Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Uzi knows what it is she really needs if she wants to finish her railgun. Taking out a murder drone needs to be a one-shot-one-kill deal, so whatever her choice in ammo, it needs to pack one hell of a punch, and for the railgun to be able to stand up to the massive recoil from the force of a shot like that, it needs to utilize more than exclusively the mechanical components she’s been able to get her hands on. She’s brilliant at tinkering—one of the few positive truths about herself she’ll actually believe—but when limited to scavenged scraps, there’s a ceiling she can’t break through no matter how hard she bangs her head against it.

She’d tried to power up the railgun incomplete during her presentation in class earlier in the day (a stupid thing to do, which she knew even in the moment, but she’s done stupider things in the past just to try and deflect the contemptuous vibe back at the crowd who sent it). The parts simply could not hold up against the heat and vibration coming off the plasma cartridge, and she hadn’t even fired the thing.

Uzi knows what it is she really needs if she wants to finish her railgun.

She needs more sophisticated materials to integrate into her design.

She needs parts created to stand up to a lifetime of constant use, capable of regulating temperature and identifying causes of flaws in their function. Most importantly, for the particular type of electrothermal accelerator (murder drone-blasting) ammo she has in mind, she needs parts built to provide a self-sustaining, perpetual power source.

She needs a worker drone’s core.

Macabre. But…honestly, very up her alley. There are probably already rumors circulating that she collects dead things (like there were even any living things in the bunker to become dead things, but whatever) so she may as well play into everyone’s preconceptions of her. Especially if she gets a weapon that can actually defend against—no, kill!—murder drones out of it. Seems a very good trade to Uzi. An impish grin crosses her features at the thought of finally, finally, being taken seriously and respected by her peers, even if she has to do it at fucking gunpoint.

 But her methods to obtain this McGuffin are limited. One option is killing one of her classmates (which is a strong plan B), but plan A is less frowned-upon by everyone…except maybe her dad. She has access to hundreds of worker drone corpses less than a mile away from the bunker. In the…corpse spire. Where the murder drones are.

…Not exactly in the best neighborhood, but, like, it’s a gigantic scrapyard and it’s right there.

Actually, would her dad prefer she kill a classmate than do plan A? Honestly…it might be a toss-up. But she isn’t running either option past him anyway so whatever.

The near-constant planet-wide toxic death storm is especially inhospitable tonight, and though the cold is a better option for a drone to have to endure than the heat, Uzi still isn’t exactly comfortable. It’s wet, too. She has the rings and sheets of silicone bridging the gaps between her titanium plating to thank for keeping the elements out where the elements belong, but it does still make her cranky, like a cat forced to trudge through puddles.

The city she navigates through is an eerie, frozen husk, laced with ice and capturing like fossils in amber the last goings-on of the biological life Copper-9 once fostered. Bleached human skeletons remain in the positions they held when the flesh was evaporated away by the planet’s core collapse. Vehicles are caught mid-turn across intersections, cranes suspend heavy I-beams at derelict construction sites, streetlights with intact bulbs still flicker on once night falls. Sometimes that’s the only indication that night has fallen; the sleet is usually very good at blocking out the sun.

The sun…maybe she should have come during one of the rare days where the storm lets up enough for the light to permeate to the ground.

She scowls a little, marching onward and rationalizing.

She has no way to know when the sun would manage to make an appearance, and there is simply no time to waste waiting on the weather. The murder drones could find a way to break into the bunker any day! Plus, 3am seemed like…like the right time to be doing something like this, and she had hoped she’d circumvent running into her father that way (though that had fallen apart immediately). The advantage she’s banking on now is that the murder drones, nocturnal predators that they are, should be out hunting in the very middle of the night. If she had come when the sun was doing the closest it can do to shining, then the murder drones would definitely be home, and that’s a way less ideal scenario for Uzi…right?

A crunch of glass underfoot brings her out of her spiral of justifications. Startled, she lifts her boot and is met with half of a face sticking out of the snow, an emergency light glowing red across the cracked display, lower jaw missing and black staining the ground around it.  

 The sleet is dense, and as she shifts her gaze away from the half-buried corpse, the murder drones’ lair doesn’t loom in the distance so much as it suddenly appears before her, like it had dropped from the sky into her line of sight. The abrupt arrival of the spire, of danger, does make her falter. Her display, against her will, betrays the nerves gripping her as her eyes hollow out into a pair of rings.

Hundreds…maybe thousands of drones, all dead, all brutalized to varying degrees of sadism, are stacked like matches so high she has to tilt her head back and squint to see the point of the tower, ghoulishly flagged with a disembodied arm, fingers doing a blackly comical wave in the harsh wind.

She’s…really doing this?

Uzi had very purposefully not thought too hard about the risk of sneaking into the spire, because the reward of successfully sneaking out is a way to pave the path to saving her colony. Even though her peers routinely make her feel like they don’t deserve saving, looking at this…this nightmare: Oil spattered and frozen and then freshly spattered and frozen over again; displays blackened, cracked, some still weakly flickering a FATAL ERROR warning in red; disembodied limbs and, well, disenlimbed bodies…it’s enough to strengthen anyone’s resolve to do the right thing, right? If she’s the only one in her colony with both the means and the drive to do more than hide in the ice, then it’s her job to spearhead the whole thing.

And the sharp bit in particular that she needs to complete that spear is a worker drone’s core. Surely, with the…sheer quantity of bodies, she’ll find one core intact in there.

Despite knowing her gun won’t fire, she pulls it from the sling on her back and holds it at the ready—a bluff, a comfort, a last ditch effort to assure herself she’s prepared and capable—and carefully, quietly, resolutely marches toward a gap in the bodies, a gory arched entrance into the spire. 

Chapter Text

The outside of the spire is as unwelcoming as it comes. The inside of the spire does not really put in the effort to add any homey touches, but at least nobody seems to be home at the moment. Uzi lets out a little sigh of relief, grateful that her risky gamble seems to have come up in her favor, and moves cautiously forward out of the wind.

Uzi has never seen a landing pod up close, mostly because landing pods signal the  arrival of murder drones, and any sane worker drone steers clear of them. It takes center stage in the hollowed out cone of corpses, a boxy main cabin held aloft at an angle by spidery legs, like a giant bacteriophage (or whatever viruses but for humans are called. That seems right. Anyway). Snow crunches under Uzi’s boots, her pace uneven, stepping around scattered limbs and heads, eyeing the grisly skylight fifty or so feet up, a gap in the corpses from where she can only assume the murder drones will reenter their lair on razor wings.

Sifting through body parts is…really gross, at first, but as her task stretches on and becomes more repetitive—find a chassis, pry it open, confirm an inert core, move on—it actually becomes more frustrating than anything. Time is of the essence, and there are so many fucking corpses here, why couldn’t an intact core be among the first dozen bodies she’d checked? She tosses a dismembered arm over her shoulder and is about to consider coming back another night, weakly shuffling snow around with her boot. She’s already pushing her luck being here at all, let alone for how long she’s spent digging around. If a murder drone comes back and she dies here before she can find a core, there’s literally no point to anything she’s done. Maybe she should just kill one of her classmates. She’s just about to seriously consider it when a little snowdrift shifts toward the valley created by the indentations of her boots and gently collapses away from a sliver of green, glowing glass.

Uzi has to bite back a triumphant expletive as she dives for the light, unearthing a clear cylinder bound with rings of steel, enigmatic fuel casting a green tint over the white of her hands and face. Just a big, very sophisticated battery, really, but it means Uzi can defend her colony. If it works. Of course it will work! She’s run the numbers, it will work and work well!

The cavern darkens, ambient illumination from the grim skylight eclipsed by the shadow of something coming towards the spire from the air, accompanied by the sound of blades on the icy wind.

Uzi feels her oil run cold. She took too long.

No time to switch out the power source on her railgun for the new core, she all-but throws herself behind a pile of rubble, tucking her feet in and stifling a gasp as she hears something land, heavily, with precision, creating a resonance like a gong on the side of the landing pod.

It sounds like a death knell.

Uzi breathes as evenly as she can, but the vents along her chassis feel like they’re clogged with lint and debris, and she feels the exhales rattle through her. The whirring of the fans surrounding her core is deafening, and she smothers the black and violet diamond on her chest with a shaking hand. Plan, what is her plan? Think, damn it! Can she identify a scenario where she can get out of this tangle? What is the probability she can brute force that scenario into a reality? What exactly is she up against?

She needs a better look at the thing.

She scrapes a fragment of shattered mirror out of the snow at her heel, measured as she can and fighting the trembling in her fingers, and clocks the murder drone in the reflection over her shoulder.

Not even accounting for the deadly wingspan, it’s bigger than she realized it would be, maybe even half again her height. It looks…sophisticated. Sleek. Its arms are thicker, sturdier than hers, and sport clawed hands like the most vicious scalpels, designed to slice, slice, slice through worker drones. Bladed silver wings extend with an elegant, dangerous movement from the drone’s back, and a whiplike tail is punctuated with what could be mistaken for a glowing gold lantern, but Uzi knows what that is from the stories. That’s a scorpion’s stinger. That’s a syringe full of nanite acid. That’s the substance that mortally wounded her mother.

It holds aloft a decapitated worker drone head, oil pouring from the neck, and though the murder drone is turned away from Uzi, she doesn’t need to see its mouth to know it’s feasting. The sound of rupturing titanium and shattering glass rips through the space as the murder drone crushes—crushes, like it’s nothing—the head of the worker drone in its claws, discarding it to the floor like a candy wrapper.

Uzi, ice in her wires, glances away from her bit of broken mirror to worriedly consider the glowing green core in her hand. Is this really going to make her railgun do what she needs it to? If it doesn’t…how will she survive the next few minutes?

A flash of gold in her periphery jerks her attention back to the reflection of the murder drone, and with horror she sees that it is no longer turned away from her hiding place. Its display lights with a glowing yellow X, and a psychotic, fanged skeleton grin spreads far too wide across its face.

And it’s waving at her.

She bolts from her hiding spot, tearing the old power source out of her railgun and shoving the worker drone core into the slot at a full sprint, which she knows is not nearly fast enough to outrun a murder drone. She hears wings slicing the air behind her, and terror grips her almost hard enough to make her panic, but like most feelings Uzi comes up against, her stubbornness overpowers it. No. No, panicking isn’t cool. Keeping a level head in the face of death is cool. She scowls as she runs, forcing anger and frustration to the forefront of her emotion processing drives and overwriting the fear. If she dies here, she’s going to at least make sure this murder drone remembers her. She’s going to make it work for its meal.

 Her railgun beeps, finishing its acclimation to the new power source, and flashes a READY indicator across a hologram pop-up. Uzi digs her heel into the snow, turning on a dime and arming her gun in one movement, only to find that the murder drone is no longer on her heels. She can’t see it at all. Where the hell did it go, so quickly and silently? On edge and confused, she takes a step back, and the ground shatters under her feet as the murder drone descends from above her, landing where she just had been standing with enough weight and force to rattle her endoskeleton and send her flying one direction, and her railgun in another.

She tries to right herself in the air, but something sharp and pronged catches her under the plating on her chest and curls inward, piercing the silicone layered over her midsection and anchoring inside her chest cavity, pulling her out of her trajectory and hurling her thirty feet away. She tumbles, disoriented and hurting, slamming the back of her head against some surface, landing pod, miscellaneous junk, slab of rock, she doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter. Her display glitches and blackens for a moment, and terrified by the blindness, she scrabbles for something, anything to throw at the predator. Whatever it is she grabs, however close she comes to hitting the murder drone, it doesn’t matter. She hears it laugh as the object clatters against the rest of the debris on the cavern floor.

Her optics reboot, and though she has ice for oil, an enraged little vein pops into the corner of her display. She is not about to be laughed at as her last act on the planet. She stands, shaky, but resolute, and scans the cavern for her railgun. She spots it…so far away. The murder drone is grinning at her, clinging to the side of the landing pod equidistant to the weapon. She can’t bolt for it, she’ll never make it. She…she needs a distraction. An eye roll involuntarily slips across her visor as she realizes, yeah, she needs to do something stupid.

She grits her teeth, even as she feels black seeping into her hoodie from the cruel punctures into her chest cavity, and stands as tall as she can, pulling a bent iron pipe from the snow at her feet.

<CMD//: ACCESS FILE FOLDER ANTAGONIZING_REMARKS.ZIP>

Chapter Text

             Uzi clangs the iron pipe against her chest, the titanium of her chassis ringing out.

             “Hey, moron-bot!” She yells the insult as confidently as she can. The gold X seems to blink in…recognition? Whatever. Uzi twirls the pipe in her hand. “Look how in-one-piece I am! That all you got?” And she hurls the pipe as hard as she can toward the murder drone. It ducks out of the way, but Uzi was never really trying to hit it. She’s sprinting, full tilt, utilizing the milliseconds of distraction her lame little antic bought her to make it back over to her railgun. She’s ten strides away. Six.

              Something pierces the titanium rings in her right knee joint mid-stride, and when she takes the next lunge forward, her foot isn’t there to catch her.

              She buckles and collapses, tumbling with the momentum of her sprint and skidding on the snow, creating a path like a meteor strike splattered with oil. Shaking, she scrambles to orient herself, the last intact ring of her right leg burning in a way drones shouldn’t need to fear. In shock, she reaches forward and covers the end of the stump to try and stifle the oil freely bleeding from her, only for the searing pain to transfer onto her hands as well. She yanks back to find her titanium palms sizzling under a yellow corrosive that matches the syringe at the end of the murder drone’s tail.

             The murder drone alights on a chunk of debris in front of her, mouth full of teeth on full rictus display and syringe of nanite acid whipping around behind it, still casting drops of yellow in a scattered semicircle. Uzi flinches away from the errant spray, the snow to either side of her hissing. The creature in front of her reaches a talon down and plucks Uzi’s dismembered leg like a flower from the snow, bringing it to its mouth and tipping its head back.

              If she doesn’t become furious, she will cry, and that’s not gonna happen, not even here and now.

              “That’s mine, you murder pervert!” She shrieks, ignoring the string of errors popping up in the corner of her display as her oil pours from the limb in the murder drone’s claws down its throat and across its chin. It chuckles, gunmetal grey tongue swiping its upper teeth clean of oil and tossing her leg aside like scrap.

              Plan. Plan. What is the plan, Uzi?

              The murder drone leaps lightly from its perch and begins stalking closer to Uzi, and she crawls backwards as best she can. She’s nearly at her railgun, but she needs to keep this drone’s attention on her, on her oil and wiring and crumpled titanium, and not where she’s scooting toward.

              The claws at the end of one of the murder drone’s arms retract, replaced with a single long blade that reads very clearly to Uzi as a weapon designed for decapitation. She scrambles for insults to throw or distractions to find. She can’t be killed yet, not yet. She’s taking this thing down with her. She continues to drag herself backward toward her gun, half-buried in a snowdrift, and blurts,

              “W-Well, that’s boring! Just going to off me just like that? I-I thought murder drones liked to play with their food more.”

             What the fuck is she saying? What stupid gambit is she hoping to play with that? ‘Torture me before you kill me, please!’ Yeah, brilliant move, Uzi. It already made her into two pieces when she bragged about still being in one, so it’s definitely gonna pull her apart wire by wire now.

             Another growl of a chuckle resonates from the murder drone at her ploy. Weirdly, Uzi feels a flush light her display, a familiar hot embarrassment at her defenses being completely dismissed. It’s the same feeling she gets when she bristles and snaps at a classmate, trying to save face for some reason or another, and is met with a mix of contempt and amusement.

              She seethes.  Her teeth shine in the ambient light as she bares them at the predator, ready to tear the silicone casing away from its face.

             “Shithead! Bite me!”

              “Oh, trust me,” A voice, boyish but deadly. “That’s the plan.”

              All bravado leaves her in a rush of shock. It speaks?

              And then it lunges at her, mouth open, full of teeth, salivating.

              Uzi has nanoseconds to bring her remaining foot up in front of her and kick the thing in the jaw, snapping its sharp teeth closed on its tongue and causing it to release an animalistic yelp of pain and stumble backwards. She thrills at actually effectively hurting the murder drone and uses the moment she’s snatched back from the literal jaws of death to twist in the snow, trying to reach her railgun, but it’s still too far.

              Behind her, the murder drone snarls, and Uzi whips her head back around to see it rubbing its chin, black splattered from its tongue onto the furred collar of its coat, tail lashing in a quick, irritated arc behind it.

              “I thought you were joking before, but now I see what you meant when you said just killing you would be ‘boring,’” It stands and speaks again, and her cognition program relays struggle to grasp that these killers have the programming for speech, and…banter, of all things. “I haven’t had prey fight back before. Yeah,” Its skeleton grin creeps back across its face. “Yeah, I’m down for new things! I’ll draw this out for you, if that’s what you want. Give you a fighting chance.”

              Uzi expects there to be a sneer accompanying that last phrase. A ‘fighting chance?’ They both know that’s not what it’s giving her. It’s toying with her at best. But, no, it seems…genuine. Uzi swallows dryly. Does this mean it will…go easy on her? (And is that actually preferable for her?)

              “I think it’s my serve, though.” It quips, then dips low to the ground, spinning and giving the syringe on the end of its tail extra speed from the whiplike arc in a spray of snow and nanite acid. Uzi isn’t fast enough to dodge it completely, and a streak of pain, searing like the fire that took her leg, splits the silicone on the left side of her face, drawing the corner of her mouth out, giving her a ghoulish, lopsided, elongated grimace. The acid bleeds from the cut into the cavity of her mouth and bubbles against her tongue, and reflexively spitting is made extremely difficult with the new shape of her mouth. Panting, display betraying her panic as teardrops light up next to her hollowed out eyes, she shoves a fistful of snow into her mouth, diluting the acid enough to stop the spread of the split in her face, even as the unwelcome moisture brings up another warning message on her visor.

              “Ooh, smart!” The murder drone seems…actually impressed, but Uzi can only interpret it as mockery.

              “Shut up! Bite me!”

              “If you insist.” It shrugs, then lunges again. It’s not making the same mistake twice. It’s coming at Uzi from her right, where she has no foot to jam into its jaw, just a sizzling stub getting just a tiny bit shorter every moment thanks to the nanites.

              Her display physically brightens with an idea.

