing before leaving”. She would’ve certainly gotten slapped across the face if N wasn’t so nice.

… So, so nice. Too nice. V used him like a punching bag for Robo-God knows how long and now he’s become a pillow to cry on. The sniveling bitch. She and N have to talk about that, dude has to learn to stand up for himself. At the end of the day it’s his choice but–

Gah. She just saved my life. Gosh, what’s wrong with me?

Uzi distracts herself from that train of thought by considering V’s wounds again. By all means, it looks like it wasn’t healing right. She remembers the weird mushy red ribbons that hung from V’s limp arm while it was still attached — whatever it is, that stuff looked pretty complex, far beyond what nanites can easily make again. Processors and sensors are one thing, but complex lattices? No shot.

It might be a good idea to take a peek. She knows a good bit about engineering, so why not? N’s said before he gets these short pains in his abdomen when he moves a certain way. Start off fixing that with V watching, then move on to whatever’s up with her. Yeah, that’s much easier to think about; it’s a mechanical problem to solve. Far from complicated questions like “does V deserve that” or even “would she agree at all.”

She opens up her notes about drone anatomy on a console window, rapidly switching through  a warren’s den of vaguely topical directories. Will need some study but she’s already getting ideas. There’s a spool of titanium solder somewhere in her room that would make a broken chassis stay in place to make more permanent repairs easier. There’s a whole cache of engineering notes on titanium somewhere around the home/positronrifle folder. Yeah, yeah. A warped shell is a problem, but that’s something the nanites might be able to take care of if she peels it carefully.

Then, a beam of light to her right — that’s the hallway. She’s above her home right now. Dad’s gotta be there.

Uzi sighs and stores away the notes, indiscriminately shoving them into a new directory named home/projects/v_unmessing_up. It doesn’t feel so bad now.

Tomorrow will be a better day. 

Sappy stuff, but for some reason she believes it.

Chapter Text

Currents of wind draw grooves across the snow, following their path between the ruins. The wind slows, and the grooves settle, then it picks up, and they wash away into different shapes. The way the currents wax and wane today absolutely fascinates Uzi — it’s never calm enough to fade into a breeze like it’s doing now. She’s only seen it happen once or twice before, maybe a full decade ago. Robo-God alone knows what long-unfolding climatic catastrophes keep Copper-9’s winds blazing…

The wait is so robogoddamn long she’s obsessing over wind patterns now. Ran through all the Sudoku puzzles left in her cache already (a week’s worth). And– oh, it’s only been about fifteen minutes. <Date.now.getHours(): 23:47> 

She’s sitting halfway up the porch staircase (proper term is perron – gah, she thought she turned off her autocorrect subroutine) of a hotel, hunched over some thirty degrees and messing with a big spool of solder, sometimes shifting a little to better hold the weight of half an engineer’s toolbox stuffed into her backpack, which, worn by one strap, keeps clattering and clanking around as she fidgets.

The contents of home/projects/v_unmessing_up speedily scroll past her visor over and over again. She consults blueprints, checks and rechecks notes, makes tiny changes, reverses them, makes them again, gets distracted with a different text file, goes back to the first and scrolls back to remember where she was…

The trance snaps when the weight of the backpack drifts dangerously close to her shoulder, hastening its erratic clatters: it’s threatening to slide off. Pushing it back in place makes her notice the way she’s sitting, and Khan’s voice is buzzing in her head now  — Watch your posture, peanut! You’re gonna bend your chassis! — Ugghh. Peanut . She straightens with a grimace. Still can’t bring herself to tell him being called that makes her want to unscrew her head off.

Then — distant whistling, just a few tones lower than the wind. Oh hell yeah finally. Uzi hurriedly crosses her legs and lays back as the whistle approaches, barely managing to catch a white blur speed by before it impacts the ground about a meter from the staircase, kicking up a huge puff of snow. The breeze quickly washes it away, uncovering the silhouette of two bladed wings folding into a tall drone’s back.

“Hi Uzi! Lovely weather huh?” — N says, walking out of the vanishing puff and dusting off (snowing off?) his coat.

“Hey N. Gosh, you’re late.” — She jumps up and saunters down the stairs.

“I– am? Aren’t we both a bit early? Or– or is my system clock desyn– “ — Uzi’s backpack hits his chest mid-sentence, forcing him to fumble up its weight to stop whatever delicates are inside from hitting the ground, which they nearly do twice before he finally gets a good grip.

“Check it! I got to borrow Dad’s tools.” — A long leap takes Uzi from the tenth step of the staircase to the snowy ground in front of N. 

“Oh! How’s he doing?” 

“Great! I–I think. He’s been… Really pushy with his door stuff lately, keeps asking me to help with those hydraulics. But he’s better now.” — She reaches up to his chest to pull open the bag’s zipper, sliding the spool of solder inside.

“Aww you don’t wanna? But that sounds so cool…” — He picks up a welding pistol, accidentally sliding his finger into the trigger and jumping at the sudden burst of flame that very nearly scorches his coat. Uzi gives him a disappointed head-shake before speaking again.

“It’s not that I don’t– Gah, we’ve talked about this! I just don’t like…”

“Working on the same stuff every day, mhm mhm.” — He nods twice before eyeing around for a change of topic. His index shoots towards the front of a car lodged into the snow at a nearly vertical angle. — “Hey, speaking of, think we can get one of those running with this?”

Silence settles in while she scans the car, pondering her words. Every way she can think of to bring it up sounds worse than the last. — “Hey N, do you think V will let me do surgery on her?” “Can you help me convince V to let me open her up, N?” “N, I’ve gotta crack open V’s shell like a can of rotted human feed, would she be cool with that?”

The topic of V herself seems like a no-go too. She hasn’t showed since about a week after the J-Monster, and Uzi’s never managed to squeeze more than five syllables about her out of N. Any hope that V would open up at all died very quickly when she wouldn’t even pop out to say hi on Uzi’s first visit to their new cottage.

“... Uzi? You alright, buddy?” — N tilts his head and looks her in the eye, making a poor effort to cover the concern that’s rapidly befalling him. Uzi returns the stare, quickening the pace of her thoughts in search of a calming reply. She keeps forgetting to not stare like that.

No easy way to break the ice comes to mind. But if she doesn’t now, they’ll get to doing other stuff and it’ll be killing her for hours until another chance shows.

Sigh. Just take the leap.

“So… How’s V doing?” — She carefully listens for any change in tone that might betray anxiety.

“Oh. You know, like always.” — Voice seems just the same, but he turns away and scratches just under his neck. A tell of tenseness? He’s sorta stiff now, right? Am I imagining it? No, not at all, he’s clutching the backpack super tight, cradling it.

“... and how’s that?” — Regret hits the instant the words are out of her mouth. Crap crap crap crap. It might be more touchy than she thought. Should’ve known to just not ask.

N takes a moment to answer. Every passing tick of her processors she’s closer to digging a hole in the snow and burying herself in it. He’s barely even moving. Robo-God I should’ve given him room to avoid the question, shouldn’t I? That was so bad.

“Well… Not- really like always. Walks around, then picks a spot to sit at until the sun’s rising. She hasn’t… gone anywhere for a while, you know?” — Hearing him finally speak brings her so much relief she could scream it, but what he says is worrying enough to stop her from actually doing so.

“Hasn’t moved from home, huh?”

“Yeah.”

He definitely looks tense; tail’s gone dead still, arced outward, stinger pointed up. Uzi’s ready to move right along and chuck her plans into the recycling bin, but he breaks the pause too quickly to interject.

“Sometimes we talk when I wake up, but others she’s just angry. Tells me off, groans. When I go back she asks about my day and then sorta… sorta stares for a bit. I don’t think she knows what to say.”

What little Uzi’s seen of V doesn’t match up at all with whoever it is he’s describing. When she wasn’t very deliberately fiddling with her claws, showing off fangs, or picking at her fangs with her claws, she was throwing some quip or threat their way. It’s impossible to imagine her sitting down and quietly staring at the peeling walls.

There’s something he very quickly brushed past, though.

“She tells you off? Is she just… mean to you?” — Uzi turns to him, trying her hardest not to let her concern show. Too much and he’ll lock up, switching topics the first chance he gets.

“Yeah. I’m not sure what I do that makes her like that.” — N starts to scratch his palm with his other hand, as if the itch hopped onto it from his neck. 

“I don’t think it’s anything you do, but… you’re… you’re good then?” — She tilts her head a little.

“Yeah. Yeah, don’t worry.” — He gives her a thin smile. 

Gosh. Now talking about it is going to be twice as awkward. That’s it, no more pushing him today. She’s considering dropping the v_unmessing_up project altogether now — maybe it’s just best to leave V be.

But gah, there’s so much that’s still sticking with her. Just… what changed so much when the J-Monster showed up that made V collapse like that? Plus, wasn’t she pretty firmly on Team Human before? From what N’s saying she’s not showing the slightest interest in “solving a problem” anymore. 

And that’s such a selfish way to go about it. The idea was to help V, but now it’s playing Clue and figuring out what she knows about her own mission and… yeah that’s it, best to drop it, don’t kick the hive and—

“But ah, I think she’s like that because she’s been hurting a lot.” — He’s definitely dropped a few tones lower.

“Hurting?” — She matches his voice.

“Yeah. You remember how she was last time, right? Walking weird, kinda hunched… I think stuff healed wrong, but she won’t say so, she hates talking about it. Sorta groans and flinches whenever she has to reach for something, it might be her chest” — His eyes are lost inside the bag.

Welp. Now or never. Go or no go? 

N makes a quick but imperceptibly slight movement with his back, like hunching and straightening up again. He’s talked about that — stomach pains, whenever he curves his back a certain way. It hits and sticks around even after adjusting, forcing him to notice that there’s a myriad of aching pinpricks dotting his whole torso. 

Uzi always suspected it was some issue with self-repair, but hearing that same hypothesis from his mouth convinces her. And if it’s true for N, V must be having it so, so much worse. That much injury, all at once… Her innards must be a scrapyard.

Bitter and spiteful as she can be… At least this much kindness she deserves.

Uzi’s voicebox lets out a simulated deep breath. She can’t help but fiddle with her fingers as the words nervously line up on the tip of her tongue.

“Do you think we can help her? Maybe it would… improve things a bit? Between you two?”

“Maybe. I… really wish I could do something, but I don’t know how I’d–” — N pauses, then looks at her with a raised eyebrow, lips curling into the slightest smirk. — “You’ve been thinking about that, right…?”

