Chapter Text
The aftermath is secondary.
Those were the stark words that had haunted much of Akira Kurusu’s life up to this point, and not for the first time, he cursed them.
Of course, when he had seen the slogan previously, it had mostly been on the numerous billboards that hung over the city like shrouds, the bright black on brighter white making it painful to look up above the skyline. He’d often read it printed across the back of cans of Power Pup, studying the label as he ate in an attempt to distract himself from the taste. And at the end of every long, hot day, he would read it upside down as he faded into sleep, the city-mandated poster above his bed at the Academy bracketing his day at both ends, morning and night.
He had been told its meaning often, of course- at school, on the headphone broadcasts. He was to be 'a cog in the machine that was Battery City', and through his labour, he wouldn’t have to worry about his future. So long as he followed his directions, Better Living was a bygone conclusion.
Akira clutched his head with the pain that he supposed would be from the blow to his skull that came from tripping into this disgusting alleyway, and began to wheeze with a painful, shallow laughter.
‘Oh, yeah.’ He thought, a hysterical nonchalance coming over him like a stormfront, ‘attacking a BL/ind board member probably isn’t conducive to Better Living. Should probably keep that in mind for next time.’
The absurdity of his thoughts wrenched him out of his reverie and back to reality. Sitting in an alleyway, staring up at a half-shredded propaganda poster.
Cold. Dirty. Pursued.
‘Right. Okay.’ He shook himself once. ‘Better get running.’
This would be his life now, after all. Unless he wanted to wear a Drac mask, that is.
Taking off down the familiar alleyways, he could hear the guards’ shouts as they stumbled after him. A smile crept onto his face at their clumsy attempts, but Akira banished it as soon as it appeared. Slow as they were, they’d soon cut him off in this warren, and he had to think about a more permanent solution.
Using a cable that stretched across the space, he vaulted up onto a section of scaffolding that seemed to be a permanent fixture of the poorer areas, and focused on trying to get to higher ground. Maybe if he could get out of sight and switch districts, he could escape in the confusion when he entered the jurisdiction of another guard squad.
Muddled bureaucracy; the one thing that gave people like him breathing room in this city.
The skyline was lower here, about four storeys, and there were enough crumbled bricks and odd bits of stone to make it an easy climb for someone who’d had a lot of practice being a street urchin. He could hear the guards swearing and shouting impotently, their strengths more in their numbers and brutality than their mobility.
They’d find a way eventually though, so Akira headed east over the grubby white rooftops, solar panels occasionally cracking beneath his feet as he did so.
‘So much for Bat City quality.’ He thought, as his foot passed right through one of the old things, worn out by the constant blazing sunshine of the desert. It left a few parting cuts on his ankle, but he couldn’t afford to slow down. There was the barking of K9s now, and even though the guards may not be able to reach him up here, the genetically modified noses of the hounds below could follow him until he eventually came down.
He headed west, the direction picked only to follow the presence of the sinking sun, and tried to collect himself. He’s always known he perhaps wasn’t cut out for a Better life, but he’d at least thought he could have kept his head down and gotten on with it. Graduated Shujin Academy and become a guard himself, the middling career being what he had been tracked for by his teachers ever since he had first become orphaned. He had seen it in their faces as he moved his meagre possessions into the dormitory of what had once been his day-school; he was now damaged goods in the eyes of BL/ind, and his past and future had been irrevocably altered in a single moment.
It had been little rebellions since then. Rebellions. The world felt electric on his tongue. Refusing to program his city-issued headphones to the prescribed volumes each morning had been one of the first. While it had made him sick to his stomach with the thought that he’d surely be discovered, it was soon replaced by the burning euphoria that, not only did no one notice his transgression, the world grew infinitely sharper each day. Like he’d swallowed a handful of pep pills but without the migraines, and he took a huge amount of satisfaction of listening to nothing but the rush of his own blood when Mandated Listening was announced each day.
It had only grown from there. Petty theft, owning items of illegal colours, leaving his hair an inch over regulation requirements. It was a careful line to tread to not get picked up on something, but Akira found that he was good at staying under the radar when it truly counted.
It wasn’t like he was a fully-fledged Killjoy, but in his mind, his actions counted for something.
