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He has to wonder if his forced solitude is his fault. Has he given those who have known him a reason to leave and never come back? Ah- he means- he knows Father cannot come back, but what was stopping him from ever doing so when he could? Zane knows it is relatively bad to make mistakes. One can gain experience and knowledge from mistakes but it is better to make none at all, for there are consequences. Has he made so many, or made a mistake or two so drastic as to create this consequence for himself? This consequence is… hard, to say the least. The very, very least. Sometimes it seems like he can’t handle this. His processors- whatever is within him that feels emotion suffers the sensation of threatening to crack under the pressure of the pain. Part of him wants it to crack. Then, there’s the possibility it won’t crack anymore.
Quite interesting how self preservation works, in a way, in comparison with alternate desires. Perhaps he wants to suffer, because, well, he might deserve it, but, really, no he doesn’t. Want to suffer, that is. He has no clue if he deserves his situation or not. Father had always rambled on about the ‘powers that be’ and how the skeletons and the tower was their way of punishing him for all his mistakes. Was the leaving of Jay and Nya and Father like that? After he had taken so much joy in helping them with everything they did? After they - the latter two - had chased away his pain and made him feel whole again?
They left very quickly, no? Both times. When they were with all of their friends, and when they came back, just the two of them. He understands, he thinks. Both times, there were stakes that he knows were quite high. Perhaps those stakes never went down, as time went on. Perhaps, even now, they are out there, fighting for their lives. Perhaps that is why they’ve yet to come back for him. His chances of being retrieved would be higher if he knew more humans. Maybe normal humans, who aren’t always fighting something or have their lives constantly on the line. But Father was always a recluse. Even when he’d talk about his ‘normal’ life before being imprisoned, he'd isolated himself in snowy woods outside of where he said the population would truly be. So both him and the ninja had those reasons to leave him.
It is not that he is angry with them. No, they were nice and kind. They treated him like Father did. Everything they were doing, they did to help someone. At times, they could act a bit… hostile, but he could detect no real intent to injure anyone but those he was sure deserved it. Father made it very clear early on in his activation how to distinguish good and evil. He had also made it as clear as he could what emotions are. How to understand them. The emotion Zane feels right now was a bit of a confusing one when he felt it when Father was around, for what use was there to feel as though one is alone when there is clearly another being right in front of you? It was when Father was in front of him no more that he got a mouthful of loneliness, as opposed to the taste he got back then. The feeling became a constant. One little machine - the one made for serving and hospitality - was the only thing left that was semi-sentient. That could semi-care. Zane latched onto that. It helped… a little, but it would not chase away the unpleasant sensation the way he wished so hard that it would. At that point he asked why. Why would he feel loneliness so strongly when he is not fully alone? More questions like that, on the subject of emotion, rise in his mind every day. They always have. And it kills him that there is no one to give him an answer. He despises not knowing. Oblivion in any way bothers him in a way he cannot describe. Though, he supposes there are a lot of things like that he cannot describe. Like how overjoyed he was when they arrived. They, whom he is not angry with, but whom he wonders about often. So, so often.
Jay and Nya, the names he doubts he will ever forget. When they arrived for the second time, he will admit - he was scared. He recognized them from before. Accompanied by several others, they arrived once when Father was still here to retrieve him. He had instructed Echo to hide, saying that he wasn’t sure how 'Zane' would react - even though that is his name - and he didn’t want to taint the reunion. That 'Zane,' if Zane can remember correctly, was the one who looked like him. The one whom Father talked about often. The one whom Father modeled Zane himself after. The one whom Father was the happiest to see. The one… whom Father left him for.
Now, like with Jay and Nya, Zane would never be angry with Father. He loved Father. Nothing will ever change that. It is just… There is some deep, dark, stabbing, inescapable pain he feels when he thinks about how Father is gone. And that feels a lot like his predecessor’s fault - he knows it's his predecessor, there is no way it could be anything but. His predecessor never seemed like someone Zane would want to be angry with, either. His directives were all too similar to Zane’s own. And although that double of his seemed to be the one Father was most eager to leave for, just as Zane is not angry at Nya and Jay for breaking his loneliness twice only to leave him both times, he is not angry at his double for stealing Father from him. What would be the point, anyway? Happiness like none he has ever seen before lit up the countenance of his creator when that shining copy arrived, and that happiness went with him when he left.
Happiness seems like a distant concept, now.
There is no escape from the pain anymore. Pain was felt when Father was around but he could always fix it. Fix anything that came up wrong with the cluttered, sloppy body Zane holds, or with the soul that no one has an answer as to how it ended up his. No one is here to fix him now. The service bot tries its best but it is small and its AI is minimal compared to anything that could fix him physically, let alone emotionally. His pain is like the tide. It comes and goes; ebbs, then comes back ten times as hard. Then it will crash around like a storm, loud, intrusive, terrifying, overwhelming and there’s nothing he can do as it tears at him and drills into him and overwhelms all of his processors and there’s nothing he can do but sit in the agony while the only thought in his head is stopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopSTOP-
He would never be angry at anyone.