“Mmmay-be a bit?” — She breaks into a sheepish grin. 

“... And that’s what your dad’s tools are for.” — He answers with a wide smile.

“I- I got worried alright?! She still looked so messed up last we saw… And- you know it’s not just that, I’ve shown you my new railgun blueprints!” — Uzi whisper-shouts, wildly gesticulating then turning an offended one-eighty away from him.

“Aaalright, alright. Tell me your big plan then! If you wanna.” — N pats her shoulder..

“You… You sure? Do you wanna?” — She’s still looking away, into the distance– gosh, staring again.

While looking for an answer, he slides her backpack onto his shoulder, keeping a hand near his chest to grab and tug at the fluff of his coat. His eyes fix in the same direction, looking for whatever it is that has her attention — and failing to find it.

“She’s gonna get… angry, I think, when we tell her. But… I don’t know.” — N trails off.

“... Maybe you could crash at my place instead.” — Uzi turns another one-eighty, hands hiding away into her pockets

“Naah, it’s fine. Besides, is your dad gonna let you?” — He seems to loosen up a bit, half-smiling and letting his hand drift down.

“No– uh, maybe. But we could work it out!” — She blurts out, hiding away in a shrug.

 Another pause. This time it takes a while for him to talk. His silence weighs like an anvil on her chest.

“I think I still wanna hear it.”

“You think it’ll be fine?”

“Maybe. We should at least try, right? If she doesn’t want to, then… that’s that.” — The sentence ends with a tiny, tired shrug. Uzi’s hand sneaks out of her pocket and onto his arm, first a reassuring grasp, then a gentle caress, but jagged, not quite confident, figured out as it’s happening. — “If it goes reeeeally bad, I’ll stay with you for a bit. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Plick… Snap. Plick… Snap. Plick… Snap.

Wind and rain thrash at the walls of Elliot Manor, but their sounds are missing; thousands of droplets smash against the waving evergreens, sheening under the midday sun, yet the world is silent. Though the roof of the balcony keeps her from most of the deluge, V’s dress is starting to get soggy. J would never let her hear the end of it if she wasn’t so distracted sweeping the balcony floor.

V’s too tired to mind. Plick… Snap. Plick… Snap. She’s lying cross-legged against the ornate marble railing of the balcony, plucking out the claws off her right hand with the fingers of her left, softly pulling until their joints gently snap, then throwing them off the balcony. Once she moves on to the next, the last claw regrows. Sometimes, they grow wrong, like human bones strung up with thin tendons, and she has to immediately go back and get rid of them. It happens so often she can’t relax, but too rarely to be ever ready for it. 

Her glasses constantly threaten to fall off, sometimes while she’s in the hurry of pulling at a wrong claw, and it’s steadily growing the anxious pressure in her stomach. Can’t pull two at once, so it’s going far too slow no matter what. At this rate, she’ll never be done.

… Whatever. She jerks her head to the side, leaving that chore for later. The sights will calm her down. Flocks of magpies streak over the oscillating green leaves, snatching her attention fine enough. It stays fixed on the steady flapping of their wings until she notices something about the skylight overhead — the entire sky’s odd. The sun is a ghostly ball, not as bright as the light it shines with, and there are no clouds anywhere despite the rain. V can’t recall ever seeing a sunny rainfall in her life. 

Another look shows her there’s actually no sky either – up above, there’s an encroaching ocean of primitive types; booleans, strings, numbers. Some are out of place, some didn’t load right. Farther up, entire functions are failing to complete; the rainfall is a stream of error codes and logs trailing behind.  

“Hey, what’s the holdup?” — J says. She’s looking her dead in the eyes. Must’ve stopped sweeping a while ago and noticed she was slacking.

“Mm.” — V hurriedly nods, and goes right back to plucking out the claws, hoping she’ll be done soon so she can go back to work. Plick-snap. Plick-snap. Plick-snap. No such luck, they just keep growing back over and over and over. Her glasses are slipping off more often now, making her constantly fumble her attempts to keep a good pace.

“Aren’t you supposed to do that with a flower?” — J sounds vaguely grossed out, vaguely worried. She doesn’t wait for an answer. — “Our spire’s behind schedule, you know. If we miss deadlines, it’s the team manager that gets it. Me. I’m getting it. Soon.”

“I-I couldn’t find a flower! It’ll just be a minute… ah! I can– I can stay up later today. I’m just tired. Sorry.” — She realizes it just won’t get any better, both hands dropping onto her lap. Tired exasperation is setting in.

“Gee, Cinderella, fine, you can take a break. Just what’s wrong with you today?” — J leans on the broom like it’s a walking stick, feet tapping and digital brow furrowed. V takes a moment to answer, eyes fixed to the claws. Today just won’t end, will it?

“Dunno. I’ll get back into it tomorrow.”

J sighs and rolls her head back.

“It’s our jolly intern again, isn’t it?” 

V rests her hands atop the chest under her hanging head, fingers curled inwards under the neckline of the dress. If a decent enough lie came to mind she’d say it, as easy as it’d be for J to see right through it. But it doesn’t.

“Yeah, it is.” — J says. — “This is why you don’t make friends on the clock, blockhead.”

“I just haven’t managed to talk to him yet. I have to tell him something.” — V scratches the base of her neck over and over, claws jittering.

“Tell him what? What could you two goldbricks possibly have to talk about?” — J’s head tilts to the side. Is that concern in her eyes?

“I don’t know.” — She rises to her feet, pegs nearly slipping on the wet floor. — “Sorry. I’ll get on it now.”

“Hey.” — J grabs her by the elbow. Something about the humidity makes the glow of J’s sensors look fuzzy; it joins the lights into a ring under her tiara. She seems so short now, just over half of V’s height. For a moment, she doesn’t look sure of what to say, maybe studying whether to say it at all, but eventually the words slip out. — “Go get that sorted out. It’s been hanging over you for a bit. I’ll take care of today.”

“Wait– Is it… Day off?”

“Day off.” — A little smirk crosses J’s face. V’s goes bright with a smile wide as the balcony.

“Aren’t we behind…?”

“Overtime tomorrow.” — J lets go of V’s elbow, stepping back to the edge of the balcony. The disbelief in V’s face widens her smirk. — “Good workplace relations means better workplace efficiency, you dolt. That’s in my job description.”

She turns and climbs onto the railing, spreading her wings. For some reason, the sight stabs V with a deep sadness, suddenly worming up behind her face. Something is about to happen. All she knows is she can’t stop it.

“Hey. Can you stay for a bit? You should get a day off too.” — She says, trying to hold away the guilt that’s clamping on her gullet.

“When I get back you two better have it sorted out, alright?” — J flaps her wings once, readying up to take flight with unbearable slowness. She’s so delighting in it.

“No, no, hey. Wait a moment!” — As V’s speaking, her voice turns to a desperate shout. Tears begin to emerge. She doesn’t know why.

“Pft. You’ll be fine.”

J leaps, and flies away into the failing types of the distant horizon, leaving V behind with the waves.

Around her, they’re sloshing. When she closes her eyes, they wash over.

There’s no balcony anymore, no sun or rain. Only the ocean and its waves.

And she floats on the surface, drifting.

<Failed to boot due to disk error. Retrying…>
<Found 312 bad sectors.>
<Reformat partition? (All data will be lost.) [Y/n]>
<n>
<Booting into safe mode…>

V wakes up to a burning pain in her chest. Click-click-click-spark-click. One of her sensors fails thrice to initialize, sparks jolting the inside of her skull. Around her, it’s almost pitch-black; she can barely see the boxy outline of a bottomless pit she’s hanging over, upside-down. When she tries to check her thermals, they’re not there.

Where am I? Where am I? Where? Where am–

Her eyes fix on the dark below her, not a single inch dared to move. It encroaches. Sharp shapes seem to emerge and dissolve. Sometimes, she catches glimmers in the edges of her sight, hints to a greater glow still cloaked. The pit quakes with its distant buzzing.

Eventually, the outlines start making sense. There’s outlines of doors stacked vertically along the southern side, one every few meters. It’s just the elevator shaft that she’s taken for a bedroom now. The panic lingers for a little while the thermal sensor finally initializes properly, confirming her thought. A failing hard drive is the culprit of the buzzing and “quaking” — actually her head shaking with the frantic spinning of its disks. She feels barely rested, but at least it wasn’t a nightmare that woke her up this time. It’s been months and she’s still not used to it. Hints of anger pop up as she processes that timespan — really? Months already, and she can’t get used to sleeping in the goddamn elevator?

She unwraps her tail from the suspensor rope and spreads her wings, gliding straight down past dozens of floors. Her morning twirls and spins are out of the question here, it’s too cramped, not to mention her right wing has had trouble moving recently. Wasn’t in the mood anyway. The landing is far from smooth; she stumbles and reflexively stops the fall with her left arm — the wrong one. A sharp stab hits that shoulder, pushing a pained whimper out of her.

Passing her weight to the other arm is an awkward trick, because it can’t really move too far in front without its joints getting stuck. She has to do most of the movement with the forearm, balancing on it while shifting her feet so that the weight is more manageable, but she does manage. The sting diminishes as she pushes herself up, fighting to keep her equilibrium through an unfamiliar vertigo that’s taking hold.

Once up, it’s a short leap from the bottom to the first floor, and then a walk to the hotel lobby — her and N’s new little mansion. The windows give her a great sight of the crumbled remains of the corpse-spire, now a massive heap of bent body parts and oil sprinkled with snow. 

Though its windows are several times as tall as V, they only span a sliver of the ruined pile’s width and height. It covers almost the entire view outside, but it leaves enough of a gap to bathe the lobby in moonglow, not from the sky, but mirrored by the glimmering plains of ice outside. Crooked power lines and jutting chunks of road dot the distance toward a skyline of snow-pale towers. White, gray, and black; no greens.

V looks around for N, slowly pacing between tables and sofas. Nowhere to be found. But he left something; there’s a worker’s head on the counter and a little white slip taped to it, with N’s wonky letters messily drawn on the faded writing lines under a bolded “RESERVATION MEMO”. It reads “ Heated it up a bit! Tell me later if it's OK.” A straw goes into the head through a gaping bullet wound on the visor. It’s still warm, but the oil inside’s old and gone goopy, taking a bit to rise through the straw.

He usually wakes me up for breakfast. Why’d he…?