But rather than sate his appetite for resistance, his actions had only seemed to grow it further. Until the events of today.
“Damn brat. I’ll have you masked.”
Even now, the words made Akira shudder. He had seen Dracs before- never up close, but close enough for his taste. He couldn’t imagine a fate much worse than that.
He didn’t know who the man in the yellow glasses was, but the sleek suit he was wearing, combined with the BL/ind issued supercar he had just gotten out of was enough to confirm that he was in at the top. Akira hadn’t seen that until it was too late, of course. Too focused on the leering man ripping wiring out of the neck of a pleading android, her struggles going pointedly unnoticed by the guards milling about. He could remember himself zeroing in on the way the man’s mouth sneered as he talked to a harried aide beside him, holding up the internal systems of something sentient and studying it as if he were pulling legs off a spider.
“Clearly subpar design. I’ll have to get Research and Development on getting more of those Plus-addled scrapheaps out of our city.”
“S-sir.” His assistant started, averting his eyes from the display going on in front of him. “I can make a note of her model number if you like? But if I may, Plus is something that limits all androids, not just her line.”
“Hmm.” His boss started, turning the droid’s face in one hand to study it. “A necessary evil to ensure we can build a Better future. But this model clearly degrades faster on exposure; I thought I saw something twitchy in this one, and I was right. It’d cost us more than we’d gain to allow this to continue.”
“Please.” The android started. She sounded more robotic now, as her internal systems diverted power from mimic functions to keep her motor ticking over. “I’ve only been in circulation five years, and they don’t even make replacement batteries for us anymore, I…” she cut off to let out a harsh, metallic screeching sound, what Akira would assume was the ‘droid equivalent of a hacking cough. “If I could just get some more Plus, I’m sure I could achieve BL/ind’s high standards, sir.”
There was a moment of silence. Without realising it, Akira had been edging closer to the scene, and he was within arm’s reach of the man, who hadn’t seemed to notice him yet.
He ran the green hair of the droid through his fingers for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face. Then turned to his aide.
“Make an order for the model’s recall and recycling with immediate effect. It’s time we cleaned up these streets.”
Time seemed to slow down in the next moment. All at once, Akira could feel himself moving forwards as the man brought his hand up to the android’s neck and grasped her carotid wiring. He could see the ‘droid bring her own hands up in a futile gesture of defence, and beyond her, a guard across the street now taking interest in the situation and gesturing to his colleagues.
He hadn’t done much in the end. A well timed shove had sent the man sprawling over the pavement, giving the android time to dart off somewhere. Their eyes met as she passed him, pooled with unanswered questions and fear, but she was gone before he could really process it. Everyone froze, Akira included, almost like they had to wait for the BL/ind exec to make the first move.
Pulling himself from the pavement, clutching his wrist, the man fixed Akira with a look he didn’t think he’d ever forget. While Akira had probably made the most decisive (and disastrous) decision of his life, the man looked at him like he was a particularly foul piece of dog shit he’d just stepped in on the way to work. While he knew he was on the bottom rungs of society, Akira had never been looked at with such blatant disgust and contempt before.
“Damn brat. I’ll have you masked.”
And now he was here. Flying over the rooftops like it was all he had been born to do.
In the distance, he could see the city diverging from the run-down commercial district he had been in to residential, the human side spilling east while the segregated androids occupied the west. It took a moment of consideration, but Akira continued west. He needed to get out of the city or go underground, and since he didn’t know anywhere he could hide indefinitely in Bat City, he was going to have to brave the desert. He knew there were communities of desert-dwellers, Killjoys, but frankly, that was the furthest thing from his mind right now. He’d only need worry about that if he actually made it out of the city limits.
Crouching in the shadow of a sign advertising porno droids, Akira surveyed the ground below. It was in even worse shape than its human counterpart, the once white stone completely blackened with filth, while the ground was littered with rubbish, machine parts, and homeless androids, sometimes indistinguishable from the scrap heaps around them due to their disrepair. He’d stick out like a sore thumb, but he had no choice.
He shimmied down the roof back to street level, cutting the black material of his academy jumpsuit at several points, and continued at a walk just slow enough to not be suspicious. He had a vague direction of where the city limits were, but no idea how far he was.