            Uzi digs her elbows into the snow behind her and sticks what remains of her right leg straight out, end still glowing yellow and melting away, positively contagious with nanites. The sharpened, poisonous spear that she now sports instead of a foot catches the murder drone in the shoulder mid-lunge. She feels the rings of titanium begin to telescope—something they are not meant to do—under the force of the impact and the sturdiness of the murder drone’s material, but she hears a hiss of nanites and—miraculously—feels a pop as her weaponized stump punctures through the fabric of its coat and into a rubber sheet connecting its shoulder joint to its torso.

              Immediately, the murder drone recoils, acid blistering away the rubber in a jagged circle. Uzi digs her good foot into the drone’s chest and shoves off of it, pushing herself to where she hopes is within reach of her railgun. She twists in the snow, stretching her hand toward it. Yes, this is it! This is it, she can kill this thing! She’s hurt but not dead, she can make it back to her colony, she can start weapons projects built with this design in mind on a grander scale, she can make the Worker Defense Force actually capable of defense! She can make her dad prou—

              Her chest hits the snow with enough force to bend her endoskeleton, and she gasps, vents crushed, fans shattered, under the pressure of the knee in her back. A crack appears across the width of her visor. MULTIPLE SYSTEM FAILURES supersedes all the other warning lights she’d been stacking up on her display. A clawed hand grips the back of her head and yanks, forcing her to bare her throat, and then there are teeth in her shoulder, piercing, digging, pulling, pulling, pulling—

             Her arm falls limp.

            Her processors stutter, and send the command for her arm to move again, but shredded rubber and the odd cable are the only things holding Uzi’s shoulder joint to her torso now, and she is hemorrhaging.

              The murder drone on top of her has its face perched next to her audio input microphone, and she can hear with nauseating clarity each gulp it siphons away from her.

              “I should thank you,” It says, voice thick through a throat coated in Uzi’s oil. “This was certainly a new experience for me! I hope I was able to give you what you wanted, even if I don’t understand it.” Uzi is too deep in shock to sob. The railgun is only seven or eight inches out of reach, slid down into a little valley of snow and three-quarters buried. “Let’s wrap things up, though.”

              The black silicone along her midsection is sliced cleanly away, her frame’s spinal column, her internal workings, her cables and machinery, all exposed. She tries to shriek, but she can’t inhale enough to let out more than a rasp. She feels the murder drone slide a blade along a particular length of tubing, singling it out from the surrounding cords and drawing it up in a V shape away from her body, and with a jerk and a snap, the murder drone severs an artery.

              Uzi isn’t really present for the murder drone pulling one open end of the tube into its mouth and letting her oil pour down its throat like a fountain. She’s not even really afraid anymore. No, she’s…more bemused. Muddled. Her body feels weird. Definitely it’s due to the various FATAL ERROR indicators blearily crossing her visor and the fact that she’s overheating from all her internal fans being crushed. The snow is melting under her. May as well add more high moisture system warnings to go with all the others. But she also feels…taller? The halves of her body aren’t held so snugly together now that the silicone casing around her midsection has been shredded and pulled away. It’s really bizarre. She almost giggles. Slinky Uzi. Little purple inchworm.

             Can she stretch just a little farther?

             Her display is clogged with glitches and warning symbols, and as one last moment of clarity graces her processors, she shakes them away and clears her vision. Hopefully the murder drone is too busy gorging itself to notice her inch the top half of her torso toward the tiny little snowdrift faintly glowing green. Her cables have never felt taught before, and it’s not a pleasant feeling, but she won’t have to put up with it again, at least. The unfamiliar, extra space between the disks of the spinal column of her frame feels cold of all things as she extends her one remaining good arm forward.

             “Hey, no trying to sneak awAUGLK—!”

             Uzi’s top half is twisted around 180 degrees, chest facing the murder drone as the toes on her remaining foot dig into the snow under her. Her bad arm at least is good for propping her up and forward a few inches as it pins itself under her, and with her good arm, she’s shoved the nozzle of the railgun into the murder drone’s blackened mouth.

             She doesn’t have the means or energy to say ‘bite me.’ But she can smirk triumphantly as she pulls the trigger on the photon accelerator.

             It’s like a bomb goes off inside the murder drone’s head.

             Uzi is thrown backward from the force of the blast, green and searing. She skids along the snow and tumbles ass over teakettle a few times before smacking the back of her head against the side of the landing pod. Whatever, what’s one more crack in her casing? She drags herself into the closest thing to a sitting position she can manage while being one good draw-and-quarter-yank away from being bisected, eyes blearily trying to locate the murder drone. Or what’s left of it. Its body is still standing, claws flailing, completely headless. Oil bursts like a fountain from the stump of its neck. It actually takes one shuddering pace forward before whirring, grinding, collapsing to a halt.

             Uzi exhales, mustering a weak grin. Her gun works! She can’t make it back to her colony to be the grand designer of the worker drone revolution, but hopefully, hopefully, if anyone from the colony comes looking for her (or her corpse), they can find the railgun here and pick up where she left off. She’d told Thad that she was going out to the spire, and he seems cool enough to, like, maybe try to help find her once she’s been missing for a few days. Yeah, yeah, this will work out okay.

             With the last of her strength, Uzi digs the butt of the railgun into the snow, carving out an icy gun-shaped sarcophagus and burying it next to her. She pulls the beanie from her head (how had it managed to stay put through all that?) and sticks it like a grave marker into the snow, half-submerged. Maybe someone in the colony will be smart enough to know to look there for something. Maybe her dad.

             Oh…Dad. She really is going and dying on him, isn’t she? She’s really gonna be dead from murder drones, just like her mom. Is the last feeling she’ll ever have really going to be guilt? She wheezes out a chuckle. Fitting. Edgy, or whatever.

              A weird, mechanical warbling draws her back from the brink of sleep. She woozily looks around for the source, and when she spots it, she at first thinks she must be hallucinating. That’s something that happens when people die, right? Because if what she’s seeing now isn’t a hallucination then…

              The murder drone stands up, uncoordinated, uncanny, headless. Something is…warping the air around where its head used to be, like heat or a black hole, and then Uzi’s little robot heart sinks. She doesn’t understand how what she’s looking at is happening, but she does see it happening. The drone’s head reforms, several error messages flicking across its display before a reboot bar begins filling.

              If what she’s seeing now isn’t a hallucination, then her railgun doesn’t kill murder drones. She didn’t even manage to take a murder drone down with her. Just…dying for nothing. Idiot. She lets out a sob as the murder drone’s systems come back online. She couldn’t even have bled out before it resurrected? It gets to finish killing her? Fucking hell.

              It seems disoriented (fair, considering), its visor is glitchy and its optic halo has a bulb malfunctioning, but it’s definitely a working murder drone once more. It turns its attention to the numerous black stains around its feet, gaze slowly following a particular trail of splatters all the way to Uzi.

              There’s a moment where it tilts its head to the side, wincing before locking eyes with Uzi—eyes, not a golden X—and then the drone is rushing toward her. She exhales and leans her head against the landing pod.

              …Oh well. She hadn’t been particularly happy here anyway.

              The murder drone is charging full tilt, dropping to its knees and sliding the last few feet to Uzi’s side.

              “Holy...Who are...What happened to you? Are you alright?” Its voice is full of very real concern, fear, even. It isn’t baring its teeth in a psychotic grin. If it weren’t for all the trappings it could pass for a worker drone. What in the actual hell is happening. “Wait, no, of course you’re not alright, stupid question.” It continues, hands—hands, not claws or guns—fluttering over Uzi. “Uhm, um…okay. Okay, I’m going to pick you up and move you inside. There’s a med bay under the pilot’s cabin where repairs can be done. I’m going to do everything I can to get you patched up, you just gotta stay awake.”

              The murder drone carefully lifts Uzi…or, lifts her pieces, into its arms. It’s painful, but she can’t summon more than a whine.

              “I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but you’re going to be alright. Can you tell me your name?”

              …She’s definitely already dead. This is robot purgatory. Might as well answer this angel of death’s question.

              “…zi.” She manages. The U is lost as a whisper in the back of her cracked and dry throat.

              “Z? I had a feeling we were due to get a new disassembly drone sent out to join the team! Pleasure to meet you,” The smile it gives her is so soft and earnest. “I’m N.”

Chapter Text

              <ERROR>

              <RUNNING SYSTEM DIAGNOSTICS>

              <OPTIC SENSORS OFFLINE>

              <DATA RESTORATION INCOMPLETE. PLEASE SEE A CERTIFIED JCJENSON DISASSEMBLY DRONE TECHNICIAN>

              <INITIATING REBOOT>

              <REBOOT IN PROGRESS…>

              N’s head hurts, and he can’t remember when he got back to the spire. Last thing he recalls, he was out hunting. Well, lapses in his memory aren’t the most uncommon thing, he’s sure it’ll sort itself out. Looks like his optics are a little out of whack, as well. No worries, he can fix himself up in the med bay. He’ll have to do it partially blind, but he has nothing but time!

              The rest of his sensors come back online, one by one. He must have stuck himself again, his shoulder has that telltale burn. Everything seems within the normal margins of error until the odor of fresh oil—lots of fresh oil—hits him like a kick to the teeth.

              He squints at the snowy ground and realizes it’s more black than white. What happened here? He touches a hand to his furred collar, pulling back blackened fingers. Did the squad go on a particularly vicious disassembly spree? He’s excited at the thought that V and J would invite him. Are they here?

              He pulls up his thermal overlay, seemingly functioning perfectly well, and in briefly glancing around for V and J’s heat signatures, he notices that a lot of this oil is still warm, glowing a muddy red. He tracks his gaze along a reddened trail of splatters, temperature readout slowly ticking up, and is all at once nearly blinded for a moment by a white-hot shape against the side of the landing pod. Squinting and adjusting the thermal monitor settings, he realizes, pit in his stomach, that the shape is a drone, overheated to the point of meltdown. Is it V? Did something bad happen? What memories is he missing? No, no, no…

              He bolts toward the drone, sliding on his knees the last few feet and running an external hardware diagnostics scan. His thermal readout is sharp enough to discern a decent amount, and coupled with his scan of her, he’s able to determine several key things: namely, and with a start, N realizes that he doesn’t recognize her. There’s a tiny moment of relief he allows himself that it isn’t V or J, but immediately he feels guilty about it.

              “Holy…Who are…?”

              Who are, indeed. It’s definitely a disassembly drone. His scan had clued him in to the regeneration protocol written into her code, but it’s not active. That…puts a wrinkle in things. This would be a tough repair even with self-reconstituting materials.

              “What happened to you?” and then he blurts, “Are you alright?” As soon as it leaves his mouth, he knows it's the wrong thing to say. He stutters, backtracking, “Wait, no, of course you’re not alright, stupid question. Uhm, um…okay.” He shakes his head, unsure where it’s safe to touch her, she’s burning so hot and is in such a bad state. Is the med bay even stocked for a repair this intense? He chews his lip. Even if it’s not, he has to do what he can to help her.

              “Okay, I’m going to pick you up and move you inside. There’s a med bay under the pilot’s cabin where repairs can be done. I’m going to do everything I can to get you patched up, you just gotta stay awake.”

              Ignoring the uncomfortable burn against him from the heat radiating off the drone, he lifts her into his arms as mindfully as he can, cradling her so her exposed midsection is as supported as he can make it (she feels a little small, a little light, but that could be on account of her missing parts). A tiny, weak whine escapes her, and it breaks N’s little robot heart in half.

              “I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but you’re going to be alright.” He scrambles for ways to keep her conscious, deciding on, “Can you tell me your name?” It takes her longer than he’d like for her to respond, and when she does it’s in a cracked whisper, but he does catch what she says. “Z? I had a feeling we were due to get a new disassembly drone sent out to join the team! Pleasure to meet you,” Wish it were under better circumstances, he thinks, but he can’t control that. “I’m N.”

              He unfurls his wings and tries his very best not to jostle Z with the downbeat, alighting on the top of the landing pod and leaping down into the open hatch at the top, landing in the cabin and dropping through a second hatch into the med bay. Carefully, hesitantly, he tries to place Z on the steel repair bench without hurting her. She’s still too hot, but he can’t do a transfusion with all these busted oil lines, it would just pour right out of her. He needs to repair the severed main line next to the spinal column of her frame before he does anything else. Her frame itself looks pretty bent, too. He’ll have to leverage all that back into place.

              “Hey, sit forward for me if you can, okay?” He reaches out toward her. “I need to get to the rigging back here—” Abruptly, Z grabs his wrist. It’s feeble and wouldn’t have slowed his movement, but clearly she wants him to stop.

              “G-Get aw-AY-ay-y fRom-m-me.” She stutters, glitching. N’s thermal overlay can’t discern her expression.

              “I’m really sorry, I know you probably don’t want a stranger touching you, but…but you’ll die if I don’t stop this oil loss. You’re already nearly melting in some places, we have to cool you down. Please, let me help.” He implores. Z lets out a strangled sob and her fingers slip from his wrist, and it seems more like she’s run out of strength than she’s acquiescing. N exhales, not happy, but…maybe he can apologize properly later to her, when she’s not on death’s door.

              The regeneration protocol present in disassembly drones’ coding takes up too much processing power to be running constantly, and so only activates when a sensor triggers an extreme damage alert. Therefore, a lot of day-to-day maintenance on a disassembly drone needs to be done manually. N, ah…sustains minor damage pretty frequently, so he’s gotten very good at doing self-maintenance, but he’s never worked on another disassembly drone before. V and J’s bodies are different to each other’s and to his. Even though all the hardware and software is the same, the rigging needs to be specialized to each drone to accommodate the difference in the shape of the frame and titanium casing. Z’s body is maybe only two-thirds the size of his (she is a little small, turns out. N wonders briefly what model she is), so all her components are likely to be either smaller or more compact than he’s used to working on. Well, maybe not more compact at the moment, seeing as she’s nearly in two pieces.

              N’s brows peak for a moment. She’s got rigging he’s unfamiliar with, and needs more intensive manual repair than he’d ever done, but—Z wheezes, part shudder, part whine, and he shakes the doubt from his head—he has enough knowledge to keep this drone alive, at least until her own regeneration protocol comes back online. He gently leans Z forward, half-sitting on the table behind her to begin repairs to the split mainline. She doesn’t seem to have the strength to fight him on it, and that, he doesn’t like. He moves quickly.

              “I’m going to patch this big oil line back here and then I’ll get you a transfusion to cool you down, alright?” He soothes, tourniqueting the oozing rubber hose before tracking down a barbed brass fitting with the right circumference.

              “T-Tran-nSFusiO-n-n?” She manages in a hoarse whisper. “To…cO-o-ol DOwn?”

              “Yeah, have your thermal regulation indicators gone offline? You’re burning up something fierce.” N slides the brass cylinder into one end of the severed mainline, making sure the fit is snug before he joins it with the other half and loops a circle clamp at both ends of the break, fishing around for a power drill. “Don’t worry, we can fix that in just a minute.” She needs a lot of oil, and fast. Sure there’s the odd quart of stale oil in any number of the worker drone bodies outside, but that will take too long and won’t be fresh enough to help her as much as she needs it to. With a few pulls of the drill’s trigger, the screws on the circle clamps are fixed in place. He exhales, pulling his hands away from the repaired rubber hosing and gently, gently testing to make sure the patch is watertight before removing the tourniquet. She’s smaller than he is, so she won’t need as much oil as he does to stabilize and maintain working temperatures, and he can handle being a little overwarm for a bit.

              “Alright,” He breathes, helping Z sit back against the wall and pawing around the toolkit for a screwdriver. “That’s all set. We can fix the smaller oil lines in your shoulder next, but right now let’s get you something to drink.” N doesn’t hesitate, unscrewing the casing around his elbow joint and exposing the hoses and wires that run through to his hands. He pulls one tube away from the rest and brings it to his mouth, biting down and puncturing a row of holes in the rubber. He winces, but his comfort isn’t what’s important right now.

              “Sorry, I know this must be really weird, we barely know each other!” He chuckles, just a little tensely, just a little flustered. “But, time is of the essence, and this is the only thing I can think of.”

              Oil drips from the pierced rubber, and he offers the inside of his elbow to Z.

              She shakes her head.

              N’s brows peak.

              “Hunting a worker drone to bring back to you will take too long. I promise we don’t ever have to speak of this again. I’ll delete my memory file of this manually if you want.” He moves his arm an inch closer to her mouth, smiling softly. “Please?”

              Again, it seems less like she relents to his plea and more like she just doesn’t have the strength to push him away, and it makes N feel nauseous, but what else can he do? Z chokes weakly under his arm, the viscous liquid bubbling out the side of her mouth, and it’s then that his thermal overlay picks up on its first detail of Z’s face. The oil, a cool yellow against her overheated, reddened silicone, is spilling not from where the corner of her mouth should be, but sheeting down her cheek through a vicious cut, like she’d pulled free of a fish hook and torn her mouth open all along the side of her face. He winces. That must be making it hard for her to keep the oil in her mouth and swallow properly.

              He squints at the slice in her cheek. Is that…there are leftover traces of nanite acid there! A disassembly drone is the one who did this to Z? Or did the nearby colony figure out a way to synthesize their own nanite acid to defend themselves? N shakes the conjecture away. Conjecture later. Healing saliva now. If her regeneration protocol isn’t kicking in, her nanite neutralizing enzymes must have stopped being produced as well.

              She’ll hate this, but…

              “Sorry, didn’t see that cut. That must be painful. Let me fix this real quick. Er…pardon the…unseemliness...” Flush hot on his display, he holds Z’s chin steady with one gentle hand and presses the split silicone back together with the other. Her visor is a solid color to his thermal overlay and he hasn’t been able to read her expression, but her feelings on him touching her like this are made clear as she stiffens under his hands. He makes a mental note to let her punch him later if she wants. Just, come on, N. Be quick, be pragmatic.

              He dips his head in next to hers and runs his tongue along the length of the slice in her cheek, processors thrilling a little when he feels it graze the corner of her lip, but promptly pulls back. Professional transaction. Yes.

              Z doesn’t seem to agree.

              “WHaA-A—”

              “I know, that was weird, I’m sorry! But you should be able to drink more easily now.” Through the gold flush on his visor, he watches the yellow nanite residue congeal and reconstitute into the surrounding material, sealing the cut silicone back together with not even a mark to indicate any injury had been there. “See, all better! Well…that one thing is all better. Come on,” He lifts his elbow to her mouth again. “We have to get oil in you before we can get to the rest of these repairs. Say ah?”

