Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Even knowing an ambush was likely, they hadn’t been ready. 

Nori ran through the blinding snow, precious cargo safely stowed in the bag on her back, and tried to make sense of her surroundings. She couldn’t hear anything past the wind, not even the screams of her companions or the blast of weaponry. She didn’t know if that meant she’d run far enough to escape the fight or if the battle was already lost. 

It’d been a mistake, and she berated herself harshly as she forged onward. Small groups were best, she knew that. Too many drones attracted the monsters’ attention, the hum of their cores magnifying with increased numbers.

But desperation made fools of them all. And the search for a new home for the colony had indeed been growing desperate as the monsters slowly closed in on their current hideaway. 

Nori looked back over her shoulder, but she could barely see her own footprints in the dark storm. She wouldn’t ever be able to tell if she was being followed. Not until it was too late. 

She cursed in her head, not daring to speak aloud, and pinged Khan. He wouldn’t be able to help her, not this time, but it was all she had. He pinged back, and that at least gave her strength. He wasn’t dead. 

The monster appeared out of nowhere. 

It slammed to the ground within arm’s reach of her, yellow X bright in the dark, and she barely stopped in time to avoid running into it. Powdered snow exploded around them from the impact, blinding her. 

Its talons flashed, slicing through the straps of her bag as they raked across her front. The monster twisted while she stumbled, frantically trying to catch the bag even as she was losing her balance. Its wing smashed into her, sending her flying. 

Nori crashed to the ground hard enough to make her vision glitch wildly. She barely had time to move before it had pounced on her, fanged grin split gruesomely wide. Its tail flicked up, and a scream was punched from her voice box as its syringe pierced through her torso. 

The burning sting of its nanite acid was immediate and all-consuming. Her voice went choppy as her system overloaded from the pain.

Gritting her teeth, she summoned her solver. The damn thing never worked on the monsters, so she didn’t waste her time trying again. Instead, she latched on to a large piece of debris and pulled. 

At the same moment, the monster ripped her other arm off with its teeth.

She choked as her makeshift projectile hurtled toward them, catching the monster’s attention just in time for it to shoot upward, wings flaring wide. The ground trembled as the rubble landed and went skidding away. She fought past her body’s attempt to shut down, desperation clawing at her core.

Heaving for breath, Nori tried and failed to push herself up. Warnings about a potential head wound flashed over her visor. It took her too long to register the monster’s absence as odd. She weakly turned her head. 

It was crouched in the snow a short ways away, where it had initially intercepted her. Leaning forward and down, her arm dangling from its mouth like a forgotten chew toy, it tilted its head. 

Directly beneath it, her baby laughed and reached up at its brightly glowing tail. It bobbed just beyond her tiny fingers, the syringe’s sharp point nearly brushing her hand. 

The ripped bag waved in the wind before tumbling away. Uzi, who didn’t even reach Nori’s waist and wasn’t yet a full month into having her first body past her newborn stage, was left laying in the snow at the mercy of a monster.

Fear unlike any Nori had known before shot through her. She gasped, fighting past the pain of her wounds, and reached out. Her solver appeared in front of her fingers, glitched, then fizzed away before she could grasp anything with it. Her arm dropped limply back to the ground, and she released a bitten-off cry of despair. 

But, though she might have failed to kill the monster, she had at least drawn its attention back to her. 

It lifted its head and faced her again, that horrible X unwavering. Her arm dropped from its mouth. Its smile had vanished, leaving something almost like a confused pout behind. 

“Come back here and fight me, you coward!” she yelled as loud as she could. She tried again to pull her solver up, but she could barely feel her hand. “Leave my daughter alone!”

Unmoving, the monster considered her. It was unusual to see one so still. It wore a long coat belted at its waist and a dark hat, yellow sensor nodes tucked beneath its brim. This was the largest of the three, she realized. It loomed in a way the other two simply could not, even though they were still taller than any worker drone. 

Uzi giggled again, not yet at the age where she spoke beyond simple single words. In the monster’s distraction, its tail seemed to have lowered enough for her to grab it. She pulled it closer, and Nori’s core just about stopped. 

But—but the monster’s hand shot out and intercepted the needle before her baby could stab herself. The tail slipped free and flicked up behind it, where it settled into a hypnotic sway. The monster shifted, lowering itself so close that Uzi didn’t even care about having her toy taken, because she was too distracted with reaching up and smacking her little palm against the monster’s face, right over its closed mouth. 