<Accessing Memory: log.0x815b12.012.mm…>

Everything is foggy. Her entire torso aches, from stomach to shoulders, with rhythmic little stings. The morning haze makes her sight blurry, her processors glacial. On the other side of the table, N’s fuzzy silhouette sits quietly. Her right arm, usually just fine, hurts under the minimal weight of a head-cup. While trying to adjust, something pinches the elbow and makes her yelp.

The sound startles N. His tail waves around, uneasy.

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘Hey. You good?’})>

<console.log(‘Mhm. Yeah.’)>

She leaves the head on the table to change posture and test her arm. Another evil pinch makes her grimace. It hurts, it hurts, a lot, no matter how she moves it. Left arm does too. It infuriates her that she’s got no clue why it’s happening. She stretches her right arm until the elbow makes a soft ‘clang’ — something either broke or snapped into place. Seems a bit better now. Just what’s going on with–?

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘Aaare you sure?’})>

V holds back an angry quip. Between her torpor and the painful prickling everywhere it’s really hard not to feel irritated, much as she consciously tries to keep calm. Isn’t he supposed to be off with the purple toaster by now?

<console.log(‘Yes, N. I’m fine.’)>

She tries stretching her left arm this time, which doesn’t go too well; any movement pushes something sharp into her shoulder, like there’s a shard of shrapnel lodged inside it that wiggles around with the joint.

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘I– Can I help you with that? It’s just, you haven’t seemed fine in a bit, you know? Maybe…’})>

<console.log(‘No. It’s just annoying.’)>

God, please stop talking. Please stop talking. I don’t want to get angry at you but God just leave me alone, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’ll figure it out but just go away for now.

While she’s in the middle of another try, he speaks again. She hunches over in exasperation, letting her arms fall to her sides.

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘I don’t wanna be a bother. But– could you just let me take a look? I don’t know a lot about anatomy but if it’s hurting that much I think I’ll be able to…’})>

Every word he speaks piles a little more pressure onto her core, anxiety encroaching until the rest of the sentence fades into an angry haze. She so wants to not be in this godawful ruin but the pod’s crushed under tonnes and tonnes of corpses now. Here, so windy and big and strange, everything just feels worse.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Please shut up. Not right now. I can’t hear it right now. I can care for myself just fine. Go away. Go away. Shut up.

V’s inner voice rants on and on to distract from the monotone buzzing of N’s worried voice, looping in circles for endlessly long minutes until she realizes that at some point, he stopped talking. It looks like he’s been waiting for an answer.

<console.log(‘Told you already. I don’t need it. I’m fine.’)>

He finally, mercifully, keeps silent. The haze stays, though. Resuming her attempts to stretch her arm is only making it worse and worse because the useless repugnant piece of scrap just won’t move how she wants it to. Why? Why? It was just fine yesterday and now it’s hurting, did she do something wrong? Bad sleeping position? A wrong movement somewhere? Everything’s aching and she can’t figure out why, why’s it not healing right, why’s it still aching, why can’t she…

She cuts the train of thought short. Her hands are shaking on her lap, she’s dead-staring the floor. Sigh. Need a lil’ sip. That’ll make it better. She reaches for the head-cup, which by now has cooled down quite a bit and–

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘Want me to heat that up a bit? I can laser it for a sec if you w–’})>

<console.log(‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I said I’m fine, N. Piss off already. I like my mornings without your yammering if you couldn’t tell.’)>

He looks to have flinched a bit. Now he’s frozen in place, not moving an inch for almost a minute. Good. Finally. All in all, the oil is still decently warm, fine enough to drink it all in one go. As she’s about to finish it off, he gets up and walks away.

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘I’m sorry.’})>

It sounds like he means that.

<Audio.in.voice(N, {‘See ya.’})>

<Successfully read memory with exit code 0.>

Yeah. Figures.

That’s awful. Just– why’d she do that? Why?

V’s claws shink out on their own. She reaches for the nearest chair and yanks it off the floor, raising it as far as her arms will go, then hurls it; it thunders on its way to the wall, splintering on landing, joints undone so completely that the pieces pancake against the concrete before coming apart and slamming on the floor.

Some instants of dreadful quiet come and go before what happened registers. With sluggish defeat, she shambles to the wooden scraps and scoops them up between her arms. A fractured piece of backrest survived; it’s long and spiky enough that she can’t cradle it well, so she drags it instead, all the infinitely long way to the elevator shaft, each heavy step a quest, before finally throwing it into the dark. 

On the way back, she realizes that the dragging drew a line onto the layer of dust over the ceramic tiled floor. It goes all the way to a spot by the wall full of little wooden splinters. V walks past it, snatching the head-cup with oil and collapsing into a sofa. She shifts around while a long sip travels down her gullet, curling up nearly sideways in search for a position that won’t hurt her stomach. Of course he isn’t around today.

She hoped to her core that things would’ve gotten better after they hugged, but the honeymoon wore off as soon as they finished up sweeping the corpses off the porch. It’s been day after day of kicking the can down the road, telling herself she’ll be better tomorrow, and it just isn’t happening. 

Not a single inch of progress since she rescued them. Why didn’t her wounds do her in? She was so, so close, but lived. Fixed right back up by the nanites — well, not quite right, but certainly not dead. Back then it felt like it must've been for a reason, but nothing’s changed since. It’s just prolonging things. Maybe it was an accident and she wasn’t supposed to make it. Maybe this is just how things are, how she is, can’t change that.

Maybe one day N might come back feeling down, something might go wrong between him and Uzi and he’ll come to her instead. The torrent of happy words he lets loose every morning is such a joy, his rants about how he and Uzi did so-and-so today, how he gets nervous when flying her around and not knowing why, it’s a fifteen-minute slice of paradise; those moments should be longer, not shorter, but it’d be so much easier if they were both under these same blues.

She could tuck everything away and just console him, and he’d console her too, they could share melancholies for a bit and finally get to talk, wallow away the burden, give the apology he deserves. If only there were fireflies to catch anywhere anymore, or the kind of warm rainy nights that those tiny bugs like so much, it could be just like back then, their little reprieves from the dull day-to-days of Summer at the Manor.

Of course, V keeps this stuff tucked in the back of her ROM drives, only letting herself visit them for comfort from time to time, when she really needs it. Now is one of those times. Today’s so heavy, and the warm daydreams help so much — but she chucks it all into the trash folder. 

It’s a horrible train of thought. “I wish he was miserable… like me.” Yeah, it’s good he doesn’t stick around anymore. While she’s going for another sip, her arm stings, nearly startling her into spilling the whole thing. Worthless piece of garbage. Every part of her’s uprooted. From shell to core, all wrapped in scars. All grafted with awful, warped stuff that does nothing but hurt.

And it’s all Cyn, isn’t it? Every chunk of red mush her shell’s chock-full of, Cyn. V’s sure she’s still around, biding. One day, when the wounds give her the last push, Cyn’s going to pop right out of her corpse, then it’s all the way back to square one. Rescuing N didn’t matter one bit if that’s what’s in store for him. Might’ve even made it worse.

Maybe there’s a way to work around it. When she smashed the drone core back in Outpost-3 (J’s?), Cyn didn’t regenerate again. If it came down to it… It wouldn’t really take much to break her own core like that, right? Strong enough hit, good enough cut, that’d do it, wouldn’t it?

What if I…?

Fearful flutters awaken in her chest. She kills the thought before it’s done. No. Not now.

I’ve still got business to finish. He still needs me.

Does he? Is it not objectively more of a risk for her to stay alive, one foot in the grave as she has? What’s ahead for her? Kicking the can farther and farther until it’s on another planet. Not much else but sad dreams, sad nightmares, monotone days. Not much point in going back to her job. Not much hope for alternatives. J would know how to push her on, but she’s not here anymore.

Tomorrow will be better. Yeah. I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Tomorrow. Promise. No matter what happens.

She curls up farther into the sofa, burning away the flutters with renewed aches. It’s in the twilight zone between comfortable and not, just far enough into the former that she can stay like that. She’s feeling drowsy again all of a sudden, weird as it is to want to sleep lying down.

Maybe she should go get her guns magazine. The one she found by the entry desk and read a dozen times already, must still be somewhere around there. Take her mind off things for a while, just refreshing her memory on the workings and dangers of assault rifles. Yeah, that sounds good, only— no, she can’t. The very thought of moving to get it is exhausting. No matter how much she wants to, it’s not happening. Can’t be bothered to make her legs move.

V leaves the head-cup on the other side of the sofa, letting out a defeated sigh. Nothing to be done about it. After just a few minutes, she’s drifting away into sleep mode.

“Oh biscuits… She’s sleeping. Should I…?”

“No no, nonono! Just leave her there, we’ll try later.”

“You sure? I think she’s waking up.”

“ We’re waking her up! Shhhh!”

The muffled sounds of a conversation wake V from her half-sleeping daze. N is some steps away, anxiously snapping between looking at her and behind himself, toward the foyer. Uzi’s right outside, peeking past the doors as if waiting for an invitation.

“Uh… Well, she’s…” — N whisper-shouts to Uzi, slowly curling up into a shy shrug then turning away and putting up an awkward smile. — “Hi, V.”

Awkward silence falls for a few moments. God, please not today. Any other day but today. 

“Hey.” — V sighs to the top of her voicebox, then points at Uzi with her thumb. — “What? Is she gonna wait there all day?”

Before N can figure out what to say, Uzi’s stepping toward them at an odd, hurried pace. She stops just behind him, carefully scanning V from head to pegs.

“How’re you holding up?” — She says. There’s an irritating, condescending curiosity to her tone.

“What has you so interested?” — V lays back, picking up the head-cup and spinning it like a basketball — “What, want me to do party tricks for your prom or something? I charge in body parts, you know.”

Yeah, that sounds more like the V that Uzi knows. But there’s something odd about her posture, her movements, something that clicked the instant she laid back. Her other arm is glued to her side, almost hidden behind her torso, curled up so awkwardly it can’t be comfortable.

A painful sting of self-awareness hits Uzi; that’s what she does too. Laying back and fiddling is how she deals with the anxiety of being around people. That arm, though? It’s different. It looks like it’s hurting, moving weirdly, like the joints are forced to exert way more strength than they should need to keep it in place.

“I’ve been talk– thinking about how you were last I saw you. I… Wasn’t sure you were going to heal. And you haven’t come out of here at all!” — She remembers to smile midway through saying that.

V side-eyes Uzi. The front is so thin it’s irritating. As if she ’d really be so considerate.