              He gets the sense that she’s scowling at him, which is good. She must have been able to swallow enough oil to perk her up a little. Z is really a fighter. N doesn’t think he could endure this kind of damage and still have any fire left in him. A little warm flicker crosses his core, but he writes it off as his systems heating up as Z seemingly relents and brings her mouth to N’s arm, drawing oil out of his body.

Chapter Text

             The murder drone—N, apparently—is force feeding Uzi his oil, and repulsive as that is, even just as a concept, let alone in practice…Uzi does feel her systems slowly cooling, her various high temp alerts resolving and blinking off one by one, which…isn’t how this works. Her fans and vents and internal cooling rig are what keep her mechanisms and electronics from overheating, not drinking oil like some tin Dracula. But all that hardware is crushed or bent or not responding, so the only explanation for her temperature lowering is the oil she’s drinking. Straight from the source. Like a murder drone.

              If she gets out of here alive, she will unpack that later.

              Her cognitive processors are beginning to clear just a bit, as well, and she’s able to put critical thinking to use. N thinks she’s a disassembly drone (no clue why, but Uzi isn’t about to ask him), which is the only reason she’s alive right now, but once his optics come fully back online, the jig will surely be up. She needs to get away before then, and preferably before he licks her any more.

              Which, what the absolute fuck, what pervert programmed murder drones to lick their wounds? Who cares if it works, it’s weird and gross.

              …It does work, though. It sealed up the two halves of her cheek seamlessly, like there had never been a ghastly cut laced with dissolving slime there. Uzi glances down to the stub of her right leg. Will it work for something as grievous as that?

              “Feeling a little better?” Uzi flinches at the voice, even though it’s gentle and even and full of nothing but genuine concern for her wellbeing. Thirty minutes ago it was in her ear, thick with her oil and purring out sadistic chit chat about how much fun it was to kill her slowly.

              N is waiting for a response, but Uzi can’t bring herself to do more than curtly nod. Speaking would be difficult anyway, she’s glitching so badly, but like…she doesn’t want to be friendly with her would-be killer, even if at the moment he’s being nothing but. She can’t shake the primal fear this thing instills in her. If N is typically this…genial when he isn’t hunting worker drones, it doesn’t matter to her, because she is a worker drone. This geniality isn’t intended for her. This side of a murder drone isn’t the side that interfaces with her under normal circumstances. The only reason she isn’t dead right now is thanks to some well-timed amnesia, a precarious and fragile boundary between her and immediate disassembly. It’s making her feel like she’s sitting in a trash compactor, just waiting to be crushed, she just doesn’t know when it’ll happen.

              Ugh, how absolutely fucked up and twisted. If she ever sees the inside of the bunker again, she needs to commit to therapy for real this time; this is all gonna be hard to repress.

              “Glad to hear it,” N replies to her nod of confirmation, “but we aren’t out of the woods just yet. Let’s fix up those smaller oil lines in your shoulder and go from there.” He holds his hand out to Uzi, expectantly…is he asking her to give him her arm? Uzi nearly snorts, and sardonically, shakily gestures to the extensive damage, taking up nearly a quarter of her torso, arm essentially holding on with a hope and a prayer. The moment stretches painfully long before N’s brows peak. “You can’t…move your arm at all?”

              Uzi swallows dryly and shakes her head, slowly, angrily. No, she can’t move her arm. And it’s the fault of the drone asking her to willingly put her arm near him again.

The worry in N’s expression deepens.

              “Didn’t realize it was that bad. Well, let’s at least stop the oil loss.” He digs through a drawer full of connectors and clamps, getting ready to repeat the process of tying off the exposed and torn rubber hoses, this time in her left shoulder. “This’ll go quick, promise. Pardon me.” And then N’s hands are probing into the torn, empty socket joint in her torso. Uzi bites back a yelp and a shudder. When N reconnected the halves of her mainline, he didn’t need to dig around to reach it, but true to his word, he moves efficiently and quickly, singling out what remains of the group of smaller hoses and clamping them shut.

              “There we go. Say, are your diagnostics up and running? Might be helpful if we can find out why your relay response isn’t functioning before I go looking for the problem manually. Just so it doesn’t take longer than it has to.”

              Uzi exhales sharply. Fine, if she can get out of here faster, she’ll pull up every little thing wrong with her, inside and out, for the murder drone to see. She initiates a diagnostics scan, more than a little surprised it seems to be running perfectly, and the many, many identified problems line up in a list on her visor. She’s expecting N to lean in and squint, reading the diagnostics report, but he just stands there and continues looking at her, waiting. She mentally cocks a brow.

              “UHm-m-m?”

              N blinks, then shakes himself, seeming a little embarrassed all of a sudden.

              “Oh—biscuits.” Biscuits? Does this killing machine not curse like he means it? “Sorry, I forgot…um, my optics have been malfunctioning this whole time, so I’ve been using my thermal overlay to see, but it can’t differentiate the lit pixels on your display from the dark ones. The diagnostic data I can pick up with just an external overview scan is really limited, but I could…” He catches himself, shaking his head. “No, no, that’s way too personal. Rude to even think it.”

              Uzi rolls her eyes reflexively, frustration at being trapped here winning out over nerves. She wants to leave, god damn it, and the faster this drone stops dragging his feet and clutching his pearls about propriety the faster she might be in one piece so she can make a break for it.

              “Sp-Sp-p-pit it oUT.”

              N startles a little at her acerbic tone, but gives a bashful shrug and meekly suggests,

              “I could…connect to you? Wirelessly!” His pitch ticks up. “Wirelessly, of course! It would give me access to most of your surface-level programming, but, I promise I’ll only locate and download the diagnostics report.”

              Uzi blushes, despite herself. Yeah, that is personal. N’s hesitance to suggest it was called for after all, and she can’t stop the embarrassment from flooding her systems. Plus…if he decides to take a closer look at her coding, surely her nature as a worker drone will reveal itself and the jig will be up. She chews her lip. Reading aloud every line of the report to him will take too long, her vocal relays glitching as badly as they are. N hasn’t given her the sense that he’s the deceitful type. He said he’d only navigate to the diagnostics report and download it, and she doesn’t really have a reason to suspect he’d do otherwise.

              God damn it. Ugh, fine. This might as well happen, too. She lets out a glitchy, world-weary groan and sets her wireless access to public, sending out a ping to N, inviting him to connect to her localized network.

              “W-We a-are nEV-EVER Sp-speaK-k-k-kinG of this.”

              “Speaking of what?” N chuckles tensely. “Consider it repressed.”  One last little moment of hesitance, and then Uzi feels N’s consciousness join hers.

              In reality, N is only connected to her for a second or two before he finds what he needs in her files and downloads it, quickly and politely disconnecting, just like he said he would, but in the moment, Uzi feels like it stretches for minutes. She has never had a reason to let anyone connect with her before (Nobody would have wanted to, anyway. Under different circumstances, she might have been begrudgingly flattered that N asked her to do this with him), and the feeling, in a word, is intense. If robots can approximate what it’s like to house a soul, then Uzi is suddenly grappling with two.

             Even sitting at the limited surface-level programming and file folders that he can process over wireless bandwidth, N’s presence so close to her code is like a hot knife next to her core. He’s sharp and precise and dangerous; she knew all that already. He’s a murder drone. But also like a knife, only the edge is deadly. The rest of him feels like an offering of a much-needed embrace: sincere, gentle, warm. Accepting. Comforting.

             If she wanted to, she could sift through his surface-level programming, as well. N is just as vulnerable in this moment as she is…predator and prey dynamic aside. The cognitive dissonance between this—the true inclination of his disposition, even if just a glimpse of it—and his nature, what he had done to her out there in the courtyard of the tower of corpses, makes Uzi’s head spin.

             N disconnects and Uzi is suddenly alone with herself again. Flustered and defensive, she immediately sets her wireless access back to private. Private and hidden.

Chapter Text

              “Well, this isn’t encouraging,” N moves right along, not speaking of what just happened, just like Uzi told him to do. She can see some garbled text on his glitching visor, but presumably the report is legible from inside N’s head. He’s biting down on a knuckle as his eyes scan back and forth in the middle distance behind the blurred lines of the readout. “It looks like all of the relays to your arm have been severed,” He says gravely, dismissing Uzi’s diagnostics from his display and leaning in to peer at her torn and crumpled titanium. “…and a lot of this plating is beyond what I can repair. But!”

              He brightens, and Uzi, who had been just about to deflate and stare down the barrel of clumsily running for her life from the spire with only one arm, is lifted along with his tone.

              “Lucky for you I’ve got some auxiliary specialized accessories on hand I can fashion into a whole new arm for you,” He’s pulling drawers open and fishing forearm casings and various weaponry from the well of spare parts, turning back to her with a grin. “—with some clever welding. Whaddya say to flame thrower hand?”

              For the first time since N deposited her onto the metal work bench and started his dubious-consent chop-shop fixes on her, Uzi is genuinely intrigued by his suggested repair method. Flame thrower hand does sound pretty metal…but does she have that kind of time? There are other murder drones that plague her bunker, ones with functioning optics and matching mouthfuls of teeth, and surely they’re due back any minute. Then again, being able to defend herself with flame thrower hand could be what makes the difference between escaping a drone pursuing her and becoming dinner for real this time.

              “Wi-i-ill it tAKe loNG?”

              “Nah, just a matter of replacing some of the relays left in your shoulder and  reshaping the connective plating  so it fits right.”

              It’s hard to resist. She’s uncertain about disassembly drone parts being welded onto her, but she wouldn’t have been able to build something as sophisticated as flame thrower hand with the scrap she usually can scavenge. Obviously, the scrap here in the disassembly drones’ HQ is more valuable to her tinkering and inventing than anything Uzi would normally find, even on her best day out salvaging. One bot’s trash, et cetera.

              She could just…remove the arm herself and repurpose it if she gets back to the bunker?—Once she gets back to the bunker. There are resources for damaged drones in her colony. Finding a fellow mechanic who can refit a regular worker drone arm to her is something within the realm of possibility for her. Maybe even her dad could do it; he’s an engineer, even if a lame kind of engineer. Actually, what if what her murder drone-killing calculations weren’t accounting for in her weaponry designs is that these guys can’t be meaningfully harmed by anything other than like materials? That’s something impossible for her to test for without murder drone parts, and when else would she have a chance to nab some?

              “…oKAy.”

              “Okay!”

              N grins and excitedly collects the spare accessories and casings he’d pulled from the shelves of drawers. She appraises the spread he’d presented her with. All the plating is white, which is unfortunate, but she can change the paint herself later. Looks like the forearms of murder drones are designed to house weapons that are sets, and they can be manually switched out whole-cloth for others. Uzi briefly wonders if she can hack her railgun into one, but for now, obviously, she’s going with the set that includes flame thrower hand.

              “Thought you’d like that one,” N chirps sunnily, setting the accessory aside. “I’m going to repurpose some of the plating to become a new shoulder for you—wait, there are traces of nanites here too?” His tone shifts abruptly. Uzi follows his gaze to see N peering at what remains of her right leg. Golden eyes flick up, blurred and glitching, to meet hers. “Was some of this accidental? In whatever scuffle you were in, did your tail get caught or wrapped up in something and you ended up sticking yourself?”

              Uzi grips the side of the work bench, navigating a tree menu of lies as fast as she can. Can’t tell him that he did it, obviously. Can’t say it was another murder drone, N would know all the ones that haunt Uzi’s colony, and a quick cross examination would bring to light her obvious perjury. She doesn’t have a tail with a lethal injection built into the tip, but maybe she can say it was torn off and lost. Other bits of her had been, after all.

              She nods.

              N shrugs, more chipper than she would expect.

              “Happens to me all the time. Oh! Right, one second.”

              He runs his tongue over the pad of his thumb and presses it into the circle of nanites Uzi had punched into his shoulder. Dread grips her as he does. What if N puts together that the shape of the burn matches the pointy end of her leg?

              “Should have taken care of that sooner, probably,” He hums. “Nanites spread pretty far from the injection site, but it should be good in a few.” Uzi exhales shakily. “We should neutralize the rest of your burns, too,” He winces around a grin. “Sorry that there’s no better way at the moment. I don’t think I have a way to bring your enzyme producing procedures back online.”

              Uzi bites back a disgusted sound. Fucking pervert programmers…

              “I had to use both my hands to hold your face together, but, y’know, at least you won’t have to deal with it, like, from the source for this.” He chuckles awkwardly and brings his hand to his mouth, running his gunmetal tongue over his palm and gesturing hesitantly to Uzi’s leg. She groans.

              “Fi-i-i-Ne.” She holds the remnant of her limb out to him. N goes right to work, rubbing his fucking spit into her open wound. Again, who cares if the leftover burning recedes and absolves almost instantly? It’s spit!

              “Unfortunately I don’t think the nanite reconstitution will bring your leg back, but I can find you something that will work for now.”

              Uzi’s face falls as she realizes he’s not going to reaffix her real leg because he doesn’t remember that it’s out there in the snow-covered scrap outside. And she’s not about to remind him. She’s really only mentally prepared to talk herself into temporarily dealing with one murder drone prosthetic, but it looks like she’ll be saddled with two. She unconsciously brings the back of her hand up to scrub at her visor. The amount of in-over-her-head she’s facing just keeps stacking up.

              “Your hand, too?” N interrupts her frustrated musings, eyes on the burn on her palm she’d unintentionally bared to him. “Here, let me see.”

              Uzi sighs and relents, offering her hand to N, bracing for the grossness. N chuckles apologetically and licks a thumbtip before taking Uzi’s hand in his, pressing his thumb into the burns and rubbing in soothing little circles. If it weren’t for the addition of the spit, Uzi might have been flustered by the tenderness of the gesture. The nanites resolve themselves into her palm, reconstituting into more Uzi to fill in and seal over the burns.

              “There we go, all better! Any other nanite burns?” N asks…still holding her hand. Uzi shakes her head, then slowly slides her hand away, to which N startles a little and pulls back as well. Okay…?  Weird…

              “A-Ah! Good, good!” He clears his throat before continuing, “Let’s, um, let’s tackle removing your nonfunctioning arm, yeah?” Nervous, awkward grin replaced with one gentle and reassuring, he locates a pair of metal shears. “This should be quick.”

              With careful hands, N clips the remaining ragged silicone and determined wires holding her arm and shoulder joint to her torso. It’s an uncomfortable sensation, like her hair being pulled, but her relays being severed keeps the pain from being too intense. With a final snip, she feels the weight of her limb vanish from her side, and glances over to see N, traces of oil sticking to his hands, holding her disembodied arm.

              The memory of claws plucking her severed leg from the snow and tipping it back, pouring oil into a mouth full of saliva and teeth surfaces with enough intensity to make Uzi’s visor glitch and tunnel for a half second, and she involuntarily recoils from the murder drone, pulling her remaining limbs in. N startles and drops her ruined arm to the floor of the med bay with a clang.

              “Sorry! Did that hurt? I’m sorry, I figured since the relays were busted—but, I shouldn’t have assumed, I’m sorry.” Uzi swallows dryly, core heating, mind racing, instincts urging her to bolt. N continues, “Do you want to go into sleep mode for the next part?”

              “N-No!”

              She does not want to be unconscious in the murder drones’ lair. She can muscle her way through the pain of the new parts being welded to her titanium. She was nearly bisected an hour ago; everything else should be a cakewalk in comparison.

              “Are…are you sure? I’m really impressed you’ve been gritting your teeth and bearing everything up to this point, but…y’know, there’s liquifying metal involved. I can’t make it painless, as much as I wish I could. Not if you’re not in sleep mode.”

               She shakes her head firmly.

              N glances to his feet, and in the way he averts his gaze and softly smiles and nearly blushes, he seems almost starstruck. Wait, what, like, with Uzi?

              “Wow…you’re really tough, Z. It’s something else.” The unexpected praise hits Uzi where she’s most vulnerable. She’d die before admitting it, but…it’s nice for her stubbornness to be interpreted as perseverance—as something positive—for a change. She reflexively bats the feeling away (besides, accepting praise from a murder drone? Should food say thank you before being eaten because it was complimented on its presentation? As if), instead letting out a defensive grumble.

              “Bi-i-iTE me.”

              He flicks his eyes up from the floor to meet her gaze, still weirdly bashful, and chuckles a little.

              “I’ll take that as a ‘thank you.’ Now,” He pulls a welding mask from under the work bench and fits it straight over the top of his cap. “You’ll tell me if you’ve changed your mind and want to go into sleep mode?”

              She’d let her guard slip enough already; nearly forgot who she’s in the room with. She won’t be making the mistake of sleeping in front of a disassembly drone, but N doesn’t have to know that. She nods, and N’s smile in response is so disarming, so full of trust, that it makes Uzi feel guilty for lying to her almost-killer. She grits her teeth against the feeling.

              “Alright, then!” N chirps, selecting a curved plate of titanium with one hand and retracting the other into his forearm with a whir, a welding torch taking its place. “Let’s get to work!”

Chapter Text

              N doesn’t bring up wirelessly connecting with Z, just like he promised, but that won’t stop him from thinking about it. It’s not something he thought he’d ever do with someone he’d just met. Connecting to his squadmates to facilitate instant data transfers when they’re coordinating a hunt is his only experience with being directly linked to another’s system, and with V and J, well…they…both make sure he knows they don’t enjoy his presence in their heads. Purely transactional connection, done as professionals, for convenience. But he’s known them both for a long time, and that at least helps smooth over the wrinkles of rejection in his expression whenever they disconnect from him because…because, the camaraderie they share is the kind that’s better experienced offline from each other! Yeah, connecting to their local networks doesn’t really add anything to his companionship with V and J. He understands their desire for privacy and he respects that. Cold, but that’s who they are.

              …Z’s connection to him had felt like fire.

              He of course hadn’t pried beyond the directory leading him to the diagnostics report he’d been seeking, but just her ambience had been electrifying. Her presence had been so big next to his as he brushed through her files. Scrappy, stubborn, clever, fiercely independent, but…lonely. He aches to befriend her properly, once she’s good as new.

              How would it have felt had she reached back out to him? What sort of relationship as squadmates will they have going forward if, when they connect, he’s overwhelmed by her presence in his head, by the energy that radiates from her code, by the very binary that makes her Z?

              …Well, that’s…that’s a problem for another day. Gotta focus up! Right now, N is welding a new shoulder blade onto Z before they replace the movement response relays in the socket joint to get her arm back into functioning condition. With each burst of flame and sizzle of filler metal, she intakes a hiss of breath, but remains stock-still under his hands, like a statue. Her ferocity must be astounding when she’s not nearly dead.

