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“You alright?” Jonny asked, knocking his shoulder into Nastya’s as they walked through the city.
“Yeah. ‘Course.”
Jonny sighed, reaching his hand over to intertwine pinkies with the girl who finally let him call her his sister.
“You don’t seem very alright. You look panicked.”
“I’m fine, Jonny. Drop it.”
Jonny made a face that stated “ alright, alright ”, and let the comfortable silence wash over, even while walking through the rougher parts of the outskirts of Cyberia.
Nastya wished she could say, for all of her formative years spent in the city, that she knew the ins and outs of every place within twenty miles of the palace. But she’d grown up so sheltered, it was like she was in an entirely different place. It didn’t even really register to her that she should be nervous here. It was just like any ordinary city.
Until the gunshots happened. There were four right in a row, and then two more, and then Nastya blindly sprinted into a dark alley and Jonny could do nothing but follow.
It seemed as though everything they had in those few peaceful moments was in upheaval as Nastya all but collapsed, shredding the knees of her trousers on the rough gravel. Her breathing was labored, and she most definitely was not present as Jonny threw himself to the ground beside her.
Needless to say, a lot was going on. Nastya, in her panic, had managed to bite her tongue hard enough to puncture it. Jonny did not realize this until she was coughing up mercury, retching trying to get the raw toxin out of her mouth and throat as fast as she could. Jonny mumbled some words of false reassurance, but it didn’t matter whether they were true or not; Nastya couldn’t hear anything except for the weak pounding of a heart trying to pump heavy liquid metal to her brain. Just thinking about it made her dizzy, and the blood loss, and the adrenaline…
In the end, she managed to stay conscious, although she continually spat up more and more of the silvery liquid as her tongue continued to bleed. She sobbed from both the panic and the pain, as she slowly became more and more lucid.
Still, Nastya was inconsolable; when Jonny reached out to touch her, she backed away, losing any of the ebbing calmness she possessed seconds beforehand. Her shaky, breathless sobs echoed off the surrounding buildings and hurt her ears, yet she couldn’t will herself to stop.
Jonny could hear, through the cacophony of wails that showed no sign of slowing or quieting, footsteps crunching the stray pieces of gravel and shards of glass on the pavement adjacent to the alleyway. He held his breath, and debated briefly the means versus the ends of trying to get Nastya as quiet as possible.
As it turned out, Jonny was not the only one thinking of means and ends.
“Oh, Brian, thank God,” Jonny cried out in relief as the metal man came into view.
“What’s going on? We need to get out of here.”
Jonny glanced over at Nastya, who was doubled over with her hands clamped over her ears and would surely be screaming if she had the lung capacity for it. Instead, she mustered up empty, hollow wheezing sounds that were almost more abrasive to have to listen to than the alternative.
“We heard gunshots,” Jonny whispered. “Sketchy-ass part of town after sunset, we should’ve known better.”
“I can carry her,” Brian offered, stepping closer towards her.
Nastya was so occupied with trying to block out as much sensory input as possible that she didn’t even register Brian’s presence until she felt cold metal hands underneath her arms and supporting her waist.
Once Brian managed to get Nastya into his arms, she immediately began to thrash around, the panic surging back at the sensation of being touched and lifted, all by these cold metal hands, and being spoken to in a voice she still couldn’t hear. Disoriented as she was, Nastya bit down hard into the metal plating on Brian’s collarbone. He didn’t react. He just let it happen.
“I know, I know. But we need to get you out of here. We’re gonna go back to Aurora, alright?”
At the mention of Aurora, Nastya seemed to lose some of her adrenaline rush, even going as far as removing her teeth from the divots she’d made into solid brass. She wasn’t coherent enough to speak yet, but she knew she wanted to apologize to Brian.
He could apparently read the emotion on her face well enough, and simply said, “It’s alright. You didn’t hurt me. You’re good.”
As Brian carried Nastya into the better-lit parts of the downtown area, she began to calm down a bit. A small trickle of mercury still stemmed from the corner of her mouth, but Brian figured she wouldn’t react well to having her face touched if he were to clean it up. Jonny trailed behind, trying to recount everything that had happened so quickly.
It was half a dozen gunshots, and then it was Nastya collapsed on the ground throwing up mercury, and now it’s him walking alone behind Brian.
Nastya was being carried exactly like she was carried from the Cyberian palace all those millennia ago. The only difference was that the blood staining her was no longer red, and the one carrying her was not the one who created her.
She’d witnessed the creation of DrumBot Brian, as much as she wished she hadn’t. She’d seen stars blink out and galaxies die untimely deaths. But she’d never really gotten over her past.
