Work Text:
Marco notices the hand, sticking like a grave marker out of piles of broken appliances and corrugated zinc sheets, an organic colour where everything around it is shades of rust and silver. He puts the brakes on his hover cart to clamber over the pile, mindful of sharp edges that might cut through his coveralls and work gloves.
He’s pleased when he yanks the arm and it doesn’t immediately pull loose, moored to nothing. It has weight, and Marco grips the slim, loose wrist with both hands, braces himself and heaves. Metal clanks and clatters, sliding down the scrap heap, loose bolts and screws tumbling with resounding pings as the main body is pulled free. First comes a slim shoulder, then a dark head. A slim torso, and a long slim leg. Marco breathes hard and leans back to examine his find.
An 08 model, more than twenty years old. It’s missing an arm and leg, and perhaps a few software chips. Some of its skin had ripped in places where sharp edges dug in, revealing shining plates of its hardware beneath. Marco rolls the andoird over, and pushes up matted brown hair to squint at the faded bar code on the back of its neck. “Eren.” He breathes aloud, and it feels right to say it.
He heaves the android on top of his hover cart, collected scraps crunching beneath its weight, and heads back to the main building of the junk yard.
He waits until he’s finished unloading and sorting all his collected odds and ends before he asks old man Pixis for the android, which leans against the high density plastic side of the garage. It looks sad, one legged, one armed, one eye closed and the other eyelid peeled back to reveal the gaping hole in its metal head. It looks beyond repair.
“What’s that morsel you’re trying to hide from me?” Pixis asks as he pulls up his facemask, laser torch in one hand and a flask in the other.
“An 08 model android. It’s pretty banged up.” Marco says, and pulls a hover scooter off the rack to slide beneath the bulk of a machine, nano light held between his teeth to shine on the wires of its underbelly. Pixis makes a noise of interest and gulps down more wine. They both know where Marco’s going with this, but of course the old man is gonna make him spell it out. “I was wondering if you’d let me have it?”
“And by let you have it you mean lend you the scraps and the tools to fix it up.” Pixis laughs wryly. Marco makes an affirmative noise, and beneath the machine, he’s absolutely still, waiting for his answer. “Can’t see the harm in it.”
“Thank you!” Marco gushes beneath the machine, and sets to disentangling its many wires, taking out and replacing screws along its panels.
Outside in the sun, Eren is not yet Eren, not really. But Marco toils, and knows that soon, he will be.
*
Marco remembers his first robot. It’d been second hand, stuffed in a crumpled box and wrapped in a hastily tied bow. His mother had beamed at him as she presented it with a flourish. The paint had been a little chipped, it took a while to process commands, but he’d loved the thing.
Marco remembers when his first robot broke, circuits utterly fried by an electromagnetic surge. Most systems had been down for hours after the surge, but Marco had fobbed together some tools and some spare circuitry to repair the robot, spent all night beneath the light of a battery powered lamp with a screwdriver, spare wires held between his teeth that he attached one by one.
Marco remembers the flood of satisfaction, pride, joy, when he fixed his first robot.
*
Marco lives in a shed on the east side of the junk yard. The trek there from the garage is long, and the sun has already set enough to make monsters of the shadows in the scrap heaps. Eren rests on Marco’s hover cart, one arm laid over his chest as though he is asleep.
His shed is a single room, and the string he pulls on the bare light bulb illuminates a cot pressed against the eastern facing window, and a work table with a portable stove shoved off into the corner. With effort, Marco hefts Eren up onto the work table, laying him out flat. He traces his thumb over the android’s plump bottom lip, feels it give beneath his press like flesh. “Wow.” Marco breathes out. “Your customizer loved you. Look at your skin, soft as a baby’s.” his thumb moves next to the ragged tissue around Eren’s eye, brushing the twisted flaps into a semblance of place. “You might not look like much now, Eren. But just you wait.”
He rolls Eren onto his side to catch his fingers in the slot at his ribs, lifting away a peel of skin to get to the battery. It needs charging after twenty long years in the scrap heap, and he mocks up a charger for it, and pulls a face when the light bulb flickers warningly at him. He examines Eren’s face again, shines a light into his eye socket to check what calibre eye he might require, talking the whole way.
“Hope you don’t mind, but I’m gonna peek at your eye while you’re sleeping.” He laughs to himself, aware he’s being silly, and lifts the eye lid. “Wow.” He says again, caught off guard by the stunning green of the irises beneath the skin. They sparkle, and Marco stares for a long moment, entranced, before he pulls out a drawer where different calibres of eyes rattle and roll. He finds an eye of pale green, but it’s too small. Another, an almost hazel colour, but the model is too new. At last, he comes across a gold eye from another completely unsalvageable 08 model. He holds it to the socket, and the magnets inside attract, the gold eye snapping firmly into place.