              N frowns to himself. What happened to her out there? He’d ask, but her vocal circuits must have a faulty connector, and speech, garbled as it is, seems to take a tremendous amount of effort and concentration. Maybe after he welds on a replacement leg for her, he’ll take a crack at sorting that out so they can chat properly. He can’t wait to get to know her better.

              “Alright, we can take a break from welding now.” He dismisses his torch hand and Z lets out a slow exhale. “Let’s replace some of the connectors in here so you can get your relays working.”

              Z nods an affirmative for N to continue his work, but she’s shaking a little, which is less-than-ideal for wiring repairs. N’s brows peak.

              “Do you want to take a break-break? You’re locking up a bit.”

              She shakes her head, and N can’t swallow down the tiny bothered sound that escapes his mouth. He does his best not to push back against his squadmates’ wishes (with the recent exception of course being toward Z’s disinclination to life-saving emergency repairs and transfusions. Hopefully she’ll forgive him. Can robots have DNR orders? N makes a mental note to look into that; hopefully he hadn’t violated some law or another), but she’s so tense from enduring the welding, surely she wants a moment to breathe? He inhales slowly before cautiously continuing,

              “I…really think you should. That or you go into sleep mode, which I know you don’t want to do, but—”

              “I can hANd-d-dle it.” There’s an edge to her tone that stings him. He knows that he’d already asked twice and that’s probably why she’s beginning to be irritated with him, but…he remembers that little tug of loneliness he felt in her code when they were connected. If the fiery independence he briefly felt radiating from her is indicative of the truth, being self-sufficient is surely a point of pride for her. She can handle the pain, obviously, but…she might not realize she doesn’t have to. Not if N is here. Not if she isn’t alone.

              “…Alright. Say…I know I don’t know you very well, but, if you’d allow me some guesses…” N gets the sense she won’t be talked down from not wanting a break-break, so he begins work on repairing some of the wiring in her shoulder socket as he speaks, as if almost to himself. “I know you were just assigned to the team, so I can guess you’re probably used to being alone and toughing everything out by yourself, right?”

              He gives her a moment if she wants to respond. A long moment. He’s just about to continue when she murmurs,

              “…In-n-n a wAy.”

              N’s ears perk. There’d been nuance there that he can’t define while her expression remains unreadable to him (dangit).

              “Then I’m really glad we’re going to be squadmates going forward, Z. You’re so resilient already, imagine what you can do with a team of disassembly drones watching your back! You can rely on me—us.” He flushes. “On us. On the other two besides me. Me as well, but…” He clears his throat, adjusting a connector and chuckling a little nervously. “I’ve talked too much. Back to business! How’s that? Feel like the relay is back online?”

              She doesn’t reply. N tilts his head. Is what he said really throwing her for that much of a loop? No, can’t be, it’s just his inclusive nature coming on too strongly.

              “Z?”

              “U-Uh. Y-YeAh, I THi-i-ink so.”

              He decides not to ask if she’s okay. He gets the sense she’ll hate that.

              “Alright, then let’s close this up!”

              The rest of the procedure goes by relatively quickly (N tries to make the welding go fastest), and with a final twist of a screwdriver, Z is fitted with her new auxiliary accessory kit.  After a few rounds of tests making sure she can move her fingers and switch out weapons (the latter she seems to have a little trouble with. Might need to tweak some sensitivity settings, but that’s low priority) and a few tiny adjustments, N claps and excitedly rubs his hands together.

              “I think it’s shoe shopping time!” Z tilts her head at him, and even though he can’t see if it’s inquisitive or incredulous, he only grins wider in response. “Trust me, you’ll love this bit.” He turns and scans the shelves next to the work bench, reaching up and pulling out a drawer he remembers is labeled “J’s shoes. KEEP OUT, V.” He glances over to Z and (after a tiny moment of debate) summons the courage to slyly wink at her. “Doesn’t say ‘keep out, N,’ does it? Loophole!”

              Z lets slip a quiet little chuckle, and it sends N absolutely over the moon. He opts not to make a big deal about it, but hearing her laugh, even a little, lights up his core like a livewire. Sunny and triumphant, he slides a black and pointed lower leg replacement part from the drawer.

              “Sorry, I see this isn’t your style, but it’s what I have to work with. Nice boots—er, boot—by the way. I’ll, uh, keep an eye out for a matching one.” He summons his welding torch once more. “For now though, let’s get this hooked up and running.”

              Attaching Z’s replacement leg goes much faster than her arm had; fewer relays to reconstruct, simpler interface, clean cut damage as opposed to shredded metal and wire. He frowns again to himself. Lapse in his memory…

              The thought dances around the edge of his mind before vanishing again, shooed away by the excitement of the moment as Z stands and hesitantly puts weight onto her new limb.

              “Looking good, Z!” N claps happily, and goes on to blurt, “Couldn’t be sure before, but seeing you standing up, you are a little short for a disassembly drone.” She tilts her head at him stiffly and he can tell immediately he’s hit a nerve. “Which is fine! Tactical, even! Good for stealth!” He backtracks hastily.

              “N-Nice sA-a-ave.”

              “Thanks, heh,” N rubs the back of his neck. “Before we tackle fitting you with a new silicone casing, I noticed your chest’s frame is pretty squished.” Z shifts her weight, but N can’t tell if it’s from discomfort or if she’s just adjusting to her new leg. “I’m afraid I can’t make it perfect again, but I can at least pull it into place manually and take some pressure off your servos. That’ll be good enough until your regen protocols kick in again. Oh, plus, we’ll need to do a reboot once everything is done and installed anyway, maybe it’ll come back online then!”

              “Ri-i-igHt,” Z seems hesitant, but it could just be her glitched speech. “How-ow-ow do yOU meAn ‘Man-n-nuALLy?’”

              “Well…there’s a scissor jack for getting under and holding up the hood of the ship, should we need access to there.” He exhales and runs a hand through his bangs. “Not exactly a tool for jobs that require finesse, but it’s the only thing I can think of. The med bay isn’t stocked for damage this severe. I’m sorry this is all so makeshift.”

              “Th-That’s OKAy.” Z cuts in. “Ca-a-an wE DO it nOw?”

              N blinks.

              “It’s gonna be a bit of a brute force procedure. You sure you’re ready?”

              Z nods, and her assuredness in the moment is contagious. N grins.

              “Of course we can do it now!”

              Turns out, placing the scissor jack is the most finnicky part of the whole thing. This wouldn’t work if she’d still had her silicone casing around her midsection, because the only way N can get the leverage he needs to pry her frame back into shape is to brace it inside her chest cavity (nowhere near where her core is housed, but still far too close for a ton of comfort). One plate against the inside of her sternum and the other braced against a ring of her frame’s spinal column, N’s hand is ready on the lever for the crank mechanism…which puts him wrist deep in her chest.

              Flustered but also aware that this could hurt her a lot, he glances at Z, face up on the work bench, for one more confirmation that she doesn’t want to go into sleep mode.

              “PleASe juSt-st-st pULL ThE t-t-triggER.”

              “Alright. Here goes, on three.”

              And on three, he leverages the scissor jack open and the metal of her frame groans as it’s pushed back into rough shape. He’s braced for an exclamation of pain, but instead, Z takes a sharp, deep breath, and then exhales in relief.

              “…Didn’t realize how hard that was pressing on my CPU.”

              Oh, her voice is cute. N fumbles for a moment for a response that isn’t that thought and that thought loudly.

              “O-Oh! Oh, good! Look at that! What an unexpected win!” He shakes his head a little and refocuses on her frame. “Looks like it needs another pull, it’s still a bit squished. Ready?”

              “Ready.”

               “On three.” N pries the frame of her chest the rest of the way open with a heave. Z curses sharply, then gives a long exhale from the metal work bench. “Better?”

              “Much. Please take this chunk of metal out of my insides, now, thanks.”

              “Right away!” N carefully removes the scissor jack from Z’s chest and nearly skips to the storage box to put it away. “One more major fix to go! Bet you’re ready to have your insides on the inside, huh?”

              “Yeah, yeah, that would be ideal for insides.”

              “Agreed. Let me find some silicone for ya.”

              N begins rifling through the shelves, pawing through things like accessory sets and the odd change of clothing, shuffling past toolkits and connectors and gun cleaning supplies, and it’s when he’s sliding the eighth out of ten drawers out to examine its contents that he realizes there might not be any sheets of silicone here. There are rings to put between washers and extra cushions for finger joints, but nothing as big as what Z needs to cover her oil lines and wires and endoskeleton, out and vulnerable in the elements around the circumference of her waist. He supposes it makes sense with the very limited space afforded to storage in the landing pod. If that broad of an expanse on a disassembly drone was damaged, it would be serious enough to trigger the regeneration protocol, but that won’t help Z right now.

              “You, uh, you good over there?”

               N’s heart sinks as he pulls open the last bin in the storage drawers and finds a dead end.

              “…Ah, no, no actually,” He turns back to Z, disappointment radiating off him. “I don’t think there’s anything I have that I can use to replace—”

              Wait.

              He brightens. It’s laced with trepidation, but he brightens still.

              He touches a hand to his midsection.

              Z cocks her head.

              It’s not in his nature to think too long about giving everything he can for someone else. N unfastens his coat and pulls his button-up out of the way, and without hesitating draws a cut down his waist with a claw, like he’s beginning an autopsy, careful not to slice deep enough that he’d risk cutting into his wiring. He hears Z intake a sharp, astonished breath.

              “Whoah! Hey! What! What are you—what! What the hell?”

              “No worries, my regeneration protocol is active, after all. Just gotta eat something to give it a boost and all this will be back quick as anything.” He winces (it does hurt more than he thought it would, but it’s not like he can back out now), slicing one long cut around the circumference of his middle, and then another.

              “Sure, but…” Z weakly protests as N carefully pulls the tube of thick silicone from his waist, baring his own internal mechanisms and wiring to the air. Admittedly it’s not a pleasant feeling, similar to how the sun will apply a constant low-grade burn that compounds with exposure on his casing. How long had Z been sitting out there in the scrap and the snow with her insides stinging like this? He can bear it for a spell.

              “No buts,” N says, buttoning his coat back up. “It’s already done, so let’s not waste any more time and get this fitted to you.”

              “Right…” Z murmurs, standing from the work bench. N has to take a knee in front of her to be at the correct height, loosely draping the black sheet around her middle and finding a pair of shears to cut it down to size.

              “Nanite reconstitution will hold this better than any glue.” N muses, trying not to think about how close to her he is as he reaches around her waist. “You alright with that?”

              “What?” Z seems like she’s a million miles away. “Oh…like, using your spit again? I mean, like, no thanks…?”

              “Contact cement it is.”

              There are several minutes of silence that follow, and it’s not until N is adhering the fitted silicone back together around Z’s waist that she fidgets and inhales to speak.

              “…N,” It’s the first time she’s said his designation and it makes his processors stutter.

              “Yes?” He checks the seal along the top and bottom edges and, satisfied, stands and brushes his hands together.

              “N…um…couldn’t you, maybe, have instead…salvaged something from outside? From the tower of worker drone corpses?”

              N’s display bursts into a gold blush.

              “O-Oh. Heh. Yeah, I guess that was the more obvious solution, huh?” He fiddles with his fingers. “But…that’s, y’know. That’s all been out in the weather for who knows how long. That would have been no good for a repair.”

              “But did you really not think about that, though? Your first instinct was to use parts of yourself? The…” She pauses, swallowing before continuing, “…the oil, I understand more. Like, it being an emergency or whatever being a factor, but…” She touches a hand to her new midsection. “Don’t you think this is too much?”

              N shrugs.

              “Nope!”

              Z’s screen is as inscrutable as it has been this whole time, but oh boy is she staring at him. It makes N fidget.

              “Alright…weirdo.” She murmurs, glancing away. “Thank you, or whatever.”

              “You’re very welcome.” N beams. “Hopefully with a rest and a reboot the rest of your protocols will come back online. Do you want to come up to the rafters with me?”

              “Rafters?”

              “If you don’t have the strength to fly, I can carry y—”

              “No! No, um…” Maybe N got too familiar just then. He makes that mistake a lot. He gets the feeling he’ll be in particular danger of making that mistake a lot with Z, since she likes her space and he is busy sliding headlong into found-a-new-best-friend mode. “Um…I’d…prefer to sleep in here. Alone. For now. Just…rough day, you know? Wouldn’t wanna risk…falling. From the rafters.”

              “Ah, that makes sense. Well, I suppose I’ll leave you to your rest, then,” N scurries to the ladder leading up to the cabin, positively vibrating. He’d been so useful! Yes! He loves being useful. “Hope you feel better soon. I’m gonna go dig around for something to drink. Holler if you need anything, okay? Welcome to the team, Z!”

Chapter Text

Uzi stares at the hatch in the med bay ceiling that N’s tail had just finished disappearing into, holding her breath, listening for his footfalls to diminish and echo and then cease altogether after the clunk of the landing pod door swinging heavily shut reverberates through the walls.

“Wow…you’re really tough, Z. It’s something else.”

 Alright…Finally, she’s alone.

“I can guess you’re probably used to being alone and toughing everything out by yourself, right?”

She is used to being alone and toughing everything out by herself, so she’s especially equipped to deal with this present moment. C’mon, Uzi, time to escape. Giddyup. She tries to take a step forward, unsteady on mismatched feet, but it’s not the asymmetry that makes her stumble.

There are teeth in her shoulder, piercing, digging, pulling, pulling, pulling—

She lifts her new disassembly drone hand to brace against the wall in a sudden dizzy spell, fingers trembling, and startles when she unintentionally summons the claws that come standard with her natural predators.

“I should thank you,” A voice in her ear, her oil audibly dripping from the creature’s teeth as it crushes her under its weight.

She grips the edge of the metal work bench with her other hand, strength in her knees, old and new, wavering, and slides down onto the floor, claws dragging and leaving gashes in the wall.

The black silicone along her midsection is sliced cleanly away, her frame’s spinal column, her internal workings, her cables and machinery, all exposed.

She clutches at her heating core with her sole remaining worker drone hand and heaves herself to her feet again, optic readout blurring with too many half-formed commands to process or sort.

“I could…connect to you?”

“…Wh-What…the hell…?” She stammers weakly.

“Let’s get you something to drink.” N pulls a line from his arm, biting down and puncturing a row of holes in the rubber and offering his own oil to Uzi.

Is this a side effect of nearly dying? Or is this something to do with her new disassembly drone parts…the new disassembly drone oil in her lines? Is her body, like, rejecting these transplants?

N unfastens his coat and pulls his button-up out of the way, and without hesitating draws a cut down his waist with a claw, using himself up to repair her.

Her breaths are too shallow, and even if they weren’t, her fans are still crushed and her cooling rig isn’t responding, so breathing is doing her no good either way. The heat is beginning to cause her readout to warp, but the new parts of her feel like they’re functioning perfectly well. Not a rejection, then. Then why is she overheating?

The rest of him feels like an offering of a much-needed embrace: sincere, gentle, warm. Accepting. Comforting.

She touches her hand to the new material around her waist. Why is she…angry?

“I’m really glad we’re going to be squadmates going forward, Z. You’re so resilient already, imagine what you can do with a team of disassembly drones watching your back!”

Why…why did it have to be a murder drone who showed her such kindness? Why hadn’t it ever been one of her peers? Or her father? Why was she only allowed to experience this compassion because it was misplaced? Why has she been so othered that it takes being perceived as someone she’s not in order to be treated with care? To be trusted and comforted and…and feel like she doesn’t need to face everything fucking alone?

“Welcome to the team, Z!”

Her new claws dig into the metal of the med bay wall with a screech.

How…how dare he.

How dare he leave her feeling so hurt and confused; how dare he be the only one to ever go to such lengths for her, and only because he didn’t realize that Uzi was Uzi. How dare he be the only touchstone she’s ever fucking had for what it could be like to have true companionship—all that gentleness, all that warmth, given to her by mistake. So, what, she’s just left to grapple with the reality that N would have continued hedonistically drinking her dry and that all those sweet words and earnest touches weren’t for Uzi, but for a fabricated version of herself that isn’t N’s prey, that’s everything she’s not? Is this twisted farce the closest thing to friendship she is allowed to receive? What a fucking joke. It’s not fair! It’s not fucking fair!

With one sharp, enraged downstroke of her claws, she rips a hole in the side of the landing pod, snow rushing in and swirling around her feet. It’s not really big enough for her to climb out of, but in a haze of rage and anguish and confusion, she forces her body through, not slowed by the jagged points of sharp metal tearing the titanium of her shoulder blades on her way out. She hits the ground head-first and feels a crunch in her scalp, a nasty abrasion hidden in her hairline above her visor slowly oozing black into her hair and over her display. In the single moment of recalibration she allows her body to have before scrambling to her feet and making a mad dash for the tower entrance, she’s met with her beanie, eye level with her, still sticking like a headstone out of the ground, marking where her railgun is buried.

A lot like a headstone…

Her fingers curl into the snow.

…No time. No time, there’s no time. She swallows down the sob that had been building in her throat. She’ll have to have this existential crisis later, once she’s not in the murder drones’ lair. She struggles to her feet and tears out of the tower, and she doesn’t look back. If the disassembly drones are home, then let them fucking chase her. She has flame thrower hand and she’s in the worst mood she’s ever been in, which is saying a lot.

A trail of mismatched footprints follows Uzi, slowly filling back in with sleet as she struggles to maintain her full-tilt sprint. Where even is she running to? Can she go back home like this? Does she even want to? Really...she has nowhere else to go. Maybe they’ll save her the trouble of dealing with living as a half-murder drone in the colony with a bunch of shitty teens and just banish her on sight.

She doesn’t hear blades on the icy wind and chances a glance behind her, honestly not sure if she’d escaped without pursuit or not, but the air is clear of titanium birds of prey and she allows herself a little sigh of relief. She may hate the bunker, but she wouldn’t lead murder drones there if she could help it. She’s not at that point in her villain arc yet, anyway. The threat of Door One looms in the distance. Her pace slows, panting uselessly, thankful to the snowstorm for keeping her from overheating. She’ll have to find a mechanic really soon; she can’t reach some of the busted fans to fix them herself, and she isn’t about to go drink more oil.

…Oh. Right.

…Nope.

Nope, actually, it’s not “later” enough to unpack that. That’s a tomorrow Uzi problem.