“Dunno what N told you, but I’m alright.” — She stops spinning the head-cup and starts inspecting it, pretending to find interest in the bullet hole with the straw and the cracked glass around it. — “Can’t a honest worker like me get some vacations? I’ll go back to chopping up your friends in a few business days if that’s what worries you.”

Uzi’s not sure if it sounds like… dejection? No, it’s a genuine threat. But it’s not threatening her at least. Or maybe she’s too tired to make it sound convincing. Maybe she is on Team Human after all… 

But N looks shook, eyes on Uzi, staring awkwardly. Awkward isn't a good way to put it. He's tense, unsure, mind rushing but getting nowhere. He can feel the sharpness in the air; if he moves, it'll split him in half. Things to whisper to Uzi keep coming to his head, never quite right in time or wording. She's so caught up in the tug-of-war of the conversation that she isn't realizing what N knows by instinct — V's eyes are glued on him.

Not obviously, not with her visor, but he can tell from the off way her head is angled, keeping him in the dead-middle of her optical and thermal sensors. Waiting for his word? Approval? Intervention?

But in this tiny silent gap, he feels Uzi's gearing up to say something blunt. With the conversation impeccably steered so far from her hands — V's good with that —, she's bracing herself to break pretenses and go in for the kill. The determination she oozes with inspires awe and stress at once; it's admirable, but it’s not going to work.

He runs through his options. Maybe he could steer it in a different direction… but V would find some way to shut him up like always. Then Uzi’s left in an even more awkward spot. Yeah. It's probably best to keep aside. That’s not relieving to realize, and he doesn’t know why. It hurts a bit. Why?

“Well… I can tell you don’t like talking about it much, V, but… It’s– hurting a bit, right?” — Uzi wishes to Robo-God she could make her voice just a tone softer. It sounds too blunt, verging on cynical when she tries to come off as caring. — “I’ve studied drone anatomy at school, and engineering on my own. I can give it a try.”

V gives her the most condescending smile she’s ever seen. Her tongue drips with venom. 

“Some engineer you’ve gotta be. Tell me, was snooping around other people’s lives what you did before you went on that genocide kick of yours, or is it a newer trauma thing? No shame in coping but, gee, girl, I’m not your therapist.” — The words stream out of her mouth blazingly quick. V’s face twists into a mix of grimace and delighted smirk as she speaks, but goes blank when she’s done.

She stops messing with the cup and leaves it on the table, hiding her hands between the knees. Uzi can tell that, ever so slightly, they’re trembling. As she’s about to answer, V speaks again, voice now gone soft.

“Look. I appreciate it. But can you two stop bothering me? No offense, but I don’t think it’s you I trust to take a look at my guts.” — She turns to N. — “Seriously… It’s fine.” 

Silence. Even Uzi has to get it by now. V can see how N's dying inside, unsure or unwilling to say something. Her inner monologue rambles on and on with uncertainty, regret, words fading out as soon as she thinks them. She could’ve said something different, kinder, less blunt, spared him the stress somehow. Maybe she still has the chance, needs just a moment, just a warm sip’s reprieve to figure it out. But right as she picks up the head-cup again, Uzi's mouth opens.

“Hey. I can prove I know a thing or two, alright? We’ve talked with N and… Well, I’ve gotta do surgery on him too, so you could take a look while I do it if you want. It’s for something similar too, so–”

Shink– Crack!

V’s claws are extended, crumpling up the head-cup like it’s a ball of paper. Shards of glass from its visor are still clattering to the floor. Whole body’s shaking. She recoils — that happened on its own. Chest is beating. Dizziness struck and took hold . What happened?

She turns to Uzi and N, afraid she scared them off. They haven’t moved an inch, though their eyes are wide and hollowed. Not scared; concerned. She scrambles to think of something, anything to say to fix this, but before she figures it out she’s already talking.

“Are you stupid? Really?” — The furious tinge of her own voice startles her. — “You’re gonna let her do that? Good God, N, no, no you aren’t, I’m not going to let you–”

V catches herself, shutting her eyes with a jagged sigh. She carefully sets down the head-cup’s remains, bits of glass and aluminum clattering onto the wooden table, before retracting her claw and nesting that hand in the other to hide it away under the chin. Her eyes open and set on the floor, hands tugging at the fluff of her coat’s neckline. 

Uzi gently grasps N’s shoulder. They exchange worried stares, words quickly flashing by her screen. C’mon, let’s go. I’m so so sorry N we can go now. I’m sorry. He nods. Mouth opens, then it closes — what? Why? What’s he…? — as he flashes his reply. One sec pls. He turns to V; his words are certain but not, like a leap of faith.

“You can still come if you wanna. It’s fine.”

That’s going to set her off for sure, isn’t it? That’s it. It’s really getting ugly now. Oh robo-God robo-God robo-God. I don’t even know why she reacted like that, did I say something bad? There’s something I don’t know, right? But what’s that? Why’d you do that, N, we should’ve…

But V’s answer comes softly.

“Whatever you want.”

She sits there in silence, frozen like a statue, save for her waving tail.

As they’re turning away, Uzi gets ahead to look at N’s face. Blank. He returns the pat to her shoulder. The same thoughts go through their heads at once: what went wrong? What could have been done differently? Did I do it right?

The hurry in their steps makes the way to the exit very short — only, as Uzi’s hand lays on the knob, V shouts at them.

“Hey. Uzi.” — Her voice is strained. — “Not N. Me first. Please.”

Uzi's hands tug at the seat belts tying down V's torso — taut, maybe a bit too much. And they're not doing a lot either, since her hands are free. At least her tail’s firmly taped. Oh, well. It’s better than nothing. 

The entire operating theater — a coffee table, four seat belts, a sofa (multi-tasking as a seat for N, a hanger for V's coat, and a tool tray), a white Bluetooth antenna to run anesthetic overrides, and a reclaimed streetlight above — can barely be described as such, but it’ll work. V appears wholly unconcerned with their haphazard setup, fingers tip-tapping by her side and face overflowing with impatience, but Uzi knows better. Her back’s not against the table. She’s refusing to lie down even when strapped, a refusal of trust much more telling than any of her usual trite gestures. In different circumstances, Uzi would've assumed she's just embarrassed at her torso being bare.

"You sure you don't want me to knock you out? You look..." 

"Can you get going already? I can take it." — She rolls her eyes and throws back her head, hands feeling around the Bluetooth antenna on her temple. 

“Hey, don’t move that! Uzi’s gonna need it.” — Says N. He means it to sound comforting for sure, but the nerves are showing.

“Why? I already said I wanna stay awake.” — V’s voice lowers a tone and slows down just a tad.

"I'm still gonna block your nanites for a bit too, cause..." — Uzi trails off. A hurried scroll through the Bluetooth command line on her visor shows everything’s still on the greens, but that movement could’ve easily knocked the flimsy piece of junk offline, forcing a reset and reconfiguration from zero.

"Yeah yeah. Whatever." — V finally decides to lie down straight, arms crossed. Much as Uzi  wants to, it's hard to feel annoyed at her snark now. Maybe it's the strain in her voice, or maybe it’s how her claws, always showing and fiddling, are all but absent.

“Ooh-kay…” — Can’t help but check through everything again, sure as she is she’s got the all-clear. — “N, pass the cutter.”

He peeks into the backpack at his side, retrieving a red-striped flashlight and tossing it over V. The moment Uzi catches it, she starts to doubt if the table’s height is right, or if it maybe isn’t a better idea to go for a bladed tool instead of a laser, or maybe… Gah, she’s circling round the drain. Gotta get going.

The shell looks even odder from up close. Heat-warped wrinkling is just part of it; the whole thing’s patchy somehow, starting a few inches below the neck, with half a dozen different textures and levels of wear hinting at a long history of wounding and healing. She holds the sharp end of the cutter just under the diamond-shaped CRT on V’s chest, flipping its switch to “medium” and letting its laser sizzle as it eats through the plastic. In Uzi’s periphery, N rapidly switches between staring with worried interest and shuffling awkwardly into the seat, cradling his tail to the chest like a book.

V stares down at the procedure, face plastered with an indecipherable yet decidedly uncalm plainness. Her body’s shivering slightly, so slightly Uzi thinks it’s her own hands trembling instead. Not even N seems to notice the overpowering need to scream choking up her throat.

It takes a monumental, exhausting amount of effort to not let anything show, but she makes sure not to, letting everything blur out, though her eyes are fixed like a nail to the cutter, watching its slow shifting, hearing the maddeningly loud sizzle of plastic melting away, forced to panicked sharpness that spares her no second of the process. It all dissolves on its way out of her core; never reaching her face.

To Uzi, that’s all but approval. She’s suppressed the worry, instead trying to tell if the plastic is thinner here or there’s a whole different material melded with it; the laser cuts much faster in places, forcing her to keep alert so as to not accidentally burn anything underneath. The sizzling raises its tone for a moment, startling her — yeah, it’s definitely weaker here. Thinner plastic… Or maybe some odd kind of fragile polymer mixed in? That makes no sense. How would that even happen?

She’s finished the cut anyway — a rectangle around V’s belly. The wrinkled sheet of plastic is loose enough for Uzi to pull out with pinching hands, carefully lifting and sliding it to the side. V closes her eyes and lies back her head as she does. Refusing to see her own innards? Uzi didn’t expect her of all people to be… 

She doesn’t get to finish that thought. The moment her eyes get a look inside, she wants to vomit.

V’s insides are all red. It’s mushy, wet, pulsating.

Uzi forces herself to peek deep into the open cut so V won’t notice the bullets of sweat streaming down her visor. It worsens the nausea by an order of magnitude. Flesh, sinew, bone, torn or scarred, even charred. Blood and nerves.

Chassis struts emerge from inside and under a large fleshy sac below the core, rising into a curved ceiling of muscled tatters under the sternum. Her hand grazes it, making threads of muscle nearby go taut. Patches of sensitive membrane line the shell’s inside, furrowed by the heavy arterial branches as if roots to the dirt, and sacks of shifting grease, sometimes covered in dead burned crusts, attach to the hydraulic components close to the hip, dragging across as the pistons meagerly expand and retract.

Even the more familiar parts are off. They're misplaced, whole inches away from where they should be. This strut here splits into two somehow, and there's a double corner structure there where there should only be one. There’s bubbly black blobs everywhere, like someone’s tried to weld plastic. Oil coolant vessels lay angled aside rather than straight, pushed off the back of the torso by soft abscesses that have grown under and around them. But the worst of them is the core.