“No,” Nori choked. “No, no, not her, please.” 

The monster showed no indication it’d heard her. It held still, X focused on Uzi as she patted it. 

Nori’s vision started to darken. Her torso was alight with agony. She couldn’t feel any of her remaining limbs. 

“Uzi,” she whispered. “Please, no… take me instead…” 

Error popups flashed past, but she could barely read them. She didn’t need to; she knew what was happening. 

The darkness receded slightly, enough for her to realize the monster had moved again and was crouched over her now. Her eyes trailed down and landed on her daughter, caught in the monster’s grasp. 

She jolted with panicked fear, as much as she could while paralyzed. 

Uzi peered down at her with wide, confused eyes. “Mama,” she said, reaching out with one hand. The other was tightly gripping the fuzzy collar of the monster’s coat. 

Nori’s hand twitched. “Uzi,” she murmured. Tears swelled in her visor. 

The monster shuffled closer and—and gently set Uzi down beside Nori’s head. She started to tip backward, not quite having learned to keep her balance yet. The monster caught her, one of its massive hands spanning her entire back and then some. It nudged her upright, and when Uzi started to topple sideways, toward Nori, it pulled back. 

Leaning against Nori’s shoulder, Uzi patted her face. “Mama,” she said. 

“Hey, baby,” she whispered. It was about all she was capable of. She wanted to reach for her daughter, to sweep her up and curl around her just one more time. To cradle her precious little girl and feel the hum of her core. To tell her it’d be all right. 

She almost missed the monster moving, ducking closer to the glowing wound in her torso. It pushed her shirt up and opened its mouth, wicked fangs gleaming. 

“Look at me, baby, that’s right,” Nori rasped. She refused to let Uzi watch it tear into her. She shuddered as its overly warm body brushed against her. “I love you, I love you, I love—”

It didn’t bite her, or rip her in half, or tear out her innards. It… licked her. She could feel its saliva dripping into the puncture wound, its tongue probing the hole it’d made. 

She choked at the sensation, her fear taking a backseat to bewilderment and disgust. “What the hell are you—?” 

It sat up a bit, oil smeared across its face. Its X glitched, and for a split second, a pair of furrowed eyes were looking back at her. But then the X returned, so fast she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t imagine it. 

The monster returned to the wound, and Nori realized with shock that she could feel her feet again. Some of the warnings clogging up her visor flickered away, her body… stabilizing. 

Having lost her mother’s attention, Uzi twisted and laughed. She leaned out, reaching for the monster. She started to lose her balance again, and despite her best attempts, Nori couldn’t move to catch her. 

The monster’s tail whipped around, the smooth side of the glass canister catching Uzi across her chest. It hadn’t even looked up. She giggled and let herself be guided back into leaning against Nori. 

Another minute passed like this before the monster raised its head and crawled forward on all fours. Her breath hitched as it came closer; it felt so large hovering over her like that. 

Her wires tingled and a brief shiver traveled up her spine, and she startled at the realization that it was scanning her the way a medic drone would. The pain from the stab wound was gone. 

She held her breath, hardly daring to move as it examined her, then Uzi. Her daughter beamed happily up at it, reaching out yet again. It reached back, one blunt finger barely fitting into her grasp. It stayed hunched over Nori for a long moment, simply letting Uzi hold its finger, before it slowly withdrew. Uzi grumbled, not fully throwing a tantrum but certainly unhappy with this turn of events. 

The monster stood to its full height and backed up from them. Its wings flared, and it bent its knees, preparing to take off. 

Nori gaped at it. This—this wasn’t just unusual behavior. Something like this had never happened before. Not in the year since the monsters first arrived. 

Pausing, the monster… waved. It waved at Uzi, and Uzi waved back. “Bye!” she said. “Bye, bye!” 

The monster smiled, fangless and utterly unthreatening, and then with a great whoosh, it vanished into the storm. 

Nori lay unmoving in the snow, body aching and arm missing, her infant daughter sitting beside her, and wondered what the hell had just happened.

She still hadn’t found the strength to get up when shouts reached her over the wind. She could barely hear them, but that seemed to be a side effect of her head wound, because Uzi perked up and happily babbled, “Hi, hi!” 

Khan emerged from the darkness, frantic, and Nori sagged in relief as he spotted them. Other drones hurried after him, Yeva right on his heels. 