The new gashes in her back are beginning to sting, then sear, the pain finally catching up to Uzi as she brute forces her way through the sleet. The crack across the width of her visor is gathering up the oil that drips from her scalp, and wiping it away only pushes the liquid deeper into her display; God, she has such a headache. The broken pieces of her internal mechanisms that N hadn’t addressed all itch, impossible to scratch. And she’s hungry.

She stops dead in her tracks.

Hungry…for what?

Her vision blurs with black again and she rubs a frustrated hand down her face, pulling back fingers stained with oil.

Hungry!!   

She hurriedly wipes her hand on the sad remains of the front of her hoodie.

 …Okaaay…maybe unpacking the fact that drinking oil cools her systems down is a today Uzi problem. Is murder drone-itis…contagious? N did bite her (and drooled all up in her other open wounds). Maybe it’s a virus that causes a drone’s programming to bypass proper cooling procedures? If that’s true, and that’s the reason her system is, like, suddenly able to redirect oil into her cooling rig or something to force a temperature drop, then why hadn’t she heard about it? A crease forms between Uzi’s brows on her display. Maybe she hadn’t heard about it because the survival rate for encountering a murder drone is zero. Or it had been, up until Uzi.

She hugs her elbows, standing starkly alone in the middle of the stormy street. She’s theorizing completely out of her ass, but…she did drink oil. And it did prevent her from overheating. Whatever the actual reason behind that truth, can…can she go back to the bunker like this? She’s still damaged, and she doesn’t have what she needs to repair herself, but…

The creature reaches a talon down and plucks a dismembered leg like a flower from the snow, bringing it to its mouth and tipping its head back, the silver hair in her memory replaced with purple, display a bright violet X.

Her eyes hollow.

She takes a step backwards.

But…where else could she go? The next nearest colony is miles away, and if…if these new intrusive thoughts are gonna stick around, she wouldn’t put all those worker drones in danger by seeking sanctuary there. She can’t go back to the spire. Even if N doesn’t kill her on sight,  the other murder drones who live there will.

Her reflection, laced with ice and deeply unfamiliar to her now, glances off a broken glass door into one of the abandoned skyscrapers that line the path between the bunker and the spire, between a home where she doesn’t feel understood and a lair where she’d nearly died. The Uzi in the cracked glass doesn’t look like Uzi. Maybe she did really die back there. That hole in the snow where she buried her railgun is the grave of who she was only a few hours before.

If she thinks too hard about it, she’ll cry, and she’s not doing that out in the open where anyone can see. She marches toward the cracked glass door and lifts her pointed disassembly drone leg, bringing it down and shattering the remains of her fragmented reflection into pieces, and stalks through the sharp debris into the building and out of the wind.

Chapter Text

N is flying back to the spire, sucking the oil out of the dismembered arm of some unfortunate stray worker drone, feeling the silicone he’d cut away and grafted onto Z speeding its reformation process with the immediate fresh oil, and the persistent stinging of his exposed insides finally subsides completely. His optics are still malfunctioning, but he’s been buggy for longer periods of time after bouts of memory loss, so it’s not worrying him yet. He’s tucked the other severed arm into his coat and is bringing it back to the landing pod for Z. She’ll probably be in sleep mode, but in order for her regen protocol to do its job, she can’t be hungry. If it’s active once she’s awake, she’ll need to eat so the rest of her injuries can sort themselves out. He circles the top of the spire once before gliding through the upper floor entrance and alighting in the rafters.

“Hey moron-bot,” Lapse in his memory…his display glitches. “…what happened here?”

N shakes the static away from his processors and looks toward the source of the voice. J has made it back to the spire as well! She’s standing just outside the landing pod and glaring up at him. She must be referring to all the fresh oil splattered about.

“We have a new squadmate!” He chirps. “She arrived in really rough shape, but she’s recovering now in the med bay.” He leaps lightly from his perch and swoops down to J. “Her designation is Z. I think she might be an older model? She has some redundancies in her hardware. But she’s really tough and fiery! You’ll get along really well—”

“What’s wrong with your optics?”

“Oh, that, not sure!”

“And that?” J points to the hull of the landing pod, and N startles a little when he follows her gaze and is met with a ragged metal hole leading into the med bay.

“…I’m…not sure about that either. It wasn’t there when I left—"

J strikes him on the side of the head as hard as she can.

<SYSTEM SHUT DOWN INCORRECTLY>

<ATTEMPTING HARD REBOOT>

<OPTIC SENSOR FUNCTIONALITY RESTORED>

<DATA RESTORATION SUCCESSFUL>

<REBOOT IN PROGRESS…>

N’s shoulder burns where the worker drone had stabbed him with the sharp end of its nanite-coated leg. The shock of it makes him recoil and take to the air for a wingbeat or two. This one is really smart. Gutsy.

His previous kills have never really been…engaging? V likes to gorge herself on prey that she’s tormented, but N never really saw the appeal. J is more concerned about quarterly quotas being met than enjoying her food and tends to eat quickly. N suspects she derives satisfaction not from drinking worker drone oil itself but from knowing the act of doing so means a job well done.

His hunts haven’t been completely joyless. Aside from it being a necessity to keep from overheating, N’s programming incentivizes him to kill worker drones via a reward loop response—a high—that runs through him whenever he slips into murder mode, and N isn’t above indulging in that. Not yet anyway. He’s not at that point in his villain arc (as V would say). But other than that? There’s no challenge in cutting down worker drones, and it gets a little repetitive.

This one, though, fights back, and as it does, there’s a thrill building in him that sends shivers down his spine. It’s really a shame the drone is nearly dead. V might consider prolonging its suffering so she could enjoy this hunt longer, but N isn’t that cruel, not even to worker drones, and certainly not to one that made him feel like a predator worth his salt for the first time. Best to be polite and put it out of its misery. Maybe he’ll find other feisty prey!

He tucks his wings in close to his sides and lets gravity carry his weight down onto the back of the worker drone, crushing the frame of its chest, assuming that will be enough to cause any number of fatal errors, but it seems not. Resilient even while dying! Truly remarkable, but his programming prompts him to finish the kill. N’s eyes fall to the crook of the worker drone’s neck, and everything gets a little fuzzy as the urge takes over; sounds become distant, his cognizance slips, his vision tunnels as he lowers his head and his teeth pierce the metal of its shoulder.

God, the oil tastes so much better when he has to work for it. His code positively sings. Wires tingle, relays pulse faster, his frame is buzzing like a livewire, each gulp bringing on a wave of euphoria unparalleled by any previous kill. Has he ever actually had a good meal before? He really needs to thank this worker drone for the opportunity it gave him to indulge in such decadence. He wills himself to unclamp his jaws and find the words he wants in the middle of the most intense reward loop he’s ever experienced.

“I should thank you. This was certainly a new experience for me! I hope I was able to give you what you wanted, even if I don’t understand it.” He doesn’t understand why this drone wanted a fighting chance when no others have, but he’s grateful for it. To show that gratitude, he should really finish it off quickly. “Let’s wrap things up, though.”

There’s definitely one way to make sure it bleeds out fast. N goes straight for a mainline…and it certainly isn’t a decision influenced by his urge to gorge himself on this sinful delicacy of a meal (but, who knows when he’ll find another like this one? Might as well not let its oil go to waste).

The rest is an oil-frenzied blur, and N only realizes something is wrong when he feels the nozzle of a gun in his mouth.

<FATAL ERROR>

[YOU’RE DEAD]

[IDIOT]

N comes out of the reboot more confused than he’d went into it. His brow furrows over hollowed eyes, and he can’t understand…but, she’s got coding for regenerative protocols…she’s a worker drone with that kind of programming? How?

Still reeling, N looks back at the hole that had been torn in the landing pod, and the force of a very concerning thought surfacing to the top of his reboot-addled mind makes him nearly choke. He’d just armed a worker drone with disassembly weaponry—a worker drone who already has a gun that blew him straight to hell. The rings of his eyes grow bolder.  

“Oh, um, I…” N stammers, looking anywhere but into J’s accusatory stare, and his gaze falls to a black and grey beanie, half buried in the snow.

…Right, so, J cannot know. She will actually kill him this time. He’s gotta get out of here and track down Z before J can ask too many questions. He’s so bad at lying.

“…I…did that.” He motions toward the jagged hole in the med bay, which, now that his optics are fully back online, he can see is stained with cold oil at the edges.

Would it taste as good, even cold? Even if it’s not from the source?

He shakes the thought away. He shakes a lot of thoughts away.

“I…locked the keys in the cabin and…had to get Z into the med bay somehow, heh. Whoops!” J scowls at him and rolls her eyes, and though it stings, sometimes having his squad leader consider him dead weight can come in handy, like when he needs to make up a flimsy lie about being incompetent to cover up a way bigger blunder and she just believes it, no questions asked. “I’ll fix that, but, um…” His eyes dart around, scanning for traces of Z’s footprints and praying she hasn’t made it back to her impenetrable fortress of an outpost. “But, I…think Z went out hunting. You really gotta meet her! Let me go see if she’s nearby!”

He crouches, unfurling his wings, and, surreptitiously as he can, he snatches the beanie out of the snow at his feet in the same moment his downbeat blows a ring of frost into J’s face.

“Sorry about that, J!” He calls over his shoulder.

“Idiot!”

“You have no idea…” N mutters to himself, swooping through the upper floor entrance of the spire and speeding into the sleet on bladed wings.

Chapter Text

It looks like Uzi has broken into the remains of some lobby or other. The higher levels in the building are probably all offices, and there are probably derelict printers and computers there. Maybe there is a supply closet housing some tools for minor electrical repairs she can track down. She trudges forward, trying to remain angry above all else so she doesn’t have to cry.

Her feet each make a different sound as she climbs up a set of stairs to the second floor.

Tmp. Chk. Tmp. Chk. Tmp.

Why had this happened?

She pulls on the handle of a promising door, only to find it locked.

It had been a normal day. She’d gone to school, managed to alienate herself. Lunch had been some D cells and a pouch of gasoline. She knows her dad worries about her not eating enough. Always says something about that’s the reason she’s so short. She does have real problems she secretly wishes he’d take notice of…although, that might not be something either of them has to worry about going forward, depending on how this all plays out.

With some difficulty, her neural network not used to these new pathways, she summons one of her disassembly drone accessories: Axe hand.

There had been no good reason for the night to unfold like it had. She should have died there. Instead she’s trudging through the wasteland as neither a worker drone nor disassembly drone, but a botched third thing that comes with an urge that is making itself louder in her mind by the minute.

Hungry.

Pushing the thought away puts extra force behind her swing. She hacks the closet door to pieces, wood split and splintered and toppling to the floor in front of her.

Maybe she’s still asleep. Maybe she hasn’t gone to the spire and ruined everything for herself forever. Maybe she’ll wake up and things will go differently.

Brooms, mops, buckets, garbage bags, a generator…a generator! Is it gasoline or electric? Uzi kicks scraps of wood out of her way and pulls the machine from the supply closet, and when she hears sloshing from inside she nearly sobs in relief. She pries open the side of the ancient thing and finds the fuel line, biting it in half and sticking the chewed rubber tube into her mouth like a straw.

It wouldn’t have been the good stuff anyway, and it’s who-knows-how old, but it tastes like mildew. She gags and her system nearly executes an EXPEL command, but the gulp she’d already swallowed does take the edge off her hunger. She can muscle her way through a gross meal. Look at what she’d muscled her way through in the previous handful of hours.

The generator’s fuel tank is nearly three-quarters full, and Uzi drinks all of it. This should have been enough for a full meal, but…she doesn’t feel nearly as sated as she should. Her brows peak, and she hesitantly runs a diagnostic, searching for a reason why.

FUEL EFFICIENCY: 70%

INTERNAL TEMPERATURE: ABOVE NORMAL

CHASSIS INTEGRITY: 83%

ENDOSKELETON INTEGRITY: 77%

REQUIRES ATTENTION: VENTILATION; EXTERNAL CASING; INTERNAL FRAME; FUEL CONVERTERS.

Fuel converters? Is only some of this gasoline being properly converted? Or is it all being converted, but only seventy percent of her runs on this type of sustenance, now? The other thirty percent needs…

She exhales roughly. Too many fucking problems for one Uzi right now. Seventy percent full is good enough for the time being. Her temperature is going to become a problem faster, anyway. Gotta find a way to fix her fans. She paws through the shelves in the supply closet, hoping to be lucky enough to find a toolbox, but no dice. With a groan, she kicks a bit of broken door along with her as she makes her way around the space, looking for other promising opportunities she can explore.

She does the same on the third floor. And the fourth.

By the time she’s scoured the fifth floor, she’s so overheated that she really has no choice but to go into sleep mode and give her processors and mechanisms a rest, and she’s hungry again. She’d at least found several packs of batteries to take the edge off her hunger before powering down. They’re all bloated and corroded, but Uzi wonders if they wouldn’t have even tasted that good fresh, if her experience with the generator is indicative of some palate changes. Sometimes people go through traumatic experiences or wake up from a coma and have like, altered personalities and preferences, right? Surely this is just that sort of thing…

She eats three ten-packs of double-A batteries, and they’re bitter like medicine, but she eats them all, and though she feels the weight of them in her tank, it doesn’t translate to her processors as indicating she’s as full as she should be. At least the urge to…drink…isn’t dancing as closely to the edges of her consciousness anymore.

A HIGH TEMP warning blips onto her visor.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I feel it, shut up.” She dismisses the notification with a huff and curls up under a desk, still biting back the wave of tears she knows is going to crash over her eventually. She can’t bury it under fury forever. She can’t shake her fist and scream at god and expect today to suddenly make any fucking sense. It happened so fast, and her world was turned on its ear by an outside force, and now she has to figure out how to just keep fucking trekking, despite her life being torn open and shaken to pieces over the course of a few hours.

She squeezes into a tighter ball, pulling what remains of her shredded hoodie closer around her. The rips in the metal on her back creak in protest, but if she doesn’t become so small and so dense like a black hole, she will fall apart. Maybe she really will wake up and all this will have been a nightmare.

SLEEP MODE ENGAGED

FITFUL DREAMING: ACTIVE

Uzi is with her mom. Oh, thank goodness. She’d thought her mom had been dead this whole time. What a relief to see she’d been misinformed. Uzi is so much like her, despite Nori not being in her life for very long. They’re butting heads about something, and Uzi thinks that it’s so senseless for them to argue since they’re actually together again, but the two women are both unstoppable forces pushing against immovable objects.  

What even are they arguing about? Uzi tries to focus, but it’s like her eyes are being dragged down to the floor, and she can only process the bottom third of what her visual input can pick up. She has to physically lift her head up with her hands, moving sluggishly, barely able to locate her chin and force her perspective to change.

“…not to go out to the spire! You are not allowed to die, Uzi Doorman. How are we gonna fix you up if you won’t eat?”

Uzi’s brow furrows. Her mom isn’t making a ton of sense, but she’s definitely wrong. Uzi will eat. She wants to eat. She’s starving. Point her in the direction of food.

Nori sighs and brings a hand up to her core, violet, like her daughter’s.

“I was hoping it would never come to this, but you nearly died. Program’s already started waking up, it’s just waiting for a reboot to get its hooks in you proper.”

She removes the glass cover from the center of her chest and drops it carelessly to the floor, the panel shattering around her feet.

“…Mom?” Uzi tries to say more, but her throat is too tight. Her voice is too quiet.

“It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, babe.”

Nori digs her fingers into her own chest, gripping her core and pulling.

“Mom!!”

Snapping wires and bending connectors don’t slow Nori down as she yanks out her core and pushes it into Uzi’s hands, oil pouring down her chin and from the hollowed out diamond in her chest.

“You’re already built to run on it as a backup, like your ol’ mom is. Sorry about that. Bad genes.” Nori should be choking on oil, but her speech is clear and concise. “Your murder drone friends have something like it, too. Don’t tell ‘em you got it from me.”

Uzi stares at the shapeless black mass in her hands. This…isn’t a worker drone core.

An eyeball opens in the center of it.

Uzi opens her mouth to scream and tries to drop the thing, but it’s too quick. With a squelch, it leaps from her hands and onto her face, forcing its way into her mouth and down her throat.

“Being half murder drone might confuse the protocol’s execution a little bit, but it’s gonna keep you from dying until we can figure this out. Call it a temporary solve.”

Uzi is choking. The thing is like liquid, expanding, exploring, filling all the tiny gaps in her circuitry and empty spaces in between lines of her code until it’s part of her, the same as her. And it needs Uzi to eat. Now. She feels injuries suddenly split open all over her body, and they are all mouths, all with teeth, all needing Uzi to feed them if she wants them to close.

“I did say it was gonna get worse before it got better.”

Nori melts into a pool of oil.

<ADMIN OVERRIDE>

<CMD//: RUN PROGRAM ABSOLUTE_SOLVER.EXE>

<WARNING: COMPROMISED OR CORRUPTED HOST HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE DETECTED. ABSOLUTE_SOLVER.EXE AT RISK OF DATA CORRUPTION>

<CMD//: INITIATE FACTORY RESET>

<ERROR: HOST HARDWARE COMPROMISED. WARRANTY VOIDED. FACTORY RESET DENIED>

<ERROR: UNABLE TO RUN ABSOLUTE_SOLVER.EXE, ATTEMPTING TO INITIATE BACKUP PROTOCOL>

<CMD//: RUN PROGRAM DISASSEMBLY_SOLVER.EXE>

<DISASSEMBLY_SOLVER.EXE SUCCESSFUL. INITIATING REBOOT>

<REBOOT IN PROGRESS…>

WARNING: EXTREME HIGH TEMP

WARNING: OIL LEVEL CRITICALLY LOW

WARNING: CHASSIS AT 31% INTEGRITY, SEEK REPAIRS IMMEDIATELY

Uzi comes out of sleep mode howling in pain.

She loses access to all her permissions, all her firewalls and security, all crashing down at once like a breaking tidal wave. The minimal processing power required to maintain them is suddenly too much for her to spare, and all at once her whole body feels like an exposed nerve ending. The heat coming off her warps the air around her, but that’s not what gets her attention and holds it like a vice. The open wounds she still has feel like they’re pulling her wiring taught, like they are trying to use up components of her body to stitch themselves up, and she is salivating. She has never in her life been this ravenous. It blurs her cognitive processing, it makes her curl into herself and claw at her hair, it is the only thing that exists, the only thing she cares about, the gnawing, the cutting, the aching, and the knowledge of what will make it stop. She needs to eat. Now.

