Chapter Text
Hail rained down hard on the ruins while the morning was still dark. N and Uzi had found shelter in an abandoned building while waiting it out. Uzi had been hit hard in the shoulder by a particularly large hailstone, but refused to tell her friend about the wound out of embarrassment. It stung harshly.
N had left Uzi presumably to sleep on the lowest floor while he looked for collectibles on the higher floors. He found all sorts of books, jewelry, clothes, and toys to pile in a corner and take home once the storm subsided. Everything the humans made was so fascinating. How could such destructive beings have this side to them?
N picked up what he thought was another toy, but closer inspection revealed it to be an untrained neural network with its face smashed in. A baby. A feeling struck N that he couldn't put his finger on. Out of nowhere, the voice box activated; it was a split-second clip of a baby's voice crying that looped over and over. N jumped and dropped the child, still unwilling to confront the horrific emotions he was experiencing.
Unwilling to destroy the baby's voice box for some strange reason, he fled two floors down. After catching his breath, he heard something. That was strange...who could be playing piano down there?
The music was melancholic and slow; N had only ever heard upbeat pop music during his time on Earth, so this style of music was strange. He slowly came down the stairs to find Uzi sitting there, hitting notes on a decrepit piano he hadn't even noticed was there.
He nearly short-circuited when he heard her sing.
"Sleep...stay asleep..."
How did she know this song? No one talked about it. No one wanted to talk about it or reveal anything about its history to younger generations. Why was the young worker playing it? Did she even know of its past?
"Sleep...stay asleep."
N felt deeply hurt by all that had happened. How could he have not rebelled earlier? He knew deep down from the beginning that these drones were completely innocent. His life flashed before his eyes. V being the first thing he saw after being forged, their friendship and all those it annoyed, the kill training, V defending him after being mocked for just barely getting the lowest kill count, their journey here...and her suddenly forgetting about him.
"My souls yearns for...one last look at you..."
Why had V done that to him? They were close. Pranksters, wisecracks, borderline rebels. They were all each other had.
"Before you leave me here to be...hidden within idyllic peace..."
N couldn't help himself. He started slowly moving his body, swaying to the rhythm of the song. He didn't see himself as a dancer worth salt, but he felt a harsh need to deal with his sudden surge of emotion this way.
"It's the perfect memory..."
N spotted a worker's corpse.
"And I'll keep it close to me."
Blushing a bit, he picked the body up and began waltzing with it as he had seen the humans do when they became very close.
"Bound with wire...cut me deep within the seams, flowing colors of the queen."
N nearly tripped several times and almost dropped the body once. It was amazing how distracted Uzi was.
"Oh, I live like I'm the only one..."
Lights reflected on the drone's dark screen. N tried to pretend he was gazing into his former friend's eyes.
"The fragile one who fights to survive..."
He remembered a time when the two were in their designated apartment rooms after training. The roommates had changed radio stations repeatedly, bopping their heads to some songs and laughing at others.
"Crown the liar...buried deep within the cross, tainted heart forever lost."
They suddenly happened upon a much stranger song. It was slow and didn't have any singing.
"Sweet….treasure…"
The two recalled seeing humans dancing this way, though there wasn't any music to go with it. They decided that this was the type of song that would accompany a slow dance between two. They evoked a similar feeling.
"Let go of all you know, sweet treasure…"
The two stood up and gazed into each other's eyes, silently daring to dance.
"You are the one, you are my only true...pleasure…"
Suddenly, N was back. He didn't see the slaughtered worker. V was back in his arms, intertwining tails with him, silently forgiving his awkwardness with her own.
"And now...watch me burn it all down, parasite town. Far down below, it's a fight for survival."
N and V touched heads. The cold sensation of old oil hitting his head brought him back to the present.
"So scared as I am of you…"
N wept bitterly, letting the corpse hit the ground.
"I'll burn it all down, parasite town...I call this survival."