“Nori,” he gasped, skidding to his knees beside her. “You’re alive.” He scooped Uzi up with one arm and leaned over Nori, hugging them both to his chest. 

Yeva knelt on her other side, frowning as she scanned Nori. {You are badly injured,} she said. {What did this?}

Because surely, Nori knew she was thinking, it could not have been one of the monsters. For the monsters never left a victim alive. 

“It was one of them,” Nori breathed. Khan sat up, eyes hollow with horror. “The big one.” 

He, too, took in her missing arm and the slash marks and the puncture wound on her torso. Her shirt was wet with oil, practically shredded. “But you’re…” 

“It let us live,” Nori whispered. Her vision started to darken again, and she knew that despite the miraculous recovery from the nanite acid, she was still in need of medical care. “It let us…” 

“Nori!” Khan and Yeva both cried, and that was all she knew.

• • •

Three nights later, the colony was quiet, its occupants all in sleep mode. They still had not found a better, safer, more secure home, but the search was on pause as Nori healed and everyone tried to make sense of what she claimed had happened. Clips from the memory she shared were still being passed around and whispered over. 

The scanner at the door marking the somewhat hidden entrance beeped, reading a worker drone’s identification chip. The door swooshed open, and there, standing silhouetted against the hallway lights behind it, was a monster. The big one.

No one was there to see it slowly step inside the entrance hall. The door slid shut behind it, and the monster lowered Nori’s severed arm. 

Near silent, it crept into the colony’s shelter. It passed empty rooms, wandered empty hallways. It paused outside every door with a sleeping occupant behind it, only to move on after a moment. Until the Doormans’ home. 

It didn’t even need her hand to gain access. It entered into their living room, having to duck slightly beneath the doorframe. It ventured deeper, searching.

Had Khan or Nori been awake, they would have seen a yellow X shine out of the darkness at them from the foot of their bed. The monster stood there a while, scanning them both. It came around to Nori’s side and carefully lifted the bottom of her nightshirt. The puncture wound from its tail had healed well, its saliva doing its job. No one would have been able to tell she’d been injected with nanite acid. 

The monster turned and left them alone. 

The faint tap of its footsteps stopped outside a different door. It slid open at the monster’s touch, and it ducked into the nursery. 

Little Uzi was curled up around her favorite stuffed animal, a floppy-winged black bird. The monster stared down at her for a few minutes, inching closer every so often. 

It bent over the crib, washing Uzi with yellow light. It paused, and its visor dimmed.

Nearly half an hour passed with it standing there, motionless, before Uzi stirred. She had not yet grown out of waking up several times through the night, though she was getting better at rolling over and slipping back into sleep mode without disturbing her parents. 

She blinked and yawned and looked up at the monster watching her. It backed up a little. 

“Hi,” Uzi said. 

The monster waved at her. She raised her arms toward it with a demanding grunt. It hesitated, then slowly reached down and picked her up. 

She patted its face and yawned again. Gripping its coat in her little hands, she leaned her head against its shoulder and closed her eyes. Her visor flickered to display [Sleep Mode]. 

The monster’s X blinked a few times. It looked around, almost but not quite panicked at having a baby fall asleep on it. Finally, it carefully sat down on the floor, one hand supporting Uzi. 

With a bit of a stutter to start, the monster began to purr. 

It examined the nursery, and eventually its gaze landed on a pile of blocks in the corner. It tilted its head, glanced at Uzi to make sure she was still asleep, and then began to scoot over to them. 

• • •

In the morning, Nori opened the door to Uzi’s room and pinged Khan so harshly that he nearly collapsed in their kitchen. He rushed to join her, and he froze at her back. 

On the floor in the middle of the room was Uzi, curled up in a little nest made from a large, dark coat with a fuzzy collar. And beside her, facing the door, were twelve wooden blocks with painted letters on them. 

I AM STILL HERE 

Chapter Text

{You are handling this very calmly,} Yeva told Nori, examining her closely. 

“I’ve moved past freaked out to confused.” She absently twirled her solver, Uzi and Doll giggling as crayons danced themselves across the papers in front of them. “None of it makes any sense, Yeva. I’m driving myself mad, turning it around in my head.” 

