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A stupid, frilly ballroom gala.
It should’ve been a movie night.
But he was faced with V’s massacred body and a disheveled, bloodied J hunched over an even bloodier Tessa—some thing puppeteering Cyn hanging above them to complete the horrendous composition.
The frankensteined maid—timid as she was, he’d never seen her so terrified—stood in front of him with a scalpel and something else sharp in each hand—no, claw. He didn’t notice the fact that he was next to join her costume party until a carapaced hand pushed her forward and guided her into his chest.
It flayed open, certainly quicker than it should’ve, and his beating core was left open to the basement’s audience, though the only member excited to watch was something not drone nor human.
He risked looking down, and spotted wires of red, blue, and something deceivingly metallic that he couldn’t place a name on—but he’d seen it. He had. He’d seen all of this before, too.
He needed to find a way back to the library—so they could watch films together, like they did any night this free.
He just had to get upstairs.
Suddenly, everything in his fragile frame hurt.
—
An elevator shaft. Emptier than it should be, missing one crucial inhabitant.
The world itself could be missing that inhabitant by now—N wasn’t sure. God, he hoped she wasn’t being mauled right now.
His colorful thought came too soon, as a violent display of feasting sentinels seemed to be placed in front of him within the next millisecond. Blinking cameras shot out in rings around them, the vapid things seemingly excited for the massacre unfolding right in front of them all.
Whatever was left of V from before she’d covered for their group was unrecognizable—the vulture-like mechanical raptors picking her apart and making quick work of her mangled corpse like she wasn’t a loved drone but instead solely meant to be a meal.
N wanted to scream, but each time he’d tried to make a sound all that would happen was the cameras unanimously echoing a staticky ‘laugh’. The mocking cacophony made N sick to his stomach.
Before he could hurl or launch himself at the sentinels, however, he was whisked away again.
—
Another setting he recognized.
A gaping hole in the planet’s ground—composed of biomechanics and an eldritch warping of space-time, nothing that should or deserves to even be.
No matter how disgusting it was, N was wracked with a wave of longing the second he was catapulted by a violet Solver symbol through the cathedral’s doors, a shiver hitting his entire body on impact. He tried to pump his wing blades, but their gravity was temporarily disabled by the code pinning his usually trustworthy anti-gravity thrusters down.
He wasn’t sure if it was his body or himself who gave up, but he’d stopped trying, now exposed to the elements. Snow whipped past him and thunder roared distantly, but all he could do was sink to the ground.
A brash, brilliant ‘DIE-MAD’ in bold purple font was all that he could see. Out of pure instinct, he’d taken a screenshot.
Her personality shone through the image like no other capture of it could—N was sure—and his core panted all the more.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Uzi was down there, somewhere, descending to what was more than likely her end. Maybe the Absolute Solver’s play thing.
Tears rolled down his visor, clouding his HUD and hurting more than any operation or stand-off ever had. The feeling of grief was familiar, and came over him as it had every time before.
He hadn’t saved her this time. He hadn’t saved V, nor Tessa, either. Certainly not Cyn.
Now, his better half was gone too.
As he craned his neck upward to scream louder than his hunched, compacted position allowed him to, something seemed to grab his throat in the middle of his servos’ upward rotation.
Not even his mourning could be left undisturbed, it seemed.
The thunder in the background dissipated into something louder. Something wilder. It was no longer nature’s drawl but a wolfish, terrible screeching. Underneath the sound, he began to hear violent squelching that had a metallic crunch every few seconds.
It was his own voice and body making those sounds. The thunder was probably still there, but he couldn’t tell.
Tendrils raked his face and smeared oil over his form every which way; a chitinous claw seemed to smile at him in its curving movement before gutting him like the easiest thing to flay, as if his form was not strongly built or metal. Its creator was smart enough to leave weaknesses that only it could exploit, of course.
He felt weak. So, so weak.
N squeezed his eye-lights shut, trying to disable his optics entirely but failing as his internal mechanisms slipped past the toggles at the last second each time he’d tried. He was too hazy.
The spider-like spines digging into him released their hold, and he automatically heaved for air before something was speared through him again. As he took the vent in, he was provided not with aeration for his joints and servos but a large helping of bloody oil.