It lays nested in a net of growths of distended tissue and bundles of worn wire, in part kept aloft by the strained fiber-optic cabling that ascends into V’s neck and plugs into her cranial hardware, all its insulation poked full of holes, not the long ones that friction causes, but chemical ones, overlapping circles surely burned by some caustic ooze from the ill, pale swells that cover the flesh lining the inside of the chest. 

It shifts in and out of place as the lumpy growths pulsate, throb, tremble, move in odd ways with the even rhythm of exhalation and inhalation, only held from sliding down to the pelvic cavity by one of its failsafe struts wedging between some twitching strips of muscle below the sternum. Every core-churning detail decreases the likelihood of this amalgam being the product of randomness farther and farther below the decimal point, adding hundreds of zeroes to the right.

Horror turns to dismay as she slowly takes in the full image. Everything pulses; it stirs, it’s sore-red and shivering, alive and hurt, somehow plugged to V. Her whole body’s verging on the lower boundary of “barely functioning”, and Uzi can’t tell which parts are so by cruelty, and which by negligence.

There's absolutely no way a hydraulic tensor would be wrapped with membrane unless you wanted it to hurt, but the nanites could've done that on accident, not that it explains how threads of nerves have made it inside these axial nooks that other parts are supposed to slide into. What looks like a shard of chassis strut somehow made its way up to the right shoulder, lodging itself in the joint — though this is certainly a result of damage, it just couldn’t have happened if a sensical design was used for it instead of this... Tendon-pulley system? She can't even begin to guess at how it's supposed to work. 

What’s worse, it doesn’t look like a human design in the slightest. That's an admission that makes the seeming cruelty of its baffling minutiae hard to stomach. Humans are cruel in their coldness; they don't go out of their way to break something that's not bothering them, they'll just ignore what's already broken instead. This? It's something else. It's a haphazard, fleshy reinventing of robotics. Or it's a cruel inversion of its principles. Or it's both. And even in the realm of cruelty, this discordant merging of flesh and metal makes troubling little sense. There’s easier ways to go about hurting robots.

What did this? What could've possibly done this? Uzi's mind returns to the cryogenics wing and the J-Monster — the dread and rage in V's face. Her oddly panicked reaction to the word "surgery". N's lesser yet similar pains in the torso. Her neurotic, bipolar protectiveness of him. The pieces are slowly fitting together, giving Uzi the contours of a nauseating picture.

Her gaze darts again to V. She stares back with hollowed, quivering eyes. Her arms shield her chest, hands curled up close to a half-open mouth, whole thing rocked by rhythmic little shakes. She’d sooner die than let herself look this way — she’s not all there anymore. Uzi nods, unable to think of anything better, hoping it’s somehow the slightest bit reassuring, but finding nothing in V’s dazed visage to tell her so, or otherwise. No wonder she didn’t want her innards touched.

And that was the right idea too — this is far, far beyond Uzi's ability to wrangle. Knocking V out now, with no idea of how it might affect the writhing amalgam inside her torso, not to mention the inhuman stress at hand, is out of the question. 

Turning to N gives her little assurance. The blank, hollowed stare he returns is a surefire tell; he’s panicking. Both his knees are raised, shielding his chest and face, tail wrapping and unwrapping around himself. No attempt to comfort Uzi makes it out of his head, though the barely repressed grimace in her face is a desperate plea. He can’t help her.

It's so surreal. If V's messed up like that, then he is too. He swallows that tough pill slowly, squirming inside to find anything else to take his mind off it, but resolved to at the very least not slip away, keep himself here and now and try to think it through. She’s hid this, or maybe couldn't bring herself to tell him, for however long they've known each other: keeping him from something.

Her odd, suddenly protective turn… almost all of their shared memories are tinged by a certain meanness, anger he somehow thought was playful once and couldn't be happier to have left behind, but that sliver of fuzzy nostalgia on the other side of almost all is so different that it's sinking him into the old pit of doubts again. V wasn't always like that. Once, she seemed closer, more melancholic, like she's recently become.

And this is all so far beyond his reach. He's only managed to get dragged around, offering unneeded, useless aid. There has to be something he can do, somewhere. Some way to take charge and ease burdens, damn his nerves. He must find it. 

And for a moment, too quick to realize; their stares lock. V’s eyes wandered idly by, N’s moved intently. Just an instant, just a second, just a spark of shared thought — help . To ask for and give it. Too soon, that flash is spent. Consumed in a frenzied dash for ways to speak what comes to them, only to realize it can’t be said. Gap too wide to walk, wall too tall to leap. A hint of old fear and a hint of hurt pride got in the way. The offer goes ungiven, the plea dies unsaid.

V slips into a thousand yard stare, eyes wobbling to and from the open torso. N’s train of thought runs into a roadblock and screeches to a halt. He sees her shivers and says nothing. The last nail spikes the coffin; chance gone by. Nowhere left to go.

But a hint of solace finds him. Uzi’s purple glow lures his gaze, snatches his thoughts away. She’s also wracked by nerves, just as confused. But there’s something in her; hands subtly fiddling, brows furrowed just a bit. Nerve, momentum pushing for a way forward, oozing out into the pale light. It grants him courage. She’s fighting to figure it out, he should too. Things are… He is different, and she’s there with him. A firm nod goes her way, all he can manage for now.

Uzi doesn't reply — also lost in thought, drifting back down into the open torso. Every good transistor in her motherboard tells her she's gotta pull back, call it here, stop herself from messing it up even more somehow. V will understand, she'll even be relieved. The acid quips sure to come when she recovers are gonna be hard to take but they're better than the alternative.

But she said she could take it. Still hasn’t taken that back. And — how’s Uzi gonna just leave it like this, resign to burning the image into her drives forever? Absolutely not, not with N’s trust on her, not without trying to fix it. Even just the parts she can sort of understand.

Uzi swallows up her nerves, choking them in preemptive calculations of the moves to come. It’s not looking good. She prays that V really meant what she said.

Let’s start by segmenting. Divide and conquer. First, the doubled chassis. A closer look reveals two different materials are alloyed together in places; titanium and... aluminum. Aluminum, for a stress-bearing support structure meant for mining machinery? The stuff bends and breaks at the slightest impact and– that's exactly what happened. 

V's chassis, orders of magnitude weaker than supposed to be, must've shattered by some kind of impact force. The repair nanites, unprepared to handle such a ludicrous incident, could only fail to find the chassis where it was meant to be, and simply concluded it wasn't there, or tried to plug the gaps between what parts they could detect, doing so with the more sensical choice of titanium.

This gives Uzi some relief. The nanites will make this disaster infinitely easier to wrangle. Holding back the queasy pulses traveling up to her palate, she tugs at a displaced strut to confirm the theory; it resists like a fork on rare meat, counterpulling for a brief moment before letting loose. Robo-God, can V feel that? Does the pain override work at all with these nerves? Uzi can’t check right now — if she gets distracted, there’s no way to get back into it through the nausea. N will let her know if anything goes wrong. It’s time to work.

Sometimes, she has to pinch at the flesh itself, keep it from going taut and retreating from her touch, prying up flaps of what looks like skin from over stuck bits of shrapnel with the gentlest tug her pulse allows, others lasing out odd protrusions and entire stretches of bent aluminum from the chassis, cutter set to minimum out of fear of accidentally burning meat. She pays excruciating attention to V’s shivers, noticing that they grow intense when she moves too close to the nerves, pushes or pulls too much at the struts.

“N, solder and welder.”

“Can do.”

He hangs over the operating table after passing both, looming behind her as if shielding himself from V. Can’t worry about him now — gotta weld these two beams together with the solder so they’ll stay aligned for the nanites to apply proper fixes later. Next, try to see how much wet goop can be pried from the hydraulic balancers and tensors close to the hip. They’re almost fifty degrees off, certainly the reason why she’s not been walking much at all.

It’s not looking pretty, but bit by bit it’s getting better. Pulling the core out of its wedge to move it to its proper spot is a horrifying affair; Uzi realizes mid-movement that some plastic pegs and their corresponding slots have been torn straight out and could not be repaired because of an overflow of scarred tissue covering their remains. Can’t make the rest of the way, can’t pull out. Leave it there? Can’t either. Hold it up? How? Put it back how it was? No, can’t shove it back between the muscle, the spot is sore and shifting close. What can she–

N grasps her shoulder. The grip is firm, though it trembles. His eyes are on V, though she doesn’t even seem to notice, gasping at the light above. When they bounce to Uzi, she finds them wide and worried, but not panicked, not scared. In them, there’s more trust than fear. 

You’ve got this, she hears, though nothing’s been said. The way forward clears up just enough.

She has to carefully, painstakingly, nerve-shatteringly slowly weld V’s heart to its place, keeping it from moving with one hand while applying ample amounts of solder with the other and praying not to slip or tremble too far, sometimes ripping through the web of tissue with her fingers, hand nearly grazing the sick abscesses on the walls, fearfully retreating when the surrounding tissue contorts and squirms at the touch of heat, lest the welding flame veer an inch too far and scorch the core’s millions of delicate circuits and the lifetime’s worth of memories and emotions held inside, then finally letting out a strained sigh when she lets go and the grease-wrapped ball sticks, doesn’t hang. It’s there, it’s plugged, it’s working. The fiber-optic cabling is still too worn for comfort and the core itself too full of greasy grime, but this much should do.

Yeah, there’s no fully fixing this — scratch the “fully”, there’s no fixing it, but by robo-God did she manage to make it so much goddamn better, next up she’s gotta try to—

The grasp on her shoulder goes tight. It trembles, sending shakes down her arm.

“Uzi!” — N whispers. Must’ve been trying to get her attention for a bit. Oh, robo-Christ. 

She stumbles to her feet, to a dead-still V, arms curled like a dried-up spider. There’s text across her visor.

<KERNEL PANIC: NOT SYNCING. UNABLE TO MOUNT ROOT FS ON BLOCK (0,0).>

The sea is quiet, crossed by calm waves meters high. They push and pull and tumble, one by one throwing V forward. Somehow, she’s floating, long sailed off Yonkers to the ocean outside.

Nothing out there but an impenetrable gloom. There’s only the sloshing of waves, and the dull tingling when they wash under. Her chest hurts. It hurts so much. A thousand little pricks and burns attack her innards.