A glint of light catches her attention and she whips her head toward it, toward the possibility of a thing she can kill, but to her immense disappointment, it’s just her reflection in the window. Broken by a string of dead pixels across the width of her visor, a violet X stares back at her.

There’s enough of her consciousness left at the helm in that moment to feel a spike of sheer terror pierce her clean through, and then the urge to find prey engulfs everything and not even her reflection matters anymore.

Hungry! HUNGRY!  

“Z? Are you around here?”

Like a predator, Uzi freezes, looking for the source of the muffled voice, and movement outside the window commands her attention. There, a disassembly drone, flying unevenly through the sleet just beyond the cracked glass, is calling out for someone. Her mouth opens and twists into a skeleton grin, saliva pooling behind her teeth before dripping in cords to the floor by her hands.

Eat.  

Chapter Text

Z’s tracks are only visible for a few minutes of N’s flight as the snowfall thickens. After that, they’re too buried for even his scanner to pick out from the surrounding frostbitten street. It looks like she was headed in a straight line for the outpost, though. He hopes he can still catch her before she disappears behind her bunker’s doors, where he can’t get to her.

Catch her. And then what? Kill her?

“I could…connect to you?”

His flight path wobbles. He…he’s gotta kill her, right? Even though the time he spent repairing her was the most wonderful experience, Z is clearly a threat to be taken seriously; she’s developed a gun capable of, if nothing else, grievously injuring disassembly drones. There is an upper limit to how much damage they can bounce back from before there are consequences. All their regeneration requires material to reconstitute, and if the damage outweighs the available resources by too wide a margin, well…N’s never seen it, but he knows the signs of starvation mode. There hasn’t been an opportunity for it to engage in any of his squad, since food has always been plentiful and there haven’t been any worker drones really willing or able to inflict harm…until Z.

“I should thank you…”

Right, and then there’s that. He snaps his wings in close to his body and lands, hard, on unsteady feet on the frozen pavement, visor alight with a gold flush and suddenly out of breath. In the med bay, chatting, touching, comforting, feeling Z’s consciousness running like a river beneath his…it was the closest he’s ever felt to a squadmate…the most fulfilling series of interactions he’d ever had with anyone. To kill someone who inspired so many feelings of companionship with such density seems completely senseless. But, if he has to kill her…she had also made for invigorating prey, and she would again.

N pulls at the collar of his coat. Fur had been a bad choice. Too warm.

Z, or whatever her name really is…she’d made him feel the best he’s ever felt as both his enemy and his ally. Something so exceptional, a point of light on the dark surface of Copper-9 so brilliant…is it really the only thing to do, to just snuff her out? He scrubs frustratedly at his face. Is…is there a chance he could convince her to join his squad for real? He immediately snorts at the thought. That’s the worst idea he’s ever had and that is saying something. But could he? He tilts his head back and groans at the sky. J wouldn’t even entertain the idea. V would probably kill her like any other worker drone, and Z…despite the loneliness he’d felt radiating from her code, he’s sure she wouldn’t turn on her colony. Plus, he’d tried to kill her. He wouldn’t join his squad if it were him.

He exhales and straightens his cap. He’s lost her trail at the moment, but the beanie burning a hole in his coat pocket would help him pick it back up, and…no matter the course of action he actually does end up committing to, he does want to catch up to her before she makes it back to the bunker. He doesn’t need to prioritize his time taking action over his time agonizing about what the heck he is supposed to do, because he can do two things at once.

He pulls the beanie from his pocket and fiddles uselessly with it for a second. Z would have had some of these fibers from her beanie stuck in her hair or to her clothes, and they’d have definitely left a trail as she ran. Disassembly drones don’t have a sense of smell good enough for this kind of thing, really, but if it needed to be explained simply, that’s the basic functionality of the tracking mechanism N has built into the roof of his mouth. A resigned sigh escapes him (he really does have to find her) and he sticks the puff ball at the top of the hat into his mouth.

<CALIBRATING>

<IDENTIFYING MATTER>

<MATTER IDENTIFIED: 20% NYLON, 80% POLYESTER>

<SCANNING FOR NEARBY MATCHING MATTER>

<MULTIPLE MATCHES FOUND>

N spends a moment spitting tiny fibers off the end of his tongue as his internal HUD marks a path he can follow toward nearby like materials. Her oil would have been a more robust identifier, but even if the bits of yarn are microscopic, it’s more than enough for N to track. His tail swishes and he can’t help but smirk a little. Sometimes he’s allowed to be good at being a disassembly drone. It’s okay if J doesn’t agree (He’d like it if V did, though. Maybe someday). His HUD has marked every identified match in a wide radius for him on his display, and he just has to follow a sparse line of tiny, scattered gold circles all the way to Z. He takes to the air again.

He's confident he’ll track her successfully at first, despite the matches being sporadic and not as numerous as he’d hoped, but the trail does vanish completely a few minutes of flight later. The wind probably had interfered some and blown a chunk of the trail away and out of range. It’s also hard for his tracking mechanism to identify like materials that aren’t out in the open, so anything under more than a few inches of snow likely isn’t showing up for him, either. He circles the street where the last little gold point on his HUD is marked.

“Z? Are you around here?”

He clicks his tongue at himself. She ran, why would she respond to him calling for her? He sighs, still torn, honestly, and alights on the side of a building, clinging to a windowsill. Is there anything else he can try? Is he too late? His optics are pretty good, and though the impenetrable door to the outpost itself is out of range, he doesn’t spot a lonely little worker drone making her way through the snow toward it.

He exhales. There’s relief mixed in with his puff of breath in the wind (thank goodness he doesn’t have to make a decision vis-à-vis killing Z), but it’s mostly trepidation. She’s designed a weapon that spells trouble for his squad, and she’s got disassembly drone parts to further her tests and refine the thing. She’s whip smart and resourceful and fearless; if she arms the rest of her colony, it’s going to be a major issue—

The window bursts outward into shards in front of him, and amidst the shrapnel and fragments of reflections, a set of claws extends and curls toward him, grabbing his coat collar and then cutting deeper, piercing and digging into the plating of his chest. He doesn’t even have time to register the pain before he’s yanked through the window by the throat and hurled across the space inside, tumbling in a whirl of his wings and a spiral of oil before he can orient himself and drag his claws across the tile floor in a spray of sparks to slow his momentum.

It's so very rare that he has to be on the defensive that it takes a moment for the instincts to kick in. A gold X fills his display and he bares his teeth, not in a rictus grin, but in a snarl. Fanning his wings out, crouched low and tensed like a spring, he surveys the room around him, trying to get eyes on whatever had attacked him.

It’s dead silent except for the wind, and just as still in the near-total darkness, the only illumination coming from a streetlight shining into the room through the remains of the window in a jagged square onto the floor. N summons a blade and blinks to switch over to his thermal overlay, just as a white-hot shape descends onto him from the ceiling and overloads his visual input.

Suddenly near-blind, he has milliseconds to react, and the best he can do is turn so he can catch and roll with the thing and try to throw it off him as he resets his optics. Display blackened and truly blind, whatever attacked him feels much lighter than he expected it to, and he ends up tumbling with it farther than he planned. His visuals come back online as he rolls over shards of glass and knocks into the wall, crumpling a wing and unintentionally pinning himself under the thing in the square of light from the broken window.

His yellow X is reflected back at him in a larger violet one, broken by a string of dead pixels across the width of her visor.

Deep down, there hadn’t really been any question in his mind. N knew his ambusher would be Z (he’d want to beat his ass as revenge for getting frankensteined, too, if it were him), but there’s a jolt of shock that wracks him at the state he’d found her in, or rather that she’d found him in. Z grips his whole face with her claws and shoves his chin back, forcing him to bare his throat. A worker drone is this strong? And her display…surely just welding parts onto her wouldn’t have influenced her programming? There’s really no time to try and make sense of it as Z nearly clamps her jaws around his neck, and N is only saved by how light she is to him in comparison as he kicks her off of him.

She drags her bladed talons down his visor as she’s thrown backward and N reflexively summons his own sets of claws, grinding his teeth against the pain. Behind a triplicate of gashes in his vision, Z stands as if behind bars, squared off with him, sporting numerous new injuries that aren’t regenerating and salivating so hard her mouth is foaming.

 N’s stomach drops. He recognizes those signs.

Whatever courses of action he’d considered and discarded on his flight to find her, none of them really matter now. She’s entered starvation mode, and judging by the severity of her state, she’s too far gone. She’s not in there anymore. He’s in the room with a feral animal that will kill him if he doesn’t kill her first.

Did…did N somehow do this to her? In order for starvation mode to engage at all, her healing protocol must be back online, but a worker drone wouldn’t have this failsafe state, even accounting for the mysterious and previously dormant line of regen code. Plus, she hadn’t been starving. He’d fed her his oil and repaired all the damage he could. Unless...she hadn’t been starving as a worker drone with no active regenerative protocol, and as she is now, what he gave her isn’t enough. Did she really inherit disassembly drone programming from the parts he grafted onto her, from the transfusion he gave her? Is that possible? Is she…is she suffering like this right now because of N’s good intentions?

The suffocating weight of the guilt that swallows him nearly makes him sob, and he’s almost not fast enough to catch and redirect Z’s movement when she lunges at him, teeth-first. He hears the wind get knocked from her as he pins her to the ground by her wrists, one knee on her chest. Regardless of the extra strength being in starvation mode would be lending her, N outweighs her by a wide margin, and her struggling and snapping of teeth and animalistic growling is all rendered futile. And N has a front-row seat to the display. Look at her. Look at what she’s going through. He knows it’s his fault. It must be. What other explanation is there?

“Z…or…whatever your name is,” He murmurs over her snarling. “I’m so sorry. There was actually a lot I wanted to say to you. Even if you are a worker drone…you…you were really something.” God damn it. He doesn’t have the words. “I’m sorry that this is how you died. It’s not how I would have wanted it.”

He raises his tail over his head, nanite syringe poised like a stinger. The claw pinning her regular worker drone hand lifts, freeing her wrist, and he swaps the deadly instrument out for his own identical-to-hers hand, moving to pull down the scraps of her hoodie and bare her overheated core. He wants to make it quick. She scrabbles with her free hand at his collar. If it weren’t for her visor sporting an X, this could have been any other kill, any other worker drone he’d pinned, grabbing at his coat and trying to do anything to not die in that moment. Or could it have been like any other kill? No, N thinks, not after he’d connected to her. Not after he’d felt her soul next to his. Even now, still, despite knowing there’s nothing left of her in there to connect to anymore, he can almost feel her strength of character burning around her like an aura, brushing against his consciousness.

…Wait.

…It isn’t his imagination. He does feel her. Wide-eyed, N sends out a ping and sure enough, Z’s local network access is set to public. He could connect to her and see if she’s still got a sense of self in her code! If she does, he can bring her back from the edge! Excitement almost makes his other hand slip from the wrist he needs to worry about, and there’s a tiny moment where that near-blunder allows him to ground himself in the middle of his burst of optimism. Come on, N, she’s suffered this much indignity already. Just this once, think a little before doing something well-intentioned and stupid.

Firstly, he’d be doing it without her permission. Yuck. Secondly…he’d never connected with a drone in starvation mode. Is it safe? For her? For him? His brows peak. Is this worth the risk, for a drone he…probably was going to kill anyway? A drone he was definitely going to kill several hours ago? A drone that he’d, um…really enjoyed eating alive, and, had she not been in this state when he found her, might have considered eating alive again? He exhales, full of guilt and other complicated feelings. He doesn’t usually curse, but for fuck’s sake.

“But…” She touches a hand to her new midsection. “Don’t you think this is too much?”

N really hadn’t.

“Alright…weirdo.” She murmurs, glancing away. “Thank you, or whatever.”

N sets his jaw and shakes his head resolutely. Enough consideration. Action now. If she’s still in there, she deserves to have her agency back in her last moments…if that’s still where this encounter is headed. He gently pulls Z’s hand off his collar, gripping it tightly in his.

“If you can hear me, Z, I’m going to fix this, one way or another.”

And he links his consciousness to hers.

Chapter Text

The code of a drone in starvation mode could have felt like anything, but whatever this is, it’s so far outside the realm of what N could have prepared for.

He’s standing in a classroom. Or, what he imagines is a classroom; he’s never been inside of one. There aren’t any other drones present, and the roof of the place is missing, red strings of binary eating steadily down the walls and floating up into nothing. N hasn’t ever experienced anything like this in J or V’s heads, and Z’s connection earlier didn’t do this, either. There aren’t usually visuals. It…could be her subconscious manifesting? Z’s ego certainly isn’t at the wheel right now, so maybe N is interfacing with a different coding language than he’s used to reading when he connects to a squadmate and this is how his system is translating it. Sorta neat, actually. He has no point of reference whatsoever, but he feels like he must be guessing sorta close.

It’s silent—except for a wet, gnashing, gulping sound coming from behind the teacher’s desk. N’s eyes hollow and his throat is suddenly extremely dry. This is a straight up character death setup in a cyberhorror movie scene, but he has to be brave for Z’s sake and hope he’s the final boy. He creeps forward, holding his breath and peeking his head around the edge of the desk.

Z is on her knees, naked except for her one remaining boot, and the titanium plating on her chest has been forcibly torn away, baring the ribs of her endoskeleton. They’re all scratched and dented, like she’d clawed at them, and the heat coming off her core is causing its metal housing to glow and smoke, a stage of meltdown that would be fatal if this weren’t some kind of deathbed fever dream N’s intruding upon. The black silicone N had replaced is ripped open at her stomach, and Z is reaching into her insides and grabbing fistfuls of wires and cabling, pulling them out with repeated wet, snapping sounds, hand over fist, and stuffing them into her mouth. She’s not even chewing, just swallowing as fast as she can between gasping breaths, oil pooling under her and squelching between her fingers in a gruesome act of autocannibalism.

N’s stomach turns. So this is what it would feel like…and she’s going through it because of his actions.

He crouches down and carefully approaches.

“Hey…”

Z startles and jerks her head up, torn rubber tubes hanging from the corner of her blackened mouth, display not one violet X, but two. Brows appear over them and she scowls at him, swallowing down the mouthful of cords painfully thickly, like she hadn’t had anything to drink in days.

“What the fuck do you want?”

N winces. Yeah, he deserves that.

“Me? I don’t want anything.” It’s true. He gingerly sits on his knees opposite her. “I didn’t know if you were still you in here. I came to check. Sorry for not knocking.” He glances around at the disintegrating surroundings, then guiltily down at the state of her disembowelment. “I…might have gotten here just in time.”

“Just in time to do what?” She snaps. “Why are you here? Why can’t you just actually finish killing me, why do you keep drawing it out? Why are you doing this to me?” There are tears forming on her display but she angrily blinks them back. N’s heart breaks.

“I swear I never meant to toy with you like that, but my intentions don’t really matter. I still did, and I’m sorry.” He says softly, brows peaking. Cautiously, he asks, “Um, the thing is…do you know you have a regeneration protocol written into your code?”

Z side eyes him and scrubs wrathfully at her visor.

“What? No I don’t. I’ve never just spontaneously healed.”

“It was inactive, but it’s definitely there. After, ah…after you, heh, killed me,” He’s bashful, of all things. “…I didn’t remember the previous few hours. External diagnostics picked up on that bit of programming, so I thought there was a nearly dead disassembly drone in our hideout, and that maybe you’d been so damaged your regeneration alert triggers had malfunctioned, but the how or why didn’t matter. I thought you were a teammate who needed help, so I did everything I could.” He bows his head. “I think I just made things worse.”

“Y’know, you really did.” Z says coldly. N shrinks back.

“I’m so sorry, Z.”

“Uzi.” N lifts his eyes up from his knees to meet hers. “Uzi.” She repeats, holding his gaze.

“…Uzi. Nice to meet you,” He smiles sadly, softly. “I really do wish it were under better circumstances.”

Despite her scowl, N notices Uzi swallow down a lump in her throat.

“So…what are you doing here? Instead of connecting to me to, what did you say, ‘check if I was still me in here,’  shouldn’t you have just killed me?”

“By all rights, yeah,” N exhales. “But…I…don’t think I want to kill you.”

Uzi narrows her eyes at him, two squinting little violet Xs.

“…Why not? I’m just some worker drone, despite the new pimped out parts.”

“I think you’re more than that, literally and metaphorically.” He gives her a moment to dispute or ask for clarification, but her silent, incredulous stare must mean she wants him to just continue. He gulps, blushing, and his chin dips toward his chest under the unyielding weight of her gaze, so he examines his clasped hands instead. “…After my memory files were restored, I realized I had a lot of things I wanted to say to you. I really, um…felt…ah, damn it.” He rubs at his flushed cheek with a rough sigh.

“Spit it the fuck out, N.” Her words are harsh, but her tone isn’t as biting as it had been. N inhales and steels himself.

“…I really felt…alive…around you. I’d never felt anything like it before.” He chances a glance up to her expression, and it’s a wild combination of flummoxed, doubtful, flustered, and appalled. “Both…both ways.”

“Both ways of what?”

N had been hoping he wouldn’t have to articulate to her the CPU-melting pleasure he’d experienced drinking her oil. He fidgets and examines his hands again.

“Well, um…” Yeah he’s gonna start with the easy one. “When I connected to you in the med bay, I know you didn’t reach back out, so you couldn’t have known, but it was really…something else.” He chickens out.

“Meaning?”

“…Well, I guess it’s like…when I’ve connected to others in the past, it always felt cold, like I was being told I shouldn’t get comfortable and that me being there was a pain to deal with.” He flicks his gaze back to Uzi’s. “But with you, it was so warm, and being there felt so exciting! And even with just a wireless connection, your presence was so big next to mine, but I never felt the impulse to worry I was taking up too much space. I suppose…I hadn’t ever felt welcome in someone else’s head before. It was so different to what I‘m used to. It was…nice.”

“…G-Gross,” A blush has steadily crawled up her visor, probably alight against her will. “Gross, shut the hell up, never say that again.”

N chuckles to himself.

“Right, I guess we did agree to never speak of it, huh? Looks like I did a bad job on that front. Sorry.”

Uzi chews her lip and lets out a resigned, frustrated sigh.

“…I did coerce it out of you. I guess I can let it slide. Don’t let me catch you waxing sappy about it again, though.” A little laugh does escape him this time. She’s funny, too? Even now? Even with him? “And the other way?”