{Talk me through your thoughts.}

Happy to get it off her chest, Nori tapped her fingers on the table. “I see that thing every time I close my eyes. We all know what they’re like when they kill, and those first minutes were no different. It took me down before I could so much as blink after it got the jump on me. It had me, Yeva. I was a dead drone.” 

She patted Nori’s arm. {And yet, here you are.}

“Here I am,” she echoed. She took a deep breath. “It found Uzi. And I don’t know why, but it stopped. It stopped. That makes no sense all on its own. But then it—it didn’t just spare me, it saved me. That nanite acid is nasty stuff, and it practically turned back the clock on that injury.” 

Yeva nodded, mouth a tight line. 

“And then…” She shivered just thinking about the monster being in their home. “It found the colony. Khan confirmed it with the system logs—it used my arm to get inside.” 

{We should all be dead,} Yeva whispered. 

If not from the monster getting inside without setting off so much as a single alarm, then from the monster sharing their location. All the squads functioned in threes, and the trio that operated in their city was no different. 

But it had been five days since the monster came and left without being seen, and it was like it hadn’t even happened. The monster’s squad hadn’t arrived to blast their way inside, there was no increased activity nearby, and the monster hadn’t returned. If not for the coat left in Uzi’s room and the evidence in the logs that “Nori” had scanned for entry at a time Nori was sound asleep, no one would ever have known it’d been there.

Which was chilling in its own way. It so easily could have gone entirely unnoticed.

“All we got from Uzi’s memories is that she woke up, and it was there, it was standing right over her. It picked her up, and she went back to sleep.” She’d had worse nightmares about that than her own brush with death.

{I keep saying we need cameras in the halls,} Yeva said. 

Nori tilted her head in concession. 

{How is Khan taking it?} 

“He spent the first few nights after sleeping in Uzi’s room. I didn’t point out that that wouldn’t stop the monster if it came back. If you want to talk about someone who’s not handling this calmly…” 

Yeva chuckled. She glanced back at the girls, cursed quietly, and used her solver to catch Doll before she could topple out of her chair at the miniature table covered in coloring supplies. 

“They’re so bad at balancing,” Nori said fondly. 

Yeva sighed but didn’t disagree. {So your biggest concern and point of confusion is its fixation on Uzi?} 

Nori hesitated. “Don’t go sharing this, okay, but there’s something else. Khan and I have been keeping it to ourselves for now. I just—I don’t know what it means. For us, for the monsters, for… this monster in particular.” 

Scooting closer, Yeva promised, {I will keep your secret.} 

“You know those wooden blocks? With the letters?” She paused for Yeva to nod in understanding. “The monster took some of Uzi’s and… wrote something with them.”

{So they are literate.}

“At least this one is. ‘I am still here.’ What the hell does that mean, Yeva?” 

Her friend leaned back, eyes wide. {I am still here?} 

Nori pushed her hands through her hair, propping her elbows on the table. “A drone-eating monster broke into our colony, tracked down my home, let my daughter fall asleep on it, and then left the message ‘I am still here’ for us to find. Make it make sense.” 

{It… perhaps a threat?} 

“That’s what I thought too, at first. The logs show the doors opening again right before morning shifts were about to start, and there’s been no sign of it, so we’re confident it left. But we didn’t find my arm, so it must still have it. But a threat just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know how else to explain it—”

{No,} Yeva interrupted, waving her words away. {I agree. As a threat, it does little more than make us uneasy.} She thought intently for a moment. {‘Still here.’ There is intention with that phrasing, I think.}

It was the sort of thing you’d say if someone thought you were gone. But that would only make sense if the monster hadn’t appeared to leave, but then, why warn them it was still around? 

Nori thought of the way the X had become ordinary eyes, so quickly there-and-gone that she’d have missed it if she’d blinked at the wrong moment. 

“It’s defiant, isn’t it?” 

Yeva raised an eyebrow. 

Nori’s core thrummed as she sat up straight. “Think about it. ‘I am still here’ sounds like ‘you did not get rid of me, I am not gone.’” 

Slowly nodding, Yeva said, {If that’s the case, then it is more than defiant. Defiance is for the one doing the getting rid of. That is not us. No, to give us this message…} She took Nori’s hand. {It is a plea for help.}

• • •

Drones weren’t the only inhabitants of Copper 9. When the core blew, besides wiping out all human life, it set off a chain reaction that ultimately led to the planet being saturated with radiation. Whatever they might have been before, the creatures that roamed the surface were unrecognizable now. 