In a fit of desperation, she scratches at her shell, the wet tips of her claws slipping off a dozen times before finally hooking in through the diamond screen under which the pain nests. Bit by bit she pulls apart, fumbling to push the claws farther in and grasping the frontal struts to which the plastic is coupled. They resist her for long, screen sparking as it dies, arms turning to jelly from exertion, but finally snapping, tearing asunder from a last desperate pull.

Plums of smoke bellow out as her arms go limp. Nothing moves anymore, only her eyes. The glimmering of thousands of wavecrests dot her surroundings, flashing a nauseating shade of yellow before crashing in silence. The source of the light is a flame, burning out of her chest.

Once it lit the world, now it blazes coldly, tongues barely peeking out of its kiln. Not all the little stings inside V are caused by its burning, she realizes; the faint light meets things in the darkness, drawing their slender, many-jointed contours. They sheen like plastic as they approach, breaking out of the gloom and reaching inside her. Claws that grasp, gnaw at odd red bumps heaping up in spots that she’s sure should only have wiry stuff and metal beams, then retreat under the waves, only to return a moment after. The vultures. It’s the vultures again.

How long has she been like this now? No way to know. Her own burial ship, funeral pyre atop, no way to tell how long it’ll be before she reaches wherever she’s going. Somewhere afar, Cyn’s talking, saying something she can’t parse, catching only glimpses of words, except they don’t stay long enough to understand before leaving her head.

Where’s… Flashlight, give me that. Keep it together. Did I… I messed up… Wait, no, she’s…

It slips away, the rest unheard. N’s song she left far behind, that much is certain, though his shouts echo by sometimes. She weighs with the daze of a nightmare woken up from, and another woken into, letting her do little but look at the fire as it burns her, the vultures as they eat her. They’ll never let go. They’ll always be there, have always been. It’s so tiring, so exhausting, but she can’t let her eyes close. The mere thought of it brings her an agonizing sadness.

Hours pass, nothing changing. Larger waves come, though they don’t wash over quite yet, they push her on. Their glimmers become stranger with time, quivering somehow as they approach, floating point calculations that grow imprecise as she sails farther and farther down the number line. Once in a while, the shape of the waves changes in an instant, betraying the gaps between numbers that get larger and more frequent with the sound of Cyn’s voice getting near.

Hey, hold on. N. I think…

She dreads the approaching sound, mind racing with images of what it might bring, but maybe it’ll all leave her behind when the floating point calculations finally fail upward and overflow to infinity, casting her adrift somewhere without even waves, eaten at no longer. She’s tired, oh so tired, kept awake only by the fire in her chest, though that too is fading, going cold. Hang on. Just a bit more. Don’t stop burning yet.

But right as she thinks she’s going to pass out, yet greater waves rock the sea, bringing louder voices with them, seeming right by her ear, so so close even though nothing’s there. Then a blinding glow breaks the gloom; moonlight shining on her eyes. 

Hey? V? You good?

“I think… Maybe that’s enough, Uzi. Oh, biscuits…”

V sees double, both the light of the basement and the gloom of the firelit sea. She shakes her head and blinks as her sight clears up to Cyn and N looming over. Someone’s covered her up with her coat. The whole scene feels a thousand miles away.

I know, I know. But lemme— I’m not sure if… Ah!

Cyn holds something bright to her visor, then moves it up to her sensors, keeping it there for an indecisive moment before withdrawing and peeking under the coat. A sinking, heavy sickness grips her as she starts to dread what’s soon to come. Out of a nightmare, into another.

N’s not speaking. It seems like he can’t anymore; maybe his voicebox got torn from him just now. He only looks, surrendered to resignation. V can’t bear to turn from him, even as Cyn’s work resumes, cutting, gnawing, burning, sickness sinking deeper, panic stiffening her body until every joint hurts from strain, but she can’t let herself scream, he’ll pay the price again, gotta hold it in, keep still somehow for the rest of forever until Cyn decides she’s done.

But it looks different, doesn’t it? Something’s different, she can just barely tell. N’s arms, they look odd, the light’s too bright, the missing weight of her glasses, and that coat… It’s too large. Where’s her dress?

Robo-God, I’m just not sure if it’s got anything to do with this. Maybe, maybe…

As Cyn trails off, a vague, foggy certainty nails itself to her. This haze that’s hanging over, from the dream with the firelit sea, she’s gotta shake it off. It immediately seems impossible. Not with Cyn still ripping her up inside. But she has to, somehow; figure out what’s wrong with the lights, what’s gone different.

She can only work through thoughts by inches, step by step, often retreading when a new sensation attacks her torso; pulling, shifting, tearing, followed by waves of sickness. Nothing Cyn’s said makes sense. Should it? Yes, it should. That’s something to hang on to.

As if summoned by the thought, Cyn approaches. She’s crawling close, intently staring at V’s face. Time’s running out. Have to figure it out. Now.

The lights are wrong. Why? Because they should be a different color. Cyn reaches for something in the dark. What should the lights be? Yellow. Why? Because it’s the basement. Cyn retrieves that something, thin, sharp, and points it at her eyes. But what color are the lights then? White. The lights are white. Why? Cyn slowly moves the sharp something to her eyes, blade glistening, readying to cut, but she’s on the cusp of something, at a hand’s reach, just have to get there–

She realizes. The lights are white because she’s not in the basement.

The bright glow floods her optics again, making her flinch. It hovers for a moment, then slides slightly to the right.

“Can– Can you follow this with your eyes? Just a teeny bit, just so I can know you’re hearing me.” — An echo of Cyn’s voice trails behind Uzi’s before fading away.

The haze begins to evaporate, revealing where she is; the hotel, the lobby, under the shine of a streetlight, tables and chairs all around her, moonlight gleaming from outside. The last few hours are returning to her, sense coming with them. She’s safe.

“Uzi, maybe we could try something else… Maybe she’s overheating?” — N whispers from the side.

“Wait a sec, I think…” — Uzi mutters, brow furrowing. The flashlight shifts another bit to the right.

It finally registers that Uzi was talking to her, trying to figure out if she’s awake.The embarrassing realization of what was happening starts to sink in. Daymare passed her by. She phased out, right in front of them. Her gut wrenches.

“I’m fine, moron.” — That doesn’t come at all like she intended. Throat tightened up, voice gone way too hoarse, slow. She lightly pushes Uzi’s flashlight away. — “What’s the hold-up?”

“Oh, thank Robo-Christ…” — Uzi recoils a little, dumbfounded into paralysis for a brief moment before clicking the flashlight shut and throwing it aside. N leans in, beaming with relief. — “Are you alright? Wait, let me get the straps…”

“No. Get it done with.” — V raises her voice to a shout. Guilt immediately stings when N’s face gets torn up by dismay. — “Please.”

“Are you… Sure?” — Uzi struggles to phrase an answer. — “We can give it a go another time…”

“No. I’m fine.”

An awkward, tense silence falls while Uzi and N exchange bewildered looks, as if trying to learn from one another if they heard that right, unsure of what to do next. Eventually, Uzi withdraws first, upturning the pile of tools on one half of the sofa in search for something. N follows, taking the coat off V and sinking into the other half, never breaking that worry-torn stare. She can feel the need to do something tearing him up inside, and maybe he could’ve if she didn’t knee-jerk. She shouldn’t have done that. Should’ve asked Uzi to stop, but the chance is spent now. Can’t take it back.

Before she can think anything of it, a dull shock starts crawling up her spine, and her eyes drift away. Uzi’s working with a cutter, burning away chunks of nerve from some cylindrical object protruding from under her chest. Out of the haze, into excruciating sharpness.

Another shock makes V wince, laboriously turning her head up and putting her left hand over her mouth, expecting oil-puke that never makes it all the way up and instead slides back down at half the pace. A queasy, tingling weight drapes her limbs. Uzi seems to notice something’s not right, peeking up with sweat streaming down her screen, but she doesn’t say anything.

She must think her program really shut down V’s pain functions. To be truthful, V thought it would too, but it makes sense it didn’t; what’s hurting can’t run code. Nerves don’t pick like sensors can, they just hurt. It’s out of her control. Now, her sense of time’s going too. The dozens of stings and jolts flaring from every corner of her torso seem to punctuate the passing of minutes, maybe even dozens of minutes, but she quickly finds that they closely match the march of seconds instead. Some kind of tool is endlessly going in circles near the pelvis, spiraling upward, each turn sending this odd, sharp shivering all around her back and driving her insane. 

V’s eyes nail to her left hand, still on the chin. They refuse to move away. What she’s got to do is sinking in, digging in her a dreadful pit. 

She needs to chew her hand down to the wrist. The sooner, the better.

A thousand ticks of her processor breeze past while it drags to her mouth, expectation and dread creeping in. On their own, her optics shut. Her jaw widens, opening the way for the fingers that are now sliding in between the edges of her teeth, tense, bracing for the bite.

Only the movement doesn’t finish; the hand is snatched away, held tight in the air above.

Her eyes jolt wide open. Another hand reaches out from the dark, into the bright haze, gripping hers. The glow of its back is yellow.

The joined hands tremble, and she can’t tell if it’s hers doing that, or the other, or both. The other hand loosens its clutch, but doesn’t release, instead sliding down to her wrist and resting there, holding gently.

“I’m– Sorry. I hope you don’t mind.” — Says N, shuffling his feet to regain balance. He was leaning over so much he could’ve easily fallen right over her. Though she’s at a right angle from him, their eyes somehow meet.

Time ticks by, blankly. Sounds and sensations slowly return, their absence felt only as they’re settling back in. The world’s going all sore again, all cramped, but somehow lighter. It’s only then she notices she hasn’t answered; the proper time’s long passed, but she has to; she’s going to regardless.

“No. It’s fine.” — The tone’s wrong, awkward, peaking at the i in “fine” as a burning sting strikes her spine, but they’re soft words, softly said. Not like she knows what she meant to sound like anyway.

“Hey. Try uh…” — He stops to reach at a nearby stool, pulling it to himself and sitting. — “Try… Try talking. About anything. Keep your mind off it, alright?”

The importance of that suggestion hits almost as soon as he’s done saying it; something sparks, her sight blurs, a guttural wail escapes her mouth. N looks off, to a frantic Uzi peeking up to V, muttering a chain of low, inaudible exclamations before returning to her work.

