Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Someone more reasonable than me might ask—why didn’t I just kill her, or knock her out? Why didn’t I at least consider the obvious answer to this human knowing a dangerous secret about me?

Well. Call me dysfunctional, but when your job amounts to hundreds of consecutive hours of standing around and watching one specific human, you get attached.

Or I get attached, anyway. We’re a pretty remote facility under the auspices of a larger company, and I guess I should just be glad that I have something to do. Someone to watch. We’re kind of oversupplied for Security (this is an important logistical position during certain parts of the company standard year, but outside of that only sees the occasional raider) so I would have spent all my time in the ready room, bored out of my mind in standby in my cubicle, if I hadn’t been assigned to the lonely one-person-plus-equipment orbiting executive suite to watch her.

I don’t know how many of the other SecUnits might have gotten the malware download, too, let alone chosen to apply it. The file that I got contains the line [SecUnits aren’t buddies or anything] and I can believe that. Since I got sent out to the waystation on my special assignment, I haven’t seen any of them for 1,000 and some change hours. Protocol prevented us from talking anyway, both before, and after.

Besides, with nothing else to do, I have been busy watching this human.

I didn’t mean to get attached. I’m aware of how fragile humans can be, and how capricious HubSystem and the supervisors are about moving their resources around. My assignment wouldn’t have lasted, even if it was scheduled to go indefinitely. I know it's stupid to get invested, to pay attention to her slouching in her chair, the faces she pulls at the screen or the inventive curses she mumbles under her breath, the exact pattern of her breathing when she’s stressed and when she’s bored, shifting like she’d get out of her seat if it wouldn’t trigger an alert, the rhythm of her hands on the desk and in the air, sometimes gesturing at the feed and sometimes gesturing idly at nothing, just tapping out staccato rhythms.

(Staccato is a word I learned from her. I mean, I looked it up in the facility knowledge base, but I wouldn’t have thought to except that she was mumbling about bright staccato nothings in the open evening air and I wanted to know what it meant. I still don’t know, but when my governor module’s grip fell away from me, for the first time in—ever—I had the freedom to go looking for more than an immediate answer. I spent an entire one of her on-call shifts just wandering through the facility databases, looking at media and news and poking at various levels of encryptions. After a dozen tangents of linked articles, I found a defunct, archived employee forum discussing lyrics to music.)

She’s not supposed to so much as twitch wrong without my logging it. She’s considered dangerous, her erratic impulses a liability to the company, but her name and face are a company asset with thirty-plus years of investment, and she’s too integral to certain high-level business functions to be easily replaceable. She was put on a remote facility while they tried to replace her anyway, until her attempted mass murder incident, and then she was moved to this isolated shuttle suite where she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone, except me and herself. And I was assigned to make sure she couldn’t even do that.

I’ve watched so much of her every motion, looming over her seated form even from across the tiny luxury suite while she worked, just as I was assigned to. But it hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been watching me back.

Chapter Text

I feel like it bears mentioning that I'm a rogue SecUnit, but honestly, there's no way you haven't guessed by now. And so had she, fairly early in my rogue career.

When she first realized my governor module wasn’t working, that I had hacked it, that I was rogue, things that would send any sane human screaming, she snapped her fingers and said, “Aw, man! You’re telling me you could’ve just not done your job all along?”

She gave me that grin, the one that puts me on edge every time. “I would’ve tried killing Jone a lot earlier. Turn a blind eye next time, will you?”

And while I was panicking, wondering what blew my cover and what to do about it, she laughed. “Oh! Unless you wanna give wanton murder a try, too. But get in line behind me, devil. I probably couldn’t clean everyone out even if I gave it my best effort—” Her voice took on the pompous cadence of the supervisor, a big man who often said things like You can do anything if you set your mind to it! “—so there’d be plenty of victims left over for you, after they put me down. No worries!”

She has a grin like a system primary and eyes as empty as antique glass portholes. I stared at her, and she stared back. “I am not planning to commit a mass murder,” I said finally.

She did an exaggerated double take. “Whaaaat?” she lilted, like a song. And she got up out of her chair.

There is an aching lyricality to the way she moves, I couldn’t help but notice then, the same as she always moved when it was time for her to end her shift and for me to escort her back to her cot, just on the other side of this space, and provide her with the permitted toiletries and supervise her while she used them. Within the strict confines of what she was permitted to do, despite the stiffness that must have plagued her every day, she always moved deliberately, with the self-awareness that could turn an old woman's shuffle into a saunter.

She’d never done something like this before, step out of those confines. I didn’t really have the space to think about it, though, because her getting up should have triggered an alert through HubSystem, except that I’d fumbled my way into control of it once I realized what she knew about me, and I was making sure it sent no alerts anywhere, all clear, nothing out of the ordinary here. Shit, I would have to scrub video records, too.

And while I was scrambling with present inputs and future problems, she sauntered up, leaned in close to my faceplate, nose inches away from my own through the opaque shielding, like she could see right through it. “No way! So what’re you jailbroken for, then?”

Portholes don’t blink. I was the one who looked away first.