The street was worse down here. He crossed the road at one point to avoid a scuffle for a place at a charging port, but was mostly able to navigate unscathed. ‘I might actually be able to make this.’ He thought, with no little wonder, and picked up his pace a bit, rounding the corner to see-
-another guard.
Terror like bile rose in Akira’s throat, but the guard shoved straight past him and ran out into the centre of the still road, looking around frantically before choosing an alley, seemingly at random, yelling incoherently into his radio about a ‘missing asset’.
He stopped dead in his tracks, the fight or flight response still pounding a war drum in his head. While he was a fugitive, he was definitely not considered an asset by Battery City. The guard hadn’t seemed to recognise him anyway, so either his description hadn’t been spread to this district yet, or the guards seemed to be preoccupied with something else.
“…Hey, you there.”
Akira jumped. The words seemed to come from nowhere and be directed at nobody; they were so faint. He thought he was the only person about, and there were no humanoid figures lurking in the shadows he could see.
“Down here.” Again, the voice was weak, but now Akira could get a lock on it. He moved a pile of debris and an overflowing bin out of the way, to reveal…
A cat.
A cat, here?
Except on closer inspection, there was something else about this creature. For one thing, it was talking. Akira was no cat expert, but he wasn’t sure they could normally do that. Secondly, one of its eyes was unnaturally blue, standing out against its black and white fur, and the other was a dull glassy black. It appeared to be injured in several places, but what was oozing out of the wounds was not blood, but a black, viscous fluid.
“A…cat-droid?” Akira questioned. He had never seen such a thing before- most of the mechanical inhabitants of the city were always varying degrees of humanoid.
“I am not a cat, frizzy hair!” the thing yowled, out of its very cat-shaped mouth. “I’m an android! By definition I’m human. Maybe you don’t have the right prescription for those oversized glasses because any idiot could see that.”
“…Right.” He was getting insulted by a talking cat. As if his day couldn’t get any worse. “Well, as lovely as chatting to you is, I’m also wanted by the guards, so I’m gonna need to be on my way.”
“Wait! Stop, I didn’t mean it, take me with you!”
Akira stopped dead in his tracks. Sure, he could take the thing with him, but it would slow him down. It would also put at least two squads of guards on his tracks.
“I suppose I could, but those guards after you? There’s another load of them looking for me only a district away, I’ve gotta get to the desert.” Crouching down, he began to inspect the cat a little, softly poking and prodding it. “Come to think of it, why are they after you? What’s your primary function?”
“I-” the thing began, before its one good eye blacked out as well and it began twitching, thrashing about from side to side violently. Akira only just managed to dodge a metal claw as the cat played an error chime from somewhere on its body. It was almost comical in a sick sort of way.
The movement stopped after a few seconds, but there were thin wafts of smoke rising from the animal in certain places, which continued to alarm Akira.
“Are you…okay?” he asked, his voice rising somewhat hysterically at the end.
“I’m fine, but you can’t let me fall into the hands of the guards. You don’t know what BL/ind would do if-” but it was cut off again by another round of convulsions, this time much more violent, the thrashing animal rolling around in the dirt of the street as if wracked by incredible pain. Akira could hear the gears working overtime as the animal’s chest rose and fell, working to pump out excess heat from its mouth. It set his teeth on end to hear, but he made a decision.
He scooped the droid up under one arm. Even if he was already an annoying little shit, Better Living wanted him as well, and that made them allies. And the thing looked to be in so much pain that he couldn’t stand to leave it, bleeding heart that he was.
It was time to go again. He took off at a run, but his thoughts were running wild again. What did this cat have that made it an asset to BL/ind? Was it a prototype of some kind? Did it even eat cat food?
At least it could be a bargaining chip out in the desert; if the cat knew things about BL/ind, they could trade those secrets for tools for their survival, at least. It gave him a glimmer of hope, at least- he could imagine the cat perched on his shoulder, ray gun at his side, domino mask across his face. A real killjoy, like the infamous Fab Four or Dr Death-Defying. Akira owned two incredibly rare (not to mention highly illegal) posters of Party Poison and Jet Star, hoping one day to complete the full set. He’d never be able to go back for them, but that was okay, because he was going to be a real Killjoy.
And that was the last conscious thought he had before the reprocessing truck hit them.