“See? Look, we’re almost there.”
Nastya raised her head, and sure enough, she could see Aurora a couple hundred feet in front of her. To Brian’s surprise, but not really out of his expectations, Nastya began to cry again, this time out of relief.
“She’s gonna take good care of you, right, let’s get inside.”
Brian stepped onto the ramp up to the docking pod that would lead up to the main annex of the ship. As soon as all three of them were onboard, Nastya began trying to squirm out of Brian’s arms. She overestimated how much her legs worked and ended up collapsing onto the floor, but she couldn’t care less as she pressed her face to the metal, hearing her love react to her.
“My love! What happened? Are you alright?” Nastya felt Aurora’s worry through her cybernetics.
She wanted to respond, to tell Aurora that she was okay, but words were still proving rather difficult. So she simply pressed her face a little further into the rigid decking, hoping that would qualify as an answer.
“Hey, ‘Rora, any chance you could take Nastya to the medbay? She’s got a few scrapes, and we have to clean the cut on her tongue. She’s, you know, no offense or anything, but she’s a biohazard,” Brian said. “Not like that matters.”
Wordlessly, Aurora heeded Brian’s request and ensnared her girlfriend in a presumably very comfortable nest of wires. Nastya all but disappeared in the mass of cables as Jonny and Brian took the long route to the medbay.
“So, I know that whole thing was… rough…” Brian said to Jonny, who’d been unusually quiet.
“Tell me about it,” Jonny replied, sighing heavily.
“How about you tell me about it? Why were you over in that area in the first place?”
“I dunno. It was Nastya’s idea.” Jonny shrugged. “She looked real tense, so I kept asking if she wanted to turn around and go back, but she said no. I should’ve just dragged her, but I figured she could handle herself.”
“She handled herself the best she could.”
“I never said she didn’t.” Jonny crossed his arms, and began to think to himself if the medbay had always been this far, or if Marius was up to something again. “Anyway, how did you find us? It’s not exactly like you were supposed to be hanging around those parts either.”
“I was here,” Brian stated. “Aurora’s cybernetics can only go so far, yes, but in Cyberia, things are different. She sent me to go look for you—well, for Nastya, and you—so I did. I didn’t really know where to look, I kind of just followed the noises.”
“Agh, don’t remind me. I hate seeing her like that.”
Brian didn’t know of any other times where Nastya was that afraid, but if anyone would know, it would be Jonny. He figured it was best not to pry.
The two were quick to discover that they’d been beaten to the medbay, and Nastya had been sitting on one of those awfully uncomfortable cots while one of Aurora’s cables warmed her scratched hands.
Brian approached her slowly, making sure her eyes met his before he started talking.
“May I touch your face for this? I just need to make sure everything is clean, so you don’t catch any bugs.” Brian spoke softly as he applied a special solution onto a disposable towel.
Nastya nodded, and another cable came down to secure her hair so it wouldn’t be in the way. Brian thanked both of the ladies and gently began cleaning off the mercury that’d gotten onto Nastya’s face, and her scraped hands and knees. The solution stung a little bit, but it was the only chemical in the medbay that wouldn’t cause a disaster of a reaction with the raw mercury.
“Can I see your tongue, please? Just need to see the wound so I can treat it properly.” Brian knew that Nastya liked things to be straightforward, so he spared no detail in telling Nastya what he was doing.
Nastya opened her mouth, and one of Brian’s fingertips let out a small beam of light. The cut was tiny, just a barely raised bump of silver. Head and mouth injuries did tend to bleed a lot.
“It’s really not a big cut at all. You must’ve just bitten down in the wrong spot. I’ll give you some gauze just so you can blot the last of it off, and then I think you’ll be fine. Physically.” Of course, there was an entirely different aspect of Nastya's well-being that needed to be discussed, but Brian knew there was a time and place for it that was neither there nor then.
Nastya just nodded, and let Brian hand her a little square of cotton padding. She gingerly put it in her mouth, and when she took it out, it barely had any silver on it at all. Still, it was technically a biohazard. At one point in her life, she might've thought that was at least a little bit cool.
“Ready to go?” Aurora asked Nastya, once Brian and Jonny had left to go their own separate ways.
“Few more minutes here,” Nastya whispered, voice sore and hoarse from her failed attempts at screaming her lungs out.
“Whatever you need, my love.”
Nastya reclined back into the wires, exhausted, battered, but glad that as long as Aurora was around, she would always feel safe.
“Thank you for looking out for me, ‘Rora. I love you.”
“Oh, darling.” The rattling in Aurora’s vents could have possibly been considered a sigh. “I love you too.”