The mutated beasts were as much a threat as the X-eyed monsters. The only difference was that the latter were intelligent, if unable to be reasoned with.

Multiple pings drew Nori to the entrance hall, where a group of drones were gathered around a pair on the floor, who, while alive and conscious, certainly looked like they’d been through the ringer. 

They were babbling, and the drones helping them were babbling, and it took Yeva noticing her and whistling sharply to bring a halt to the mess of voices. 

{Tell Nori what you saw,} she said to the less injured drone. 

He trembled but nodded. Nori approached and knelt on one knee. “Trevor, right?” she said. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He glanced between his companion and Yeva. “We were in the sixth quadrant, scouting for a new shelter or supplies. It was going well, but on our way back, we realized we were being followed.” 

Nori tensed against her will. 

“It was a beast,” Trevor said, and the vice grip on Nori’s limbs eased. “And we could hear it smelling us.” 

His audience murmured in fear and concern. Most mutated creatures had retained only one of their senses of sight, smell, or hearing. The first could be hidden from in any of the broken buildings or piles of debris; with the latter, the near-constant wind blowing across the planet’s surface usually covered the sounds of running. But the beasts that could smell, once they latched on to the scent of a drone’s oil, were a near guaranteed death sentence. 

“Piper and I tried to run anyway,” Trevor continued, and they both shivered. “It was getting closer, and we were just about to split up and—and hope at least one of us…” He choked, eyes teary. Piper took his hand, and Trevor latched on tightly. “But then we practically ran into another.” 

“We didn’t do so well,” Piper whispered, her visor cracked and left arm hanging limp. Trevor’s shirt was tied tightly across her upper body, and it was already soaked through with oil.

Trevor nodded. His torso was decorated with the imprint of teeth, spanning hip to shoulder, as if he had been picked up from the side and chomped on. One of his legs was sparking and bent wrong. 

“How did you get away?” Nori asked. 

They exchanged a hollow-eyed look. “We didn’t,” Trevor said. “A monster showed up. Th-the one that attacked you. Right? You said it was the big one, with the long coat.” 

She nodded, core lodged in her throat. 

“It came out of nowhere,” Trevor said, gaze distant. “I thought it would snatch us up—but it blasted the first beast and then practically ripped the second one off Piper. That one had—it’d thrown me, and it, it was pinning her down…” 

“The monster barely even looked at us,” Piper added. “We ran as soon as we could, and it sounded like it was still fighting them when we left. Not that it took long to finish.” 

“We saw it again.” Trevor reached out, shaky, and Nori grasped his hand. “Nori, it followed us. We kept seeing its X. But it didn’t touch us. We—we wanted to lead it away, but, I’m sorry. We weren’t sure we’d make it to begin with.” 

“That one already knows we’re here,” Nori solemnly informed them, and their eyes weren’t the only ones in that hallway that hollowed with fear. “The committee is aware of this, and a public announcement will be made soon, but the big one has found us.” 

“Why haven’t we left yet?” someone else blurted out. “Won’t it—”

“Because it found us a week ago, and there’s been nothing. The other members of its squad have been behaving normally, and if those two knew we were here…” 

{They would not have waited,} Yeva finished. {The monster has not shared our location.} 

“Why did it save us?” Piper whispered. 

Nori looked around at the assembled group. She saw their fear, their confusion, and wanted nothing more than to give them the reassurance they needed. 

“I’m going to do everything I can to find out,” she promised. “We’ll mention it in the announcement, but we still need to act with caution. We don’t know if this monster can be trusted or if this is a fluke.” 

The group mobilized shortly after, as comforted as she could make them, to deliver Trevor and Piper to the medical wing. Yeva remained behind with Nori, frowning at her. 

“What?” 

{You are going to do something stupid,} she said, emphatically not a question. 

Nori tilted her head back and forth, weighing her options. “Yeah, probably.” She grinned. “Don’t tell Khan.” 

{Please do not be reckless. Your family needs you, Nori. I need you.} 

She leaned bodily against Yeva, the way they used to in the labs when Nori got a little… overwhelmed. “Like I’d leave Khan to run this place alone. He’d be lost without me.” 

Yeva cracked a tiny grin and bonked their heads together. 