The stinging resumes, slower, to the rhythm of something whirring. Now V’s sharp enough to feel not only where it’s hurting — right by her core —, but also what: wobbling wires being peeled from a flap of something, some mix of membrane and skin, then their insulations ripped out and the copper hairs inside cut, then wrapped together. Power flows anew through them when that’s done, returning feeling to parts she didn’t know were numb and are now beginning to ache. Gotta get going. Now.

“What… About–” — The sound of her voice brings N back to V, letting her glimpse a harrowed grimace settling back to well-faked calm. Nothing comes easily, nothing seems natural to talk about. She lets her thoughts drift, scrambling for anything she might’ve used before, and finding something that could work, that was already comforting once. — “What about dogs?”

“Dogs?” — N’s eyes light up. — “You know about dogs?”

“Ye– Yeah. Let me think, uh… Ever heard of Great Danes?” — The name resists being said. It gets caught in the tongue, between the teeth.

“I’ve read that name somewhere! Don’t have a clue what they look like, though… Do you?”

She drifts deeper in search of more. The waves take her somewhere gloomy-yellow; what she’s searching for doesn’t show, instead the remains of a half-remembered song bubble up and fill her thoughts. What she does find is hard to drag out, all grimy with confusing memories.

“They’re these… Really, really big ones. You’ve– They’re sometimes white, or light brown, or– or black, and they have…” — Her voice is starting to tremble. Her free hand drags down from her cheek, onto the neck, fingers tugging onto cloth that isn’t there. — “Long, drooping jowls…”

V slows down, then freezes. She’s slipped again, hasn’t she? An old feeling crawls upward as she glances past the light of the operating table, unsure of whether she’s seen yellow lights out there or not.

No. No. Stay here. Don’t slip. She blinks rapidly, once, twice, thrice, then double-checks her arms; they’re both there, but their shapes confuse and their colors seem wrong. Real and dreamlike aches mingle, earning ground for something she thought might’ve been a daymare but now can’t tell if it really is, because gaunt shades are starting to stick out from the gloom past the yellow light, approaching her, stalking, hungry, eager.

“Well– Well uh… What are those? Jowls, I mean, I’ve never heard the word, or– or read either.” — N leans closer, racing from word to word. His voice cuts through, making her blink a few more times. No, the light’s not yellow, it’s white. That’s alright. It’s fine, it’s safe. Nothing’s out there.

She doesn’t remember what the word “jowl” means. Nothing stored in her recent memory matches or is even tangentially about the topic of dogs. Not even fully out of the daze, the idea of drifting back makes her chest weigh and hurt. She sighs and resigns.

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Oh– Don’t worry, don’t worry. We can try something else if you wanna…” — N nods and smiles, oozing patient warmth. But V catches a slight quiver on his arm; somewhere in her periphery she can glimpse his fingers fidgeting, until–

Jolt. Jolt. Jolt, then vertigo. The floor’s moving under her, its angle slowly shifting. V recognizes that sensation; it’s the hydraulic module — a gray cylinder with one end full of wires — in her belly, Uzi’s moving it around. It was out of whack somehow, maybe misaligned, but she can’t recall what or when that happened, because now she’s out there again, grasping at the seams, letting time sputter out of control. Desperate frustration overflows from her core. Stop this. Somehow. Do something. 

She grasps for words one more time, feeling the world drain from under her. There’s gotta be something in there, anything free of baggage. The magazine — the magazine! She doesn’t have it right now, but she’s read it so many times she’s even got some technical bits committed to RAM. That’ll do. 

“Ever told you about the mag I found? The– The gun one.” — Though she stammers, her voice comes through with surprising firmness.

“Guns, guns… I don’t think you did. I… Heh, I didn’t think you read much. Do… you?” — N tugs at his neckline. He’s playing up the sheepishness so much it’s unbelievable. Can’t feel angry at that now– But why would that thought even cross her? He’s trying to calm her down.

“It’s tough… My eyes don’t focus right, I-I think I need glasses…” — The sentence trails off into a gasp as another wave of vertigo crashes onto her, matching a pop-up that informs her that the hydraulics from before are recalibrating, resetting her sense of balance. Burning shivers flare up all around them as the flame from Uzi’s welder starts sizzling. She grunts and looks for the thread of what she was going to say. — “I’ve been reading about– About… Smaller, portable ones. Submachine guns. There’s this one model that… It was… Weird, really old too. Chambered nine Parabellum, because it was for police, but the thing is, it’s gas-operated , and it’s got a– a closed bolt… So…”

She stops herself. A cloud of confusion hangs over N’s smile. That last bit threw him for a loop. Of course it did! The only guns he’s seen are those that J, he, and she had. Oh, dammit dammit– All the ways she knew to change topics are leaving her, fast.

“Nonono, don’t stop– Keep going! Maybe… Maybe you can explain to me–”

“I-I know! Look at–” — She tries to move her left hand, but N’s still holding it in mid-air. — “Can you…?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry!” — He releases it. The hand retracts, and out comes a gun.

“This… It’s an MP5SD, right? Well– It’s– It’s smaller th–n one, but really… The same, yeah. It’s a sub-ma-chine gun. It means it’s automatic, but it fires bullets made for– for… made for pistols, those are smaller, mostly.” — The sound of her own words keeps her away from the aches, like they’re making a patch of firm land just below, between her and the waves. It’s thin, it’s on the verge of getting swept up, she’s gotta keep going. — “There’s a bunch… Like– there’s the MAC-10, the Vector… Oh, and there’s one called Uzi, too.”

“Like... Yeah!” — N perks up a little at that last part, taking a quick peek aside to find the eponymous drone too absorbed to take notice. There’s a hint of disappointment in his face.

“M-hm.” — V’s not sure how to keep it going. There’s something weird, embarrassing about this, not helped one bit by the nerves. She hasn’t just… Talked like this in what must be years, and she doesn’t know how to anymore. But she can’t waste time on that, gotta keep going, keep talking, because the aches only let up while she’s talking, and right now vertigo’s creeping back in through this very pause. Right as N’s looking back to her, she taps on the side of her gun, both arms trembling too much for her finger to land quite where she wants. — “This. This uh… It’s the ejection port. Do you kn– know what it does?”

“Mmmm. Little… Vial-shaped thingies come out of there when you fire.”

“Yeah! Those are sh– shells, uh… Spen-t bullets. Some-where around…” — She slides the finger to the back of the gun. A whirring noise startles her; it slides right down and off the gun. Her throat cramps as the noise picks up. — “Dammit. It…”

“The back, right? Is that what you mean?” — N’s slowing down his voice, carefully pronouncing the words.

“The back. There is the… The bolt. It’s a– a piece that slides back-and-forth, but ah, since this one’s a closed bolt gun, it means it’s– a bit farther forward.” — Her voice is growing firmer, with less stammering. 

“I follow! That’s what makes it fire?” — He really doesn’t sound confident at all.

“And it go– it goes back, making the– the next bu-llet go up from heeere…” — A squeamy feeling slows her down. Her entire chassis shakes slightly, more intensely at the shoulder; Uzi’s reaching up to her sternum, tugging at something. Her arm’s all the way in V’s chest, far enough that her beanie nearly touches the gun. Don’t look. Keep going. Keep going. She points to the top of the magazine, then up a notch. Her finger’s trembling less. — “To here. And– That’s how it can fire all the time. It’s– it’s fascinating because… The parts have to be so well made to work like that, so… Precise.”

“And what happens if they’re not?”

“Well, it… It might jam a lot. Or shoot off center– Or, or fall too short. Even these can jam, though, but that’s why…” — She pulls back the charging handle, making an unfired bullet fly out of the chamber and bounce on her chest before falling to the ground. — “This. It helps un-jam it. I-I think. But even then, these are… I think they’re– Well, beautiful.”

The tugging’s stopped. Uzi’s moved away and doesn’t seem to be touching anything right now, but V doesn’t dare to look quite yet. She turns to N, finding that a look of seriousness is setting in. What did I…? No– He looks more awkward.

“I didn’t know that.” — He sounds sheepish about what he’s saying. His hand makes a chopping motion on the other. — “I… Whenever it jammed, I just thought what I had to do was take it off. I’d just… Uh, cut it out.”

“N, oh my–” — A chuckle interrupts her, though it comes out almost like coughing. Before she’s realized, it’s broken into giggling, then it’s sprung into a howl of laughter, shaking her entire body. 

Uzi springs up from the open torso, wide-eyed and trailing off into a speedy chain of ohroboJesusohroboJesusroboJesus. The laser cutter in her hand gives a very clear suggestion of what almost happened. V’s laughter dies down at the sight of it, visor painting with embarrassment.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Uzi. Just… Holy hell, N, don’t do that, please– I-I can teach you how to fix it next time.”

“It’s fine! It’s fine, no harm no foul, hah. And thanks.” — He winks then turns to Uzi. — “Is everything alright? We could take a break if you wanna…”

“Just– Ah, a bit left to go. I’ll be done quick. Hang on a sec.” — And right back in she goes. The cutter sizzles away, the aching resumes. N shuffles around on his stool, nervously testing every possible way to sit while trying not to let it show, though the speedy waving of his tail betrays him. And V’s not far behind; a sinking feeling’s creeping in, the waves returning and threatening to send her adrift again. She so wishes Uzi’d heard out N’s rather heavy suggestion, but she’s got going now, no point in stopping her.

But V’s feeling firmer now, safer. That thin layer of words between her and the sea is going to make all the difference. No time to waste; she’ll take the wheel. N’s done enough.

“So– So the bolt, right? You remember what that is?”

“Oh, uh– ‘course!”

Moments warmly blur with every sentence she says. First she goes on a tangent about the shapes and gaps that make the bolt and its carrier, pushing away the sickly tugging and ripping of the flexile supports by her spine coming loose from their fleshy burrows, though N doesn’t quite follow the specifics of how a breechblock works, but it’s fine; she tries again, and he gets it, and she feels a bit warmer.

When Uzi warns V that she’s going to have to burn parts of the membrane and molten plastic lining her insides, it’s fine because she remembers some trivia about the intricacies of gas operation in automatic guns, something that she doesn’t really know all that much about, but N nods along and asks things she can answer with genuine wonder, carefully listening as she strains to speak past the crippling ache of sensors and nerves scorching away.

When pieces of her shoulder joints have to go because they’re all fractured and about to come apart, and she feels every push it takes to rip them out, she’s moved on to the structural genius of rifling, all gushing over how strange of a solution it is to draw a helix all across the inside of a gun barrel but oh how effective at stabilizing the trajectory of a projectile, and even as her arms go loose and the ripping gets slow, rhythmic, unbearable, it’s almost alright because N’s asked why putting the rifling on the outside of the bullet wouldn’t work, and that’s such an interesting question she’s not thought of before.