Red splattered onto the ground in chunks ahead of him, gurgling and spilling over from his choked, gaping mouth. It stained his already soiled coat.
There was much, much more flesh and meat than there was oil. The sanguine fluid was half his own and half the God toying with him as if he was supposed to be taken apart.
His repair mechanisms kicked in, consequently forcing him to try and take another breath, his code unaware of the reason why such had failed the first time. The wires behind his visor pounded in searing hurt, and a culmination of whatever he had left inside of him was thrown up onto the floor with the rest of the mess. With it came his core, which tried its hardest to scurry forward.
Before he could get even one more inch away, the most whetted spike he’d been pierced with shot up from the ground—agonizingly sharp despite the fact that it was made of organic material. It cracked the delicate casing in front of his core’s eye, before streaking down and between the small joints and most sensitive crevices of the part. He had no way to yell, but he flailed his core’s limbs wildly about in a frantic manner that made a pathetic attempt to grasp onto anything that could get him further away.
Yellow overcame his vision, and echoing creaks of ‘EXTERMINATE’, ‘EXTERMINATE’, ‘EXTERMINATE’ screamed in his head.
;;We Missed You, Big Bu—ddy :-)
Get OUT of my fucking—OW, OW OW OW OW, SHIT—
—
N woke up with a start, pained cries dying in his vocoder as he strained to make any sound. He continued to mouth pleas out of fear, but not even one whisper of ‘stop’ could leave his lips.
His chest felt too tight, and the biomechanical core inside of it seemed to be aching. Maybe a placebo, maybe purely from his anxiety.
He immediately splayed his hand out in front of him, finding it to be stainless and without a hint of splintering. Horrifyingly, that felt wrong.
He still couldn’t talk. It was over. He—oh god.
A creak sounded from the rafters above, and it humiliated N that the noise had almost sent him back into a spiral. For the first time in what felt like hours of hell, something familiar to N had been comforting: a gust of wind from two membraned wings lowering themselves to the ground, accompanied by a concerned purple display.
Faster than he could start explaining or try to explain, Uzi’s arms enveloped him in a tight embrace. Mindful of previous encounters, she tucked her wings back into their ports and kept her tail hidden.
N wouldn’t have minded them from her, but she knew how reminders of the Solver could sometimes make either of them feel. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
N wasn’t sure how long it had been, but she didn’t let go. His core seemed to have begun to slow.
“..I just miss her, ‘Zi,” N whispered, voice hoarse and quiet. “All of them. I couldn’t—if I had just—“
“Quit that,” Uzi whispered back, stopping him from even beginning to start on that line of thinking. “None of them deserved what happened to them, and that wasn’t something you could’ve changed.”
Uzi sometimes wondered about Nori—and additionally, Yeva. While the former had recovered, Yeva certainly hadn’t. It couldn’t have been anything but grueling for Doll, especially given her expedited awareness of the shit show they’d all endured. She herself had ended up with an unfortunate death. And Robogod, Uzi would be one horrible liar if she acted like Nori’s absence while it lasted hadn’t affected her at all. The Solver had messed up things for everyone—that was a shared pain.
What a disgusting thing. Uzi grimaced, burying her head against N’s chest in what was a protective gesture. The pressure helped ground him, and he leaned back into her weight.
N wanted to speak again, but he’d faltered. There was a slightly altered subject matter to this nightmare—he’d gotten the pleasure of more than just being tortured alone, this time. She should know. “It was you and V, too. Gala stuff. The … sacrificing bits.”
She tried to hide it, but he had completely felt the wince Uzi tried to stifle as she tensed up entirely.
Her grip got tighter, but not smotheringly. N sighed.
“..Nothing will happen to me, N, because we figured things out,” she assured, voice much softer—a tone only he got to hear. “Like you said, baby steps, yeah dude?”
N leaned slightly forward, pressing into the crook of her neck as she did his chest, completing their slightly unconventional body puzzle. He nodded into her shoulder, not wanting to speak much more. The action was plenty of a response for Uzi.
Before he fell back into shut-down, the last thing N heard was a barely audible “We’ll be okay.”