• • •

It maybe wasn’t the best idea Nori’d ever had, but she only had so many options here. Standing out in the snow, a reasonable distance from the colony in case one of the other monsters found her, she glared around the ruined city. She kept her solver at the ready and the scattered loose debris scattered in mind. 

“Hey!” she yelled. “I know you’re there!” 

She did not know that, but a bit of confidence could go a long way. 

“And I know you creeped on my family! What the hell was that about, huh? There are other ways to get a message to us!”

She kept slowly turning in a circle, scanning the buildings and alleys for a telltale X. Nothing. 

“What are you waiting for?” she shouted. 

Her echo hadn’t even faded when a bright yellow X lit up in a blown-out window of the skyscraper she was facing. 

Nori tensed, gritting her teeth. If it was one of the other two, they’d have been on her already. It had to be the one she was looking for. 

Regardless, her self-preservation programming roared to life, and she forcefully planted her feet in the snow to keep herself from running. “Well?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. 

The X remained unwavering for a long minute before it started to move. It tilted, bobbed, and then a faint dark shadow emerged from the window. Its wings snapped out, and it glided silently down to her. Her spine tingled. 

The monster landed in a crouch a polite distance away. It stared. 

Despite not expecting it to talk, the silence made her casing crawl. “Bite me,” she snapped. “You don’t make any sense, do you know that? You monsters don’t just let us live, and you especially don’t save us from beasts. So why did you?” 

The monster, obviously, did not respond. Nori huffed. She wasn’t sure what she’d hoped to accomplish with this. She looked away, taking a deep breath. Getting angry wasn’t going to help. 

She jumped when she turned back, finding the monster closer by half the original distance. It set something down in the snow and pushed it toward her. 

It was a backpack. The one Trevor and Piper had been extremely apologetic about losing, since they’d reportedly found some useful supplies. 

Nori activated her solver to lift it closer. It was untouched and still full. She lowered it to frown at the monster. It didn’t react to her scrutiny. 

Khan pinged her, and Nori sighed. Her time was up.

“Thanks for this, I guess. But hey, lay off the stalking. You’re freaking my colony out,” she said sternly. 

And the monster—it flinched. The X glitched, and those eyes were back for a fraction of a second, hollow and upset. It shuffled backward, blunt fingers fiddling with its belt. 

“So you do feel things other than sadistic oil-lust.” 

It hunched into itself, then shot into the air suddenly enough to surprise her into dropping the backpack. It thumped to the snow, and she watched as the monster quickly vanished into the city.

Hoisting the pack over her shoulder, Nori started the short trek back to the colony. She supposed, even if she still didn’t have any answers to the growing number of questions she had, that she had still learned something from this. 

The monster saving her had not been a fluke. The monster defending the other two had not been coincidence. It had approached her without intent to harm her, had returned a lost backpack, and it understood her words.  

The people of her colony had always called them monsters because no one had wanted to liken monsters to themselves. No matter how much they resembled drones, they could not be drones, because they were cruel and vicious and without remorse as they slaughtered their way through the planet. They had to be monsters because only monsters could be so horrifying. 

But that, what she had just witnessed, was a drone. It was a drone someone had tried to make into a monster, except—

Nori grinned. I am still here. 

—they had failed. 

Chapter Text

As a week passed, then two, the monster became a common topic of conversation around the colony. The promised announcement had turned into a meeting everyone had attended. Nori had felt oddly relieved when the general mood had been tentatively hopeful. The few who were uncertain were just that, and not outright against the plan Nori had presented. 

She would continue to try to engage with the monster, and in the meantime, anyone else who came in contact with it would treat it as something of a potential ally. They wouldn’t be careless—it was too soon to tell if this was all a trick—but Nori’s gut said it wasn’t. 

More and more drones returned from scouting missions with tales to tell. The monster almost always kept its distance, but if one looked around, they could often spot the watchful yellow X. The stalking, in that way, continued, but at least it let itself be seen. 

But the stories that gave her the best hope were the ones where the monster protected the colonists. In these two weeks, there hadn’t been a single death. It had killed three beasts in defense of drones. During a whiteout blizzard, it had guided a small group to safety, sat watch over them until conditions improved, then led them back to the colony. One morning, it had crouched at the end of the hall down from the exit, wings extended like a barrier. It hadn’t let even Nori pass, never mind the group set to go out scavenging. A surprise electrical storm was tearing across the city by midday, and only when it was over did the monster leave its post.