Uzi sat there for several pained moments, trying to ignore the stabbing feeling in her shoulder, before standing up and turning around. She jumped violently at the sight of N.
"What--?!"
N shook his head. "That...was the most beautiful thing...I have ever heard. Really…"
"Are you…" Uzi looked closer. "...crying??"
"Sorta. As much as a robot can, anyway. Heh." N tried slowing his breathing down. Uzi took a step forward, wondering if she should help calm him down. He looked up abruptly, almost making her jump again.
"How exactly do you know that song?"
"Erm." The drone tilted her head with slight impatience. "It was a lullaby. Mom would sing it to me all the time."
N recoiled. "That's a pretty infamous song back on Earth. I wonder how your mom even learned it."
"Files, maybe?" Uzi kicked a pebble. "Why would it be controversial?"
"Oh." N seethed and looked away. "Are you sure you wanna know?"
Uzi cackled. The haunting sound echoed through the high ceiling.
"Bite me, grandma. I've seen my friends-- no, my KIND-- destroyed in some of the most violent ways imaginable! Half the time by you, no matter how useless you think you are!! Spill it, asshole!"
"Okay, okay! Jeez…"
N sighed. No matter what she told herself, Uzi simply wasn't ready to hear this.
"Factory K98. A pretty famous name back home. It produced a pretty big batch of faulty worker drones. They seemed normal, until they were taken to the testing room."
He paused and looked down. Uzi elbowed him.
"It's a giant room where new batches are taken to see if they work properly. The first test is a sort of Simon Says thing, without the Simon. It's basically just them checking to see if they can follow orders. But this group was left unchecked for longer than usual between creation and testing. And one of the drones found an MP3 player and decided to listen to it. They were programmed to be curious, after all."
"How do you know all this?"
"Preserved footage from security cameras." N rested his face in his hands. He really, really didn't want to share this story.
"Just before testing time finally came, the curious drone whispered to his peers to sing the song he learned in unison as a prank. So when they were given their first order, which is always to salute, they sang. The first few verses to that song you just played."
Uzi tensed.
"Now, testing rooms have a special feature. Every surface can heat up enough to melt down defective drones so the metal can be recycled. It the defect is minor, they can usually just do some reprogramming. The hot walls are a last-resort thing. And this flaw seemed too big to fix in the small minds of humans."
Uzi began to tremble the slightest bit. N resisted the urge to hold her close.
"The room didn't heat up fast enough. The drones were in there, panicking, slowly melting together as they tried to escape. And once the monstrosity was big enough, it did. It burst through the doors and blindly ripped apart anything it saw. Humans, drones, armed or not. Nothing could get through it. So they just...closed down the factory. It became something of an urban legend, but people tried not to forget what really happened. I certainly didn't. One viewing of that nightmare tape was enough for me, haha…"
Uzi was trying to cry as quietly as possible, but it was plainly obvious that she was deeply upset. N hesitated before wrapping an arm around her shoulder, causing her to cry out and jam a hand to it. N forcibly pulled her collar aside to examine the injury, ignoring her frustrated growl.
"You played piano with this? I'd say that's impressive, but I don't think I should be encouraging just sitting there with something as nasty as that. You know what, I'm gonna go ahead and say it's impressive anyway. You're really tough for a worker."
Uzi's blush rose to cover her entire face when N spat on the wound. She tightly pulled her beanie over her eyes while N tried not to laugh.
His thought processes stopped when Uzi collapsed into his lap, visor flickering off. After scanning her and finding that she had merely gone to sleep, he stroked her hair and gazed out the huge windows in sorrow. He hadn't even apologized yet.
Before they had gone out foraging for spare parts, N had found Uzi in a blind rage. She was shouting unintelligibly while ripping through the corpse pile. When she had sensed N's presence, she whirled around with enough force to stir the falling snow around her, face alight in pure hatred.
"Which one, N??"
N couldn't find the words to respond to that.
"Which one is my mom?!!"