Having registered two eyes now, Eren blinks, eyes open. But he’s not awake yet. Marco stares at the ragged, banged up face, the mismatched eyes, one as green as radioactive waste, the other the colour of wolf’s eyes, both bright with a phosphorescence of their own. “I like it.” Marco informs the android at last, though he does not, cannot, acknowledge him. “It’s strange, but it makes you look a little wild.”
*
Marco’s feelings about the scrap yard are bitter sweet now. When he was young, when his parents were still alive, he’d play in and among the piles, wiling away his time, and didn’t know then that only the poorest children lived in the sectors closest to the scrap heap. All he knew was that other kids played hide and seek with him, pretended at war, or dragons and knights. The girls liked to build huts from the scraps of iron, marking out their kitchens and babies rooms to the point of artistry. They would claim a boy as a husband, find a doll as their child, and rope them into long hours of house until old man pixis called each child away.
One day it was just Marco, and his little robot left behind and waiting. He thought it would be fun to build a fort to surprise everyone else the next day. Old man Pixis called him, his hoarse voice wavering, and Marco jumped up, ready to go home.
“Boy. There’s been an accident.”
He feels the scrap yard holds more bad memories than good now.
*
Marco nearly burns out the generator twice trying to patch the gashes in Eren’s skin, the old thing being over taxed just trying to charge Eren’s archaic battery pack. “I wonder what kind of voice you’re going to have?” he says to himself, or Eren, he has yet to figure out which. “A nice voice, I think. Kinda boyish.” The laser skitters over the synthetic skin, knitting the frayed flaps back together with nary a scar left behind. He works with the smallest laser he has, long meticulous work that knots in his shoulders as he hunches first over Eren’s face, then his chest and arm. “It’ll be nice to have another voice around. You go a little loopy living by yourself.”
He glances to the clock, rolls his shoulders. It’s approaching the wee hours of the morning, He has work starting at down, but he doesn’t want to stop. He turns off the laser to lean back on his stool, inspecting his work. Eren lays limp on the table, repaired arm laying across his belly, fingers loosely curled as though he were merely asleep.
He wasn’t kidding; his customizer loved him, took time to pick out the highest grade silicone, an artistry to the lively sparkle of his original green eye, the soft gentle fall of his dark hair. Marco takes a moment to brush it into some semblance of order, thick strands falling over Eren’s feathery brows. He’s beautiful, both in an artistic sense and aesthetic. He wonders what his programming was like, what would Eren look like when he awoke?
“Will you smile at me?” Marco wonders aloud, stroking Eren’s repaired cheek. “Or will you wonder why you were left to rust when someone must have loved you?”
*
Marco thinks he probably would have ended up in the junkyards one way or another, despite the accident. He likes getting his hands on things, working them out like puzzles. Every morning, the air ships dump piles of unsorted metal refuse into the junkyard, each piece crashing and banging, screeching and grating. Quite a few children have been caught in these metal avalanches before.
He and Pixis sort through each scrap, what they can salvage goes to fixing hover crafts and builderbots, cyborg limbs and duplicators. What can’t be salvaged is melted down.
The nuclear furnace is so hot Marco has to wear a suit to check the gauges. A great, fiery mouth chews up the constant stream of scrap metal, crunching and crushing as it snaps open and shut. Inside, it is melted down and poured into neat cubes that emerge at the other end still steaming, to be stacked by droids and picked up in the evening.
The towering city in the distance, growing ever taller like the tower of Babel, needs an endless supply of metal.
Marco no longer looks to the towering Babel city with envy, as he used to when he was a child, puttering around with his second hand robot, climbing junk piles with the other ragamuffins to get a better look, to see if he can spot an air cruise liner through the fog. He has everything he needs in his little hut with its window facing the rising sun.
*
Eren’s battery is fully charged when Marco gets back home. For a while he debates putting it in, letting him wake, satisfying his curiosity about his voice and his smile and the glimmer of his wild eyes. But he decides against it. He will hear Eren’s voice when he’s completely repaired, not some limbless tangle of wires and circuits, barely jimmied together while he searches for parts to make do with.
Most 08 models are gone, melted down and scattered into bits and pieces. Marco has to use an ancient 07 model arm to replace Eren’s missing one. He strips its fiber metal sheet plating to reveal the alloy bones, and finds them more beautiful than any second hand thing he could hope to give Eren here.
“Wish I was one of those rich mechanics, up in the city.” He murmurs to Eren as he solders the arm into place. He checks the seam, flexes the joints, puts oil at the creases to ease the stiffness. “If I were rich you’d get the royal treatment, I’d find you the perfect skin, to match yours, and perfectly fitting arms. You’d look even better than your first check in day.” Marco sighs wistfully as he digs his fingers into the receptors at Eren’s shoulder, checking each response. The fingers wiggle and twitch as he directs. The bones are slightly bulky for his frame, but Eren will be able to read and move it.