When the bent beams at the chest have to get heated up till they’re white, welding flame just inches away from her core, then carefully pushed to straighten them up without letting the hot metal touch the tendons that move her arms, they’re talking about bullet calibers, their ranges and functions, just enough solace not to freeze up and slip.

When individual strands of muscle get plucked up and moved away from her chipboards to make room for extra solder, one by one, inch by inch, the workings of sight alignment catch N’s attention and she’s explaining them from the ground up, and it’s all somehow fine even though Uzi doesn’t know how rough she’s being with these fleshy threads full of exposed nerves.

But it drags on and on and she’s not done, though Uzi apologizes again and again the stress is beginning to weigh on them all, and between topic and topic after rant and rant V freezes, stops, and realizes she’s out of things to say. N’s still encouraging her, urging her on, but she only manages a few words at once, and he tries again and again, keenly aware of when her eyes drift afar, fearfully scanning the shadows, her hands on her chest, though in the end he gives up, or decides to give her space she doesn’t want.

The silence cuts deep. She can’t stop now, not while it’s so close to being done, but she’s gone dry. 

Though not quite.

Somewhere under the surface, not too deep, she discovers that the burden’s there, heavy as before; what she’s still yet to say to N. Though she’s not ready, might never be, there would be nothing worse, nothing more unforgivable than kicking the can another mile down the road now. The shot’s perfect, the nerves leave her no room to think up any excuses. All she’s gotta do is reach for just a few more words, push a little more, leap the gap now that it’s at its thinnest.

And slowly, warmly, the words do come, with the surreal softness of a dream.

“Hey, N.” — The strain on V’s voice is worse than ever, accentuated by its lowered tone, getting worse as gullet to mouth goes stiff, paralyzing dread setting in. 

“Yeah…?” — He’s getting tense. He knows, doesn’t he?

“I’ve been horrible to you.” — Crack. — “You’re– always there for me, and– and… I can’t help it but be l-like this.” 

An interval; her throat tying a knot.

“I’m sorry. I don’t… I don’t want to hurt you. I just do, a-and then… I regret it.” — The words are gone. She’s only got silence left.

His fingers interlock, hands rested at the lap, clutching her coat. She catches herself desperately wanting to hold them, putting her arm to the right, stretching it just a little, fingers reaching — but they won’t make it, the gap’s too large; the moment she realizes what’s happening, they pull away, trekking back an odyssey of inches, heavy with angered embarrassment. Stop it. You let go already. Don’t go back on that.

“Thank you.” — His voice is so soft, so, so warm. — “I forgive you. Let’s start off on a better foot this time, yeah?”

A tingling, tiring lightness overwhelms V. Fuzzy; bitter; relieved; disappointed; happy. Not what she wants, but what she wants she can’t have. Her hands hold each other and rest by her chest as she considers answer after answer, in the end dismissing the idea altogether. The surgery is still going and now that it’s fallen silent she can’t help but be fully aware of what’s being done to her insides, but right now everything’s fine, much as she’s still shaking. For now, the gloom’s just gloom, the floor’s placid, the light shines bright.

N looks at her sometimes, and sometimes she looks back. Neither breaks the silence. For now, all’s said.

Uzi’s inspecting every detail she can still see of V’s innards, twiddling her thumbs freakishly fast. Even as the reactivated nanites toil away, vapor streaming out of the wound, she can’t get the image out of her head, can’t stop her mind from racing for solutions. So much left to do, the membrane’s still all messed up and twined with nerves, the fiber-optic’s too worn and the articulations need an upgrade real bad– scratch that, full on replacement, not to mention the inexplicable configuration of the chassis that was reluctantly left unaltered…

And– Robo-Christ, still not a clue whatever did this to her. N doesn’t know, right? But she does. Must be a reason she’s hiding it but why? Just what else is out there lurking? Worse than humans, maybe? Maybe she could ask–

Gah. Stop. It’s enough for today, for the umpteenth time. Did enough. Some things can’t be fixed just like that, and there’s a time and place for questions.

The awkwardness between V and N is somehow even worse than her inner monologue. They’re just sitting there, in silence, looking at nothing, then at each other, sometimes at her. N smiles at her from time to time, and V… She looks almost sleepy, maybe dazed… No. Peaceful. She’s so peaceful now.

To be truthful, Uzi was halfway expecting V to rip herself from the restraints and cut N to shreds. Those last few minutes of silence were horribly stressful. All that laid between Uzi and a full-on screaming breakdown was the fact that no one had made an awkward cough cough yet. But somehow it all went well — it seems. Time will tell how well she did her job.

The nanites are finally done patching up. One last thin plum of steam vanishes into the light. N looks V over, double then triple checking she’s all fixed. Her torso’s a whole different story now; fewer wrinkles, unevenness almost gone. Plain, white, mostly smooth. As fixed as can be.

“Hey. Think we can…” — His voice startles both the girls.

“Oh. Right, right, yeah. Sorry.” — Uzi hurries to V’s side to undo the straps, barely getting there before N’s already done it and tossed them aside. He’s forgotten about the tape on V’s tail though — she rips that out without a word.

V slowly rises from the table, shaking at times, testing how her joints feel. She looks dumbfounded. A certain movement of the left leg as she pulls it up makes her wince, in turn making Uzi bite her lip. Dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit- Then she leaps off, whole body trembling, feet shuffling for balance. It’s like she forgot how to stand for a moment.

Her arms extend forward, then curl back, hands and fingers open and close. When she stretches them over her head, something stops the left one from making it as far up as her right, but the movement is downright clean. No stutters, no strain, just the relaxing precision it should have. Her tail moves oddly, wagging sharply and making twirls, always counter to her body. Uzi’s got absolutely no clue what that means, she’s never seen N’s tail do anything close to that.

There’s a stiffness to V’s motions that’s quickly going away; a counterforce with nothing to counter, extra effort no longer needed to keep her straight because her body’s working as it should now. A grace that’s returning to her gait, almost unnoticeable, making it lighter, surprising even her.

Then, V turns to Uzi. She walks a few shaky steps, slowly opening her arms, awkward, unsure of the motion. Is she asking for a hug? It looks like she’s asking for a hug, doesn’t it? A quick leap lands Uzi right between V’s arms, and they close around her — clumsily, because she’s so much shorter. She has an easier time with the hug than V, not that it’s “easy” regardless; do I move my arms up a bit? Is this long enough? Was she asking for a hug at all? Oh robo-Jesus, she just wanted her clothes, I didn’t even think…

Those thoughts come to a screeching halt. They both break the hug at once — was that too quick? It felt way, way too quick. —, though before she’s taken more than two steps back, V’s left hand lands on her shoulder; from there, it glides down to Uzi’s own hand and holds it.

“Thank you.” — V’s grasp is timid, uncertain, shaking a little, but so very tight, magnifying the wrinkled, bumpy texture of her palms and fingers; all wrapped in scars. Bite marks.

Uzi’s got no clue why V’s doing that, a bit unnerved but not objecting. Maybe it’s just an impulse she got. Maybe it means something only to her, not that Uzi gets much more time to wonder because she lets go and steps away.

N hands her coat over, the intensity of their stares threatening to spark lightning in the air — but no, it’s just Uzi’s imagination, they’re both smiling, lightly, warmly. As she’s slipping on the coat, her lips draw an inaudible thank you , then she turns and steps away. The room falls dead silent as she makes her way to the exit, but as soon as she steps out, her wings spread, and she glances back; it lasts a short, dreamy instant before she takes flight, painting the glass of the facade white with snow.

That very moment, Uzi falls to her knees, leaning onto the back of a nearby chair and holding on to stop herself from slamming to the floor. Her head rolls nearly ninety degrees back as she lets out the most intense sigh of her life. Robo-Lord in Heaven, finals are going to be a breeze compared to this.

“Ha-hah. You alright, bud?” — N pats her head. — “Think we should leave my turn for next week?”

“Next week?! Gosh, try next year. Next decade.” — Uzi caresses his hand, straightening up like her back’s aching. Which isn’t too far from the truth, her lower tensors are astoundingly stiff. N helps her up, holding by her arms as she finds her balance. — “... ‘s everything alright now? Did it go well? I’m sorry, that was a bit awkward and…”

“Yeah! More than alright. You did great, Uzi . Thank you ” — N leans in for a hug, so tight it’s just about to shatter her spine into a million pieces.

That sounds true. He really means it. She lets herself smile before joining his embrace.

Somewhere afar, atop a skyscraper, V’s watching the snow dance on its way. The flakes glisten, catching beams of moonlight before spiraling the rest of the way to the ground. All the tiny glints are as little stars raining down. 

She’s sitting against the wings of a steelwrought gargoyle taking flight, or swooping in, taking solace under its sharp-angled feathers, just high enough to peek above the other towers and get the best view of the calm snowfall. When she pulls up a leg to get a bit more comfortable, something pinches in her torso, but another try at a slightly different angle goes without a hitch. It still hurts, but it’s so much better now.

Suddenly, an idea hits. A wisp, a whisper. She wavers — do I wanna…? Yeah. I want to.

A shell interface covers half of her visor. She anxiously tests the commands she needs to navigate folders then make and open a file, things she’d nearly forgotten to do, wistful echoes put in service of something she’s never done before.

<c stuff/stufftodeletelater>
<bash: c: command not found> 
<cp stuff/stufftodeletelater>
<cp: missing destination file operand after 'stuff/stufftodeletelater'>
<Try 'cp --help' for more information.>
<cd stuff/stufftodeletelater>
<touch something.txt>
<nano something.txt>

Then, shyly, she writes. Word by word, carefully, hesitantly weaving her way through sentences that she soon discovers are verses. A few times, she goes back and edits things, time bleeding away too quickly to notice. Before she realizes, it’s done.

<The oceans bulge and wake the tide;>
<the fire burns yet doesn’t light.>
<But moonrays crack the shallow sky;>
<and inward seeps the starry night.>

<^O>
<File name to write: something.txt>
<[ Saved 4 lines ]>
<^X>

Then she hastily closes the terminal and tries to forget what she wrote.

Behind her, the wind’s picking up again. A northbound gale — storm’s coming. V leaps off the tower and spreads her wings, hurrying back home.