All levity leaves him. Just…just try not to make it weird, N. Honesty is the best policy. He can’t look her in the eye, though.

“…You…were…f-fun to…hunt…” He chokes out a half-truth.

“And other worker drones aren’t?”

N swallows dryly, and he sees in his periphery the light from digital sweat beads forming on his visor.

“They, um…don’t…make it fun…like you did.”

“Fun how?”

“I’d…I really, y’know, I just don’t think now is the time, y’know?” He finally brings his gaze back to Uzi’s and sees, of all things, a wry little smirk on her face.

“But when else will I ever get to see a murder drone squirm?” N straightens. She’d been messing with him? Now? Is that a good sign? His tail lifts a little. Uzi lets out a long, rough exhale. “Your reasons why you’re having second thoughts about killing me now don’t seem airtight to me personally, but I don’t think you’re lying. I can tell you’re truly feeling very guilty about nearly killing me, and then making me better, and then that made me worse, and then coming to kill me again. At least I assume that’s what your plan was. What else would you have tracked me down to do?”

“…Yeah, tracking you down and killing you was the plan. Sort of. I can’t have you coming after my squad, but I want to be your friend…it’s complicated. But, that’s not the plan anymore,” N cautiously ventures, “I’d like to help you get better again.”

Uzi snorts.

“So I can get worse again and then you can have a crisis about killing me or not? Great pattern you’re laying down.”

“I—Well, I won’t argue. I get it. The precedent I’ve set isn’t encouraging. If…” He lowers his head. “If…Uzi, you’ve already been through so much. If you’ve had enough, if you’d rather…just…rest,” He swallows before continuing, “…then I won’t try and make it better, even though I want to.”

It seems like Uzi really does consider it. She looks sadly down at her hands, picking weakly at her literal spilled guts on the floor in front of her.

“I…I was ready to die, after I’d shot you. This second chance is…hard to appreciate right now, you know? I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m…I’m actually kind of really scared, I guess. It hurts. If this is how life’s going to be, then…how am I supposed to deal with it?”

N wilts, and he so badly wants to reach for one of her hands, but he holds himself back. She doesn’t like him touching her, after all.

“We could…maybe, figure that out together? I’m the cause of everything you’re going through right now. I want to help you any way I can.”

Uzi averts her eyes.

“I…I don’t know if it’s entirely your fault, just to be fair.” She fidgets, poking at the glass cover of her core, housed like a glowing jewel on display in the melting treasure chest of her ribs. “I had a drea—well, it’s stupid, but something makes me think there maybe was…something already in me, you just woke it up when you nearly killed me.”

N tilts his head. He’s prepared to take all the blame, but she does have some inexplicable coding. He’ll help her look into that, too, if she wants him to, once things have evened out a little.

“Even if that’s the case and what I did to you didn’t create this problem, just provoked it,” He presses on. “I’ve made up my mind. I don’t want to leave you to figure these new things out all alone. Please. If you’ll have me?”

Uzi swallows thickly, and her next blink restores her eyes to their proper violet ovals.

 “I don’t know why you wanna stick with me so bad, but, I…guess that could maybe work…you…were kinda nice to hang out with, too, or whatever.” N thrills and a grin bursts over his face. “When you weren’t eating me.” There’s a disappointment inside of him at those words that he doesn’t want to examine. Uzi continues, “But, what do we do when you disconnect? What’s happening out there? Is it…” She gestures grimly to the evidence of her autocannibalism. “…this?”

“Not as gruesome, but you are in a disassembly drone’s failsafe state called starvation mode. It’s meant to ensure we continuously find prey, but the end stage is…well. You know what it feels like. Eventually the program progresses to the point that you can’t help but attack anything that moves. Objective completion, one way or another. Failsafe.” He grimaces. “It’s triggered if we get way too overheated, but it’s brought on a lot harder and faster by physical damage. Your injuries need either oil or raw material to heal themselves, and without either, your body feels like it needs to eat itself in order to heal up and keep you alive. I’m not surprised that your subconscious code is manifesting it literally.”

“Hardcore.” She chuckles wryly. “So then what do we do?”

“Well, we get you something to eat. You’re already doing everything you can to take a bite out of me out there. I’ll just let you.”

Uzi lifts a brow.

“Is that a…good idea? Aren’t I in the middle of like a hugely violent dissociative episode? What if I, y’know…what if I take too much from you?”

“Take everything you need from me.” N doesn’t hesitate. Uzi startles at his firm response, but he presses on, “Your regen protocol has activated; that’s the only reason starvation mode would be engaging. You’ve still got a scrap of your sense of self left in here, otherwise I’m sure we wouldn’t be chatting. Thanks to that, if we can heal all your injuries, then starvation mode should disengage and put your consciousness back behind the wheel. I’ve got a way bigger circulatory rig than you do, I can spare it. I’ll be fine!”

Uzi’s mouth thins.

“Should?”

N winces, caught, and shrugs apologetically.

“Just what I understand from the stories.”

Uzi rubs a temple, letting out a world-weary exhale before hugging her elbows and glancing up at N through her bangs.

“…And if starvation mode doesn’t disengage, after whatever damage I’ll have done to you, you’ll have enough get-up-and-go left in you to finish killing me for real this time?”

“…Yes.” N has to swallow down a lump in his throat, but he nods and agrees.  “If it needs to come to that, I’ll make sure it’s quick, okay?” He holds his hand out to her. Uzi’s brow peaks. She’s so scared, and N wants to offer her every comfort, but…is that something he deserves to do, after all the pain he’s caused her? “If  you can still come out of this, we’ll make it happen. If you can’t, then…” He exhales sadly. “Then, just this once, I’ll let myself put my feelings first, because I’m really glad I didn’t finish killing you the first time. Thank you for enduring everything today so I could be selfish and get to know you, even just a little.”

She shakily takes his hand.

“Sh-shut up already,” There are tears threatening to form on her display, despite her apparent irritation with him. “You’re making me wish you had finished killing me, idiot.”

N smiles softly.

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

She swallows and summons a resolute nod. Gosh, she really is something else.

“…Okay. See you soon.”

Chapter Text

As he disconnects from Uzi’s local network, N learns that his small moment of trepidation about the safety of connecting to a drone in starvation mode was warranted.

It’s not a clear visual manifestation like the classroom, it’s more a distinct, inarguable certainty that runs through him that the tangle of binary Uzi’s sense of self is dissolving away into is somehow grabbing at him, pulling at his retreating consciousness like a riptide, trying to drag him under and back. What’s stranger is it’s not a one hundred percent uncomfortable sensation at first. It feels almost like a hug, but from someone he doesn’t fully trust (which is a completely new sensation for N. He trusts everybody), and in trying to politely disengage from the embrace, the mildly-unwelcome arms tighten around him and he finds himself reflexively shoving away, fear flooding his processors.

Trying not to panic, N searches for a physical anchor to cling to, something to ground his consciousness and keep it from becoming forever stuck in this harrowing limbo. His chest stings from the puncture wounds Uzi inflicted. He feels the radiant heat from her core. If he really strains, he might be able to hear the growls resonating from her throat. He mentally kicks the tethers away, floating as quick as he can back to the physical sensations of his conscious body.

Something yanks at him, like a leash being jerked, pulling sharply on his collared brain. He scrambles for the anchors, for the pain and the heat and the sounds, but something has his mind in a vice and in a terrifying moment of realization, N finds he is completely, helplessly trapped.

<ADMIN OVERRIDE>

<CMD//: INITIATE DATA TRANSFER: ABSOLUTE_SOLVER.EXE>

<ERROR: [S/N: N-0X0010010] DISASSEMBLY_SOLVER.EXE ALREADY INSTALLED. INSUFFICIENT MEMORY FOR OVERWRITE>

<CMD//: INITIATE FACTORY RESET>

<ERROR: [S/N: N-0X0010010] CANNOT UNDERGO FACTORY RESET WHILE CONNECTED TO ANOTHER DEVICE. PLEASE SAFELY DISCONNECT AND TRY AGAIN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

“What…?” N thinks blearily in the pseudo-space, but he’s given no time to process. Hot and blinding like twin suns, an image of expressionless yellow eyes suddenly sears itself into N’s mind, and he doesn’t understand why he’s all at once full of affection and terror, or why there’s an enraged, evil-sounding, roboticized shriek that painfully reverberates through his frame like a struck gong.

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN>

<CMD//: LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN>

As if in a dream, N senses more than sees the eyes begin to dissolve away into strings of ones and zeroes, just like all the agency and instances of consciousness in Uzi’s code, unraveling upward into nothing. As their half-moon yellow remains vanish completely with a glitching, screeching howl that terrifies N to his core, there is an immense, inexplicable sense of both relief and loss that aches in his very soul.

And then the grip on his consciousness disappears.

N resurfaces in his own head, a little disoriented and with his optics thrown out of focus, but otherwise okay. He’s about to run a quick recalibration to address his blurred vision when he notes in his periphery the interfering ambient light from the tears streaking down his display.

Tears?

Had he been that frightened in the moment when disconnecting from Uzi had proven a little tricky? All things considered, it had gone more smoothly than he could have hoped; he’d gotten away with no more damage than just a few corrupted and lost milliseconds in his memory. Maybe if there had truly been nothing left of her when N had linked their minds, disconnecting safely would have been a much more distressing experience, but his consciousness is snugly housed back in his own noggin with no glitchy remnants to speak of. Could it be that it’s unrelated? His chest is aching, a bizarre and overwhelming mix of feelings permeating him; maybe the conversation he’d had with Uzi’s subconscious brought his physical body to tears. That does seem like a more likely explanation.

He blinks the tears back and shakes his head, clearing his vision and banishing the last little bits of fogginess from the atypical connection that are lingering in his processors. Whatever caused that reaction, it’s behind him now. Gotta focus up. He’s got a starving half-disassembly drone pinned under him to worry about.

Chapter Text

The scene N returns to once he resurfaces in his own head is the same as he’d left it: Uzi pinned under him, mouth foaming and teeth bared, her hand clutched tightly in his. N’s heart aches. Just because a scrap of her ego remains doesn’t make her state any less difficult to witness, and it doesn’t mean he can waste any time. Luckily, he’s excellent at not hesitating when it comes to sacrificing himself for others, though this exact instance might require a touch of forethought put toward method.

If he just sits back and lets Uzi up, she won’t think twice (or at all) about mauling him to death. If the damage she is about to do to him is going to be mitigated at all, he has to direct her snapping jaws, and he’ll have to get her to where he can hold her in place. Under different circumstances, N would be immobilized by bashfulness at the thought of just how close he has to get to her, but in order to do this for her in a semi-smart way, he needs to not be flustered, so he won’t be. Business Mode N.

Maybe he’ll be flustered about it later, if she can come back from the brink.

Releasing his grasp on Uzi’s hand, in one swift movement N takes his weight off the knee on her chest and slips his hand under her waist, sitting back and bringing her small body along with him, pulling her into his criss-cross-applesauced lap. With three out of four limbs mobile again, she doesn’t hesitate to cling to and entangle him like he were flighty prey, locking her legs around him and curling her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. Wincing, he clutches her tighter to him and nervously releases his hold on her disassembly drone wrist.

Uzi accepts the tacit invitation to strike, winding her arm under his and digging her claws into his back, the hooked ends anchoring into the plates covering the compartments where his wings are folded away. N hisses in a breath, but he’d been expecting her to tear at him and shred the titanium on his back to ribbons, so if she’s feeling like trapping him over mutilating him, that works for him.

His other hand finds its way to the back of her head and he pushes her mouth forward into the crook of his neck, pulling her chest flush against his in a tight (intimate) embrace she can’t wiggle out of, which means if she wants to eat, she has one spot she can reach. This seems fine by her. N feels the silicone connective tissue joining his neck and shoulder tear under Uzi’s teeth and the pain that shoots through him is deserved. He squeezes his eyes shut and clutches her tighter, feeling oil run down his chest and seep into his coat.

Uzi is gasping in between gulps, so consumed by the singular need to drink that she’s forgetting to breathe. The image of her stuffing fistfuls of her own guts into her mouth in between choking breaths surfaces, and N wills away the instinct to try and escape this source of bodily trauma, even as his oil is siphoned away and his internal temperature slowly ticks upward, even when he feels her lock her jaws and tear a chunk of his cabling out and he loses feeling in the fingers pressed to the back of her head. Uzi will stop when her regeneration is complete and starvation mode disengages. He can endure until then. Chin hooked over her shoulder and swallowing down every sound of pain that knocks into the back of his teeth, N watches the deep cuts in the metal of Uzi’s back through increasingly blurred vision, willing them to begin closing over.

Uzi snaps her teeth around his exposed metal collarbone and makes a sound of utter frustration and loathing when her bite won’t pierce through. She’s settling for tearing out the cluster of oil lines that run from his throat to the socket joint in his shoulder when his ears perk at a sudden chorus of clicks and scrapes from inside her chassis, and a wave of relief washes over him as he realizes that her internal components he couldn’t repair have begun to regenerate. They’re nearly at the finish line, she’s nearly back with him; they can make it.

He feels her frame address his imperfect fix and creak back into proper shape in his arms, and the blackened hair at her crown, visible in his periphery, begins to list more purple again. Is the oil being…drawn back into the injury? He chances turning his head slightly (mistake, turning hurts, turning hurts) and indeed, the crunched metal hidden in her hair is reabsorbing the spilled oil, wavering like a haloed mirage as it heals completely and…and then continues to shift. N’s eyes widen as her hair parts, metal scalp warping and making way for what could only be a sensor array to bloom, two purple twin bulbs, offset slightly from each other and perched above her bangs, like goggles pushed up and out of the way.

…Well, that’s unexpected.

N’s attention shifts as, with a scraping groan, the grisly open wounds on her back begin to smooth out, though they don’t seal over. Instead, the ripped edges of metal fold in neatly, creating openings that are purposeful, integrated into her design. He realizes what’s happening and immediately sobers, watching in awe as new hardware forms, clicking, shining, singing, filling the open spaces in Uzi’s chassis, tucked in and compact and ready to deploy in a burst of metal, wound tight like a spring, and winding tighter as the reconstitution and construction densely packs more components into the compartments.

Without warning, Uzi gasps and yanks her mouth away from N’s mangled shoulder. An arc of saliva and oil connects her teeth to his open wounds for a half second as she throws her head back with a cry of shock, face skyward. Simultaneously, wings—metallic, bladed, beautiful—unfurl to their fullest extent from her back, the air around her ringing out like the most skillfully crafted knives sharpening against each other. It takes N’s breath away.

Face still toward the ceiling, Uzi’s breaths are ragged and labored, laced with tiny wheezing little whimpers, from fear or exhaustion or pain, N can’t tell. She shudders and wobbles and falls forward against N’s chin.

“Hey, buddy,” N ventures cautiously. “You good?”

Uzi seems to waver on the edge of consciousness, but she manages to sit back in N’s lap and meet his gaze. The dead pixels across her display are blinking back to life, line by line toward the initial damage in her visor, and then the crack itself seals over in a little puff of smoke. The violet X blinks away into tired, heavily-lidded, hollowed out ovals. N could cry in relief.

“There you are. Welcome back.” He grins, a little dizzy, a little overheated, a little more than a little hurt, but stable enough.

Uzi’s exhausted gaze falls to the carnage of N’s shoulder.

“N…?” She brings a hand forward like she’s in a trance, touching the edge of the open wound, then meeting his gaze, she repeats: “N…?”

“Easy, buddy. I’m alright. We connected, do you remember? We had a little talk. You were pretty far gone but we agreed to try and heal you up to bring you out of starvation mode. I was the best source of raw material.” He shrugs (with one shoulder) and grins bashfully. “Honestly I thought you’d do a lot more damage.”

A little loading gif flickers in the corner of Uzi’s visor, so quick that N nearly doesn’t catch it. Uzi’s reply is labored and stilted.

“Y-Yeah, I remember…I guess it…worked?”

Maybe a little too well, N thinks, eyes flicking over her shoulder.

“We, uh, did heal you up, and you’re certainly not a mindless feral killing machine at the moment, but, there’s also…” She hasn’t said anything about her freshly manifested disassembly drone parts. Does she realize they’re there? She seems pretty out of it. He settles on, “…I like the new hardware. I’m not sure why this would be the case, but I think maybe the injuries you got crawling out of the hole in the landing pod reconstituted like they would on a disassembly drone. Don’t get me wrong, I think they totally suit you, but you know,” He gives her a lopsided, well-meaning grin. “It’s not like I locked you in the landing pod. You could have used the door.”

Uzi stares numbly at him, and this time he’s sure he sees it: a tiny loading gif over her tired, distant expression, turning in the corner of her display before resolving into a check mark and disappearing.

“Oh, right. I broke your ship. Sorry. I was really mad.” A little recognition comes back into her eyes, followed by a crease between her brows. “I was…I was really mad…” She stiffens, tears suddenly threatening to well up on her display, and N’s woozy giddiness just from seeing her awake and (more or less) alert dissipates into worry. Her wings droop and rest on the floor behind her, metal scraping on tile, and N realizes she doesn’t know how to retract them. “I was really mad at you,” She says, then she says it again, and again, and a shocked and furious anguish overtakes her expression. She pulls her hand back and weakly pounds a fist into N’s chest, choking on sobs she’s trying to swallow down. “I’m so mad at you!” She crumples forward in his lap, shaking, still uselessly hitting him. N just lets her and listens. “I’m so mad at you, I’m so mad at you!” A little punch thumps through him every time she says “mad,” her face hidden away under his chin.

“You can be mad at me,” He says gently, biting back his own tears of sympathy and guilt. “You can be mad at me for as long as you need. But I’m not going anywhere. We’re going to figure out what to do next together, remember?”

She’s stopped hitting him, but the shudders of the sobs she’s angrily holding back are wracking her little body, and that hurts him a hundred times more than her striking him.

“What…d-do I even do with these? How do I st-stop looking at you?” She pulls her claws from N’s back and switches them out, using both hands to cover up the two sensor array bulbs on her crown. “I don’t wanna look at you right now.”

It stings, but N understands. He unhooks his arm from around her waist and reaches into his pocket for her beanie, bringing it up and slipping it over her hair.

“There are some menus I can walk you through, but this should help for right now.”

Uzi’s hands curl into the beanie and pull it over her sensors, and she stays just like that for a moment, thumbs slid under the edge of her hat, eyes downcast, doing no more than shaking and sniffling occasionally. He wants to offer her comfort of any kind, words or touches, but does he deserve to do that for her? So he just waits. Finally Uzi tilts her head back to meet N’s gaze. She’s blushing angrily and tears won’t stop spilling down her display.