He narrates the whole time he rebuilds Eren. “Let’s try the 07 leg on you, whoops— maybe an 09?” he settles Eren’s sitting body at the end of his work bench, peering into his leg socket. His receptors have been damaged there, wire peeking out jagged like lightening bolts, like someone pulled on his leg and yanked until it came free. “Been through a lot huh?” he says dully, zapping the wires back into place.
In a way he and Eren are similar; abandoned to the junkyards, to be disposed of like a rusty scrap, or salvaged and turned into something else.
*
Marco wakes up where he’s fallen asleep at his work bench hunched over Eren’s single leg. He drops the soldiering tool in his fist and rubs at his eyes. The sun has already risen, illuminating his second hand toy robot sitting lifeless on the window sill, sending its shadow streaking across the corrugated zinc wall. Eren’s new leg, made of the socket of an 07, the ankle of an 010, and the knee of an old 09 is the closest Marco could get to Eren’s measurements.
Outside, he can hear the air dump ships grumbling in, and the screech of metal being tossed. He slips on his face mask and digs around his skinny, lopsided cupboards for a metal finish paint. When it’s dry, it slides into Eren’s socket easily, magnetized connectors snapping into place. “You look like a skeleton, with your metal arm and leg.”
“Boy!” Pixis calls outside. “Get your butt out here and stop playing with your toy, you can work on it later.” He bursts into the shed, and blinks at the sleeping android propped up on the work table. “Not bad at all,” he hums, impressed. “You did a pretty good job here.” He pokes and prods at Eren, inspecting his arm and the delicate soldering of his leg, the laser repair of his skin. He claps Marco’s shoulder fondly and laughs. “Looks like you’re almost done too.”
“I am.” Marco agrees softly, leaning into Pixis’ one armed hug. “I just have to check and correct any of his circuitry, plug his battery in and calibrate him.” Marco sighs. “I guess it can wait—“
Pixis laughs and nods. “Alright boy, alright.” He says, clapping him on the shoulder again. “Take the day, finish your android, calibrate to your heart’s content.” He turns a shrewd eye on Marco then, smile gone. “Then tomorrow, I expect you to finish that order of maid bots that was shipped in a week ago.”
Marco smiles wanly. “Sure thing.”
Pixis beams again and leaves with a wave over his shoulder.
*
Eren’s circuitry is a mess. He lays on his belly, nestled in his folded arms like he’s waiting for a massage, the panels on either side of his spine open to reveal chips and wires in disarray. “What happened to you?” Marco whispers, snapping chips back into place and connecting all the wires. “You look like someone was trying to destroy you.”
When the last circuit snaps into place, Eren jolts as though shocked, and relaxes again. Marco shuts the panels and tighten the small, skin toned bolts framing either side of his spine he turns him and opens the panel in his ribs and hooks the battery into place. The battery blinks lazily at him, and something whirrs softly in the depths of Eren’s body. Marco’s heart leaps into his throat, and his fingers grow tight on the edge of the table.
Slowly, Eren sits up. He blinks open mismatched eyes, looks down at his mismatched hands, then around the sparse shed. His eyes land on Marco at last, camera pupils dilating. “You are not a recognized user.” He announces hollowly. Then he frowns. “Who’re you? Where’s Mikasa?”
Marco puts his hands up palms out. “I’m a mechanic, I fixed you.” He shrugs and grimaces as Eren flexes his skeletal alloy fingers, turning his hand over. “Sort of. Um… what’s the last thing you remember?”
It seems to take Eren a moment to process the question, but when he does his eyes go wide, back snapping straight, hands clutching the tables for hard it creaks under the force. “We were running, I picked Mikasa up so we could go faster, she was so quiet I was afraid a bullet got her—“ his voice is strained and terrified, watching the memories behind his eyes, jerking a little. “we got to a fence, I tried to just tear through it, Mikasa got cut, but I kept running, even though they were yelling.” Eren shudders and Marco watches just as terrified because he hadn’t expected any of this when he woke this android. “They got be with magnetic shot, electrocuted me, I had to recalibrate, but they already had Mikasa. She was screaming for me but I couldn’t recalibrate fast enough. I couldn’t move—“
Marco eases closer, resting his palm on Eren’s knee. He twitches, and looks at Marco with wide eyes, and shudders again, head dropping in defeat. He combs his skeletal hand through his hair, and looks like he would be crying if he could. “That’s the last thing you remember?” Eren nods mutely. “when was that?”
“3080.” Eren whispers.
“Okay.” Marco whispers back, gently stroking Eren’s knee in soothing circles. “It’s 3103 now.”
“What about Mikasa?” Eren looks so sad and defeated Marco’s heart melts.
“We’ll find her.” He promises. He hopes Mikasa isn’t an android, scattered and melted down over the past twenty years. “We’ll find her.”
“Do you think she’ll remember me?” he looks at his hands as though he’s been irreparably changed, as though nothing about him the same, his silicone skin stark against his metal alloy. “It’s been 23 years, do you think—“
“When we find her, you’ll find out.” Marco smiles, and reluctantly, Eren smiles back.