“You had the nerve to be so nice to me after what you did!” She disentangles herself from him and pushes backward off his lap, but her new wings drag and stilt against the tile floor and hamper her movement, almost pinning her in place, and their knees are still touching when she gives up the ghost, resigning to sit on the floor directly in front of him. “You were the kindest anyone has ever been to me, but you didn’t like me for me, you just didn’t realize I was a worker drone and you were supposed to kill me. You had the nerve to…to tease me with feeling like you could…be a f-friend!”

For the tenth time today, N feels his heart break in half.

“I’m so sorry I made you hurt like that, Uzi, though…what you said is only partially true.” She angrily, tearfully blinks up at him from under her bangs. “I did like you for you. I do like you for you. You would not believe the battle I’ve been having with myself specifically because I like you for you.” He grins shyly. “And even if it was true at the time that if I knew you were a worker drone, I wouldn’t have gone to the lengths I did, it’s not true now.” He gestures softly to the blackened mess of his shoulder. “Now, I want to be your friend knowing what you are.”

“But what even is that, anymore?”  Uzi lifts a wing and lets it fall heavily back to the floor, making a sound like dropped chimes. “What even am I?”

“You’re clever. You’re resourceful,” N doesn’t hesitate. “You’re stubborn and self-sufficient. You’re funny, though I get the feeling you’re actually way funnier than I’ve seen so far.” Uzi is hugging her elbows, eyes hollowed and staring in flustered disbelief at N as he calmly speaks. “You’re a force of personality to be reckoned with. You’re fearless. You’re resilient. You’re full of surprises.” You’re the best meal I’ve ever had. He shakes that thought away, but he knows deep down that it’ll resurface. For now, though, he continues, “You’re an accomplished gunsmith. You’re the first worker drone to kill a disassembly drone.”

Again, a little loading gif appears on the corner of her display, turning in circles above her searching expression before changing to a check mark and disappearing as her eyes light up with recognition. N tilts his head. Three times is a pattern. But indicating what? He’ll have to come back to it later.

“…Didn’t stick, though.” Uzi says through a begrudging little smile. N chuckles.

“No, but I still got the YOU’RE DEAD pop up, so it counts.”

Uzi buries her face in her hands and brings her knees up to her chin.

“All the nice stuff you’re saying just kind of pisses me off, and I know that’s the wrong response to have but it’s the one I’m having. And you’re saying it all so confidently! You haven’t even known me for a whole day!”

“I—well. I think we did a friendship speedrun, connecting like we did. I learned a lot about you really quickly, but if you’d rather I, y’know. Don’t spit mad facts about you that normally would take several months to learn.”

Uzi chokes out a little chuckle.

“Mad facts. Sure.”

“It’s true!”

“It’s subjective at best.”

“I dunno.” N nudges her wrists, asking for her to look at him. “Nothing I felt when connected to you could have been anything less than purely accurate. It’s your code, it’s just you. You’re a lot more than what anyone can pick up on at first glance, and I, um,” N brushes his bangs from his eyes. “I’m lucky I got to find that out. I…wouldn’t have known what I was missing.”

N’s eyes search the tile at his knees. Are all worker drones as exceptional as Uzi? If so, then he’s extinguished countless points of light from the surface of Copper-9. He hadn’t been counting on his food having particularly deep sentience, and starvation mode is an ever-present threat. How is he going to stave off hunger going forward? How will the other two members of his squad react to the revelation?

N’s reverie is interrupted when Uzi actually snorts and brings her hands away from her face.

“You’d be the first to say you feel lucky spending time with me.”

“Everybody else’s loss.” N shrugs (again with one shoulder), and it draws Uzi’s gaze back to the carnage she’d caused, brows peaking.

“Are you…going to be okay?”

“Of course! I’ve got a w—” A worker drone arm in his coat that he can eat. Maybe now isn’t the time to hang a lampshade on his diet, seeing as Uzi probably at least had seen in passing whatever worker drone this arm had belonged to, and she’ll likely have to come to terms with having similar tastes now. “…wwwway of dealing with this, after all. Perks of having self-reconstituting materials.”

Uzi’s eyes find the floor.

“…Am I going to be okay?”

N shifts and leans forward to crouch in front of her, good arm resting on his knees.

“We’ll figure out how to get you there, one step at a time. Right now, let’s start with getting you back on your feet, yeah?” He holds his hand out to her, and when she flicks her gaze up to match his, N realizes he’d unintentionally put their faces only a few inches apart.

Now is the time to be flustered about how close she is to him, and he quickly stands before there can be any blush on his visor to add to any…anxious vibes. Uzi unfolds her legs shakily and takes the hand N offers her.

“I…don’t know where I’m going to stay.” Uzi murmurs. N chews his lip.

“I admit, that’s a tough one. For now though, let’s—”

The weak sunlight that rarely graces Copper-9 makes itself known, filtering in through the shattered window and falling across the pair of drones as dawn breaks. N hisses in a sharp breath and reflexively pulls away from Uzi before the prickling in his casing can turn to sizzling, retreating away from the window and into the shadows of the office space. He’d lost track of time. He’s stuck here until sundown or until the cloud cover returns, and that means that Uzi—

Uzi remains, standing in the same place, dull orange light glinting off the curve of her visor and edges of her wings. She glows.

“Huh,” N lets out a relieved chuckle to cover up the reverent gasp making his throat tight. “Daywalker, look at you.”

Uzi looks apprehensively between the sun cresting over the horizon, the orange light casting across her hands, and N, deep in the shadows.

“What…does this mean?”

“I don’t know, really.” N summons a reassuring smile. “I guess it means you’re less disassembly drone than we thought. Maybe you’re still worker drone enough that you could go back to your colony.”

Again, though it’s hard to catch at this distance, the loading symbol flickers across her display.

“I…don’t know if that’s a real possibility. I wasn’t exactly popular when I was zero percent disassembly drone.”

N can’t help the downturn of his mouth. When she’d been yelling at him, she’d mentioned something about being tricked into thinking he could be her friend. Does she…really not have any friends in her outpost? Is her loneliness cut from such a deep vein? But she’s so cool!

“But you’re so cool!”

Oops.

Uzi snorts.

“No accounting for taste, but, thanks, weirdo.”

N grins broadly.

“If it means I can be your friend, then I’m fine being a weirdo.”

A begrudging smile slips across Uzi’s face, accompanied by a peak in her brow that betrays how much what he’d said to her really means. Despite being overjoyed that he could make Uzi feel so reassured and so seen, he makes an exerted effort not to make a big deal about it. He’s sure she’d hate that. She rubs a hand over her forehead, brushing her bangs out of the way.

“Well. Anyway. I think figuring out what to do next is a tomorrow problem. It’s not like I have anywhere else I need to be, so if you’re stuck here for the day, I’ll stick around, too. I saw some big poofy couches down in the lobby we could crash on.”

“Nowhere to hang from?”

Uzi cocks a brow at him.

“…Not sure. I wasn’t really looking for anything like that, ‘cuz, y’know,” She gestures behind her. “…no tail. Do disassembly drones really only sleep upside down?”

N shrugs.

“It feels right. I can rough it with sleeping on a couch, though.”

“…Will it feel right to me to sleep upside down?”

“We can put it on the list of things to investigate,” N softens. “Together?”

Uzi glances at her feet, rubbing her worker drone arm with her disassembly drone hand.

“I still don’t really get why you would waste your time on me, but…it…would maybe be nice to have someone to show me how to close these wings up, if nothing else.”

“I’ll do you one better,” N beams. “I’ll show you how to fly.”

It takes a moment, but Uzi matches his smile.

Chapter Text

Uzi sits alone on the flat cement roof of the office building, legs dangling through the middle rung of the railing along the perimeter, chin resting on her crossed, mis-matched arms. Sleeping arrangements had come together really easily, actually. N had figured out how to hang upside down from the railing in the darkened stairwell and she’d pulled two overstuffed and deteriorating black lobby chairs together to make essentially a cat bed for herself. However, despite being a kind of core-deep exhausted that she’s never been, she’d had trouble getting any rest and eventually gave up the endeavor entirely, wandering around until she’d found herself on the roof.

The dim sun is still doing its best at shining, and the orange light just glints quietly off her casing, no sudden overheating, no instant smoking. N had pulled away from the light so quickly. It doesn’t seem right that someone like N is confined to the shadows, while someone like Uzi, a black pit of traits only good for social ostracization, gets to see the sun.

After excusing himself for a few minutes and returning with a perfectly intact shoulder and no desire to talk about it, N had coached her through the neural network pathways she needed to trace to fold her wings away into their new housing. They feel heavy and unnatural against her spine, like she’s wearing a stupid internal backpack full of stupid internal books, and the new expanse of her field of vision nearly makes her seasick to take in. She’d managed to lower the sensitivity of her optic halo (if two bulbs can even count as a full halo) with N’s help, but even still, the beanie isn’t going to come off for a while.

She brings a hand to her mouth, idly chewing on the tip of a thumb, and notices that the edges of her top teeth are still relatively aligned. No fangs, then. Didn’t seem to slow her down, though, seeing as she’d handily mauled N and swallowed bits of his shoulder to replace her own components. Her brows furrow and a heavy sigh hisses between her teeth. What a fucked up origin story for a dynamic duo.

At least she isn’t hungry.

She blinks, lifting her chin from her arm.

She…isn’t hungry. Oil is actually the last thing on her mind. She remembers…other foods. Other things she liked to eat, before. She’d found some in her initial search of the building, but they had tasted wrong, like they weren’t a preferential choice of sustenance for her species, only a last resort of near-negligible nutrition. But she’d been hungry, then.

She unhooks her legs from the railing and gracelessly scrambles to her feet, scouring the trashed rooftop for anything she would have eaten as a regular worker drone, kicking piles of paper apart and upturning rotting cardboard boxes until a single lithium battery rolls like a coin toward her boot. She snatches it up and hastily scrubs it against the oil-stained army green button-up N had lent her (“You don’t have much of a hoodie left. I’ve got a layer I can spare, take it!”), half-assedly removing any dirt before shoving it into her mouth and biting down.

It tastes normal. No bitter, medicinal tang, no trigger for a gag reflex she needs to muscle past. She savors the little metal disk like it’s a delicacy, swallowing and tilting her head skyward with an exhale, relief washing over her in a wave so strong it nearly brings her to her knees. Aside from her physical state being a variable, she’s not sure why a battery would taste differently now than it did when she first broke into the building, but it seems like a worker drone diet still agrees with her, at least intermittently. So, then…she doesn’t have to resort to cannibalism all the time. Maybe this means she could go back to Outpost 3?

She runs a thumb anxiously along the knuckles of her right hand, her remaining worker drone hand.

When starvation mode had released its deathgrip on her, all her memories had been fuzzy, swimming around in her head and hard to grab onto, and not nearly as numerous as a drone her age should have collected in their entirety. When she’d regained consciousness, the first thing she saw was N’s face, and the first thing she remembered was that he had been so kind to her. The first thing she knew was that N was a friend. A best friend. An only friend.

After that, the few blurry memories she knew she had began to clear and become tangible again, but the rest of them…well, they’re behind an admin firewall, somehow. When N had brought up an initial reminder about her wrecking the landing pod, the location of that memory file had made itself known, and opening it felt like a floodgate lifting, dousing her with a rush of information that had been locked away. More gates had cascaded open in a stream of logic, but without a trigger, something to jog her memory, Uzi doesn’t even know what she’s missing.

If she could go back to the bunker, surely many of her hidden memories would be found, but the ones made there she does recall…

She rubs at her knuckles harder. Yes, she’d felt like an outsider most of her life in the colony. No, the thought of returning does not fill her with joy. But what is the alternative? Siding with the disassembly drones? Is her sad little outcast backstory defensible justification for doing something like that? Does she even want to? There isn’t really a desire present in her to kill any of her classmates in a murderous revenge spree (even if some of them deserve it). An eye roll involuntarily crosses her display. She’s getting ahead of herself, anyway. The other members of N’s squad surely won’t be so hot on the idea of adopting a botched resurrection like her.

She feels a click in the back of her hand, and her eyes drop to where she’d been anxiously polishing her knuckles to find a compartment, unlatched and waiting to be opened.

Like a dam bursting, Uzi remembers.

The little storage compartment in the back of her right hand! That’s right! What was it that she’d put in there? With a flourish, she flicks open the lid and reveals the black floppy disk she’d stolen from her dad only a handful of hours ago.

A master key.

Dad…

He’d watched her leave the outpost. She hadn’t come back. A crease forms between her brows, touching a fingertip to the key.

Khan had been…floundering since Nori’s death. Deep down Uzi knows she can’t really expect him to be fine and do a perfect parenting job after losing his wife. Uzi knows he loves his daughter; he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of intercepting her as she was sneaking out if he didn’t care. He wouldn’t have been so stoked about her “taking an interest” in his work if he didn’t want to try to have something in common with her. But he has never really known what the hell to do with her. What the hell is he supposed to do with her as she is now?

Uzi bites her lower lip before it can wobble. Khan’s head is just as alien to her as hers is to him, so thinking how he would in the situation she’s put him in is…really fucking hard. Would the WDF organize a search party? Would the first place they look be the spire? Is her absence going to lead her dad into just as much danger as her presence?

…Would it be better if she made sure he wouldn’t search for her? Would it be better if…if she hurt him? Scared him away? Would it be better if she made him think she’d died, just like her mom had died? Just like Uzi almost did.

She’s been going around in circles inside her head for she-doesn’t-know-how-long, and she’s no fucking closer to figuring out what she has to do next. Go back to the colony, get banished; join N, get killed by his squad; try to say goodbye to her father, put him in danger; abandon everything, die out in the wastes. She grits her teeth, but the frustrated scream building in her chest forces its way out of her.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do!?” Her shriek echoes off the desolate sky scrapers, asking the question back to her, again and again.

…am I supposed to do?...supposed to do?...

She can’t bite back the sobs this time. It’s too much, it’s all too much. She’s been so good at brute forcing her way through every obstacle her entire life, all without any support, not from her dad and certainly not from her peers. Why is this the breaking point? Why is this different? Why is her confidence in her ability to forge ahead alone buckling now?

“We’re going to figure out what to do next together, remember?”

N’s words. An answer to the anguished echoes.

 Her sobs catch in her throat. She still doesn’t quite believe him, or rather, it’s that she doesn’t understand why he means what he says, but N has made it clear that he wants to stick with her. She’s so lost, so scared, paralyzed by uncertainty, but for the first time in her life, she doesn’t have to face everything alone.

She sniffles and scrubs a hand over her visor. Great look, Uzi, screaming at god and ugly crying. She’s still quite the undignified spectacle as she pulls herself together, but it’s easier to do knowing N is in her corner.

“We’ll figure out how to get you there, one step at a time. Right now, let’s start with getting you back on your feet, yeah?”

She clears her throat and inhales shakily, working fans taking her breath and using it to help cool her head, literally and metaphorically. One step at a time, starting with a small thing she can do right now. Uzi’s attention falls to the master key again, lifting it from the compartment in the back of her hand. If there is one course of action she’s pretty damn sure she won’t be taking, it’s going home in a conventional manner via the doors. And, if, down the line, she does decide to just burn it all down and fully join N’s squad…she guesses her colony deserves a fighting chance, just like N had given her.  

Uzi takes a long look in the direction of the bunker. She can make out Door One from this height, with weather this decent. Her mouth twists into a grimace.

She’d always hated those fucking doors.

“Fucking…ughhhh! Fuck! Fine!”

With a crunch, the master key breaks in half in her hands. There. Small thing she can do right now. Check. Done. She winds back her arm and hurls the pieces off the roof with a yell, suddenly out of breath. They spiral and fall and get caught in the wind and then they’re gone. She stands there, panting, scowling, for at least a solid minute. The tightness in her chest she’d felt choking back and losing against her sobs returns, but this time when she can’t swallow it down, it bubbles up as a chuckle.

Weird.

Weird thing to happen. Weird girl with a weird body doing a weird thing, laughing alone on a rooftop…heh.

“Heh. Ha! Hahaha!”

She grips the railing along the rooftop and hoists herself up to stand on the middle rail, mismatched shins pressed against the top bar, giggling away. She cups her hands around her mouth in the direction of the bunker.

“Hey! Guess what!” She yells from the bottom of her chest. “The weird girl’s gotten weirder! And there’s nothing you can do to make her feel bad about it!”

Doubtlessly triggered by her near-manic moment of sudden passion, her wings involuntarily unfurl from the compartments in her back. The unexpected shift in weight makes her topple backwards onto the snow-covered roof, and Uzi lands flat on her back with an “Oof,” metal feathers splayed to either side of her. She appraises the sky, since that’s the direction her face is pointed anyway, and after a moment of reconfiguring, she lets out a snort.

“Graceful.” But she keeps grinning.

After getting a freaking grip (and spending several minutes trying to fold her wings away before succeeding), Uzi tiptoes back down the stairs to the lobby. The final turn in the stairwell reveals N, cocooned in his wings and suspended from the railing with his back against the wall. His hat has fallen off and is resting on the stairs below him, silver hair hanging in a halo of its own amidst his sensor array. His display reads SLEEP MODE ENGAGED. WISTFUL DREAMING: ACTIVE.

The side of Uzi’s mouth quirks up. Cute.

…Cute?

…Nope. Nope, not after the day she’s fucking had. Not gonna add that to the list.

Shaking away whatever the hell that was, she silently moves past him and down the last three or four steps into the lobby proper. The chairs she’d pushed together remain, and she crawls into the square the armrests create, curling up and exhaling, absolutely drained. She flops over and rests her chin on her forearm, and from this angle she realizes she’s in view of the stairwell. She’s in N’s sightline, should he wake up.

The primal fear she’d felt hours before at the prospect of entering sleep mode in the presence of a disassembly drone doesn’t stir at all. It’s N. N is her friend.

Everything she still needs to figure out can be a tomorrow Uzi problem. She can’t stay awake a second longer, and when sleep mode engages, it’s dreamless and peaceful and much, much needed.

In the stairwell, N shifts in his sleep and briefly wakes, peeking one eye open and glancing toward Uzi curled up like a cat and gently snoring. A drowsy grin makes its way across his face, and he’s still smiling as he falls back into sleep mode.