It was as incredible as it was terrifying. Nori was fascinated.

“I don’t like this,” Khan said. He held Uzi tight to his chest. “It’s too risky. We still don’t know enough about that… thing.” 

“And we won’t know more unless we try to learn about it,” Nori countered. She hefted the bag full of wooden blocks over her shoulder. “You don’t have to come, Khan. I won’t make you.” 

“But you’ll take Uzi no matter what I say.” 

Uzi, who refused to sleep now without the monster’s coat acting as her blanket, made grabby hands at the door. “Mos’er,” she demanded. 

Nori gestured at her with a grin. 

Khan sighed. “She doesn’t know any better, and you know it.” 

“Which is perfect. I think it knows we’re still afraid of it, and that’s part of why it doesn’t try to interact with anyone.” 

“And it shouldn’t,” Khan muttered. He huffed, ruffling his mustache. “So you’re going to use our daughter as bait?” 

“Not bait,” Nori said. “Just… incentive. Besides, it clearly likes her.” 

Khan gave her a tired sort of look. “That’s… not supposed to be a good thing.” But when Nori opened the door and left the shelter, he was at her side.

As soon as they were out in the open, Nori felt watched. She didn’t try to look for the monster, just led her family through the snow to the parking garage she’d taken to using as a meeting place. She was the only one the monster would ever get close to, but the communication barrier made for frustratingly one-sided conversations. Even nodding or shaking its head had not come naturally to it. 

“Why here?” Khan asked. His head was on a swivel, suspiciously eyeing their surroundings. 

“Protected from the elements, close to home, enclosed enough that we’re not likely to be attacked by anything else,” she listed off, “and… I’ve gotten the sense that it likes to have an easy escape route.” 

Khan gave her a bewildered look, but she could only shrug. She’d tried setting their meeting place in one of the many office buildings, but the monster had been twitchy the whole time, staying crouched and alert, lingering in doorways rather than fully enter a room.  

She had just finished spreading the blocks out on the concrete on the third floor when Uzi laughed. “Hi! Hi!” 

Nori looked up. Khan stiffened and slowly turned to see what his daughter had seen from over his shoulder. 

Perched on the outer half wall, the monster tilted its head. Its tail swayed behind it, wings already retracted. 

Khan took a shaky step back. 

“Hey,” Nori said quietly, rising to her feet and going to him. “I know. I know it looks scary. But it’s not going to hurt us.” 

“It nearly took you from me. Both of you.” 

Nori had nothing to say to that; it was true, after all. And until they understood why the monster hadn’t followed through with killing her, they didn’t know if its reason was something it might change its mind on. She knew she took that risk every time she came out here, relying on its continued mercy. 

Uzi wiggled, arms out toward the monster. She made her adorable little grunt, her way of demanding something or else feel her wrath. 

The monster wavered in place, leaning forward before pulling back. It waited. 

“See?” Nori said. “It doesn’t want to hurt us. It doesn’t even want to scare us.” 

Khan scowled at the monster. “If it changes its mind, we won’t be able to stop it.” 

Uzi’s grunts started to turn frustrated. 

“Khan,” Nori whispered, turning his face to hers with a hand on his cheek. “Where do you see us in five, ten years?” 

“Us?” 

“The three of us. Our colony. The planet.” 

“I—I don’t…” 

“We live in fear of everything outside our shelter. Monsters, beasts, blizzards, lightning. We only come out at all to scavenge—and for what? Is that all we’ll ever have? An underground bunker that we’re too scared to leave? An existence dedicated to basic survival? Is that the future we’re working so hard for? I don’t want Uzi to grow up afraid for her life, Khan. I don’t want her to think this is all there is. But if we don’t try to make things better, that’s what will happen.” 

He swallowed, his mustache twitching. “And you think befriending a monster will help?” 

She looked over at it. It hadn’t moved, was waiting patiently for some signal she didn’t know how to give but that she imagined had to come from Khan. 

“I think we have the chance to change things. This is where we start.” 

Uzi whined, straining against her father’s hold. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes. 

“Okay,” Khan whispered. He leaned his forehead against Nori’s and let out a slow breath. “I trust you.” 

“Thank you,” she breathed. She pressed a kiss to his cheek, smiling when he leaned into it. 

They both faced the monster, who immediately perked up. It slinked off the wall without a word from them, approaching slowly. 

With a happy squeal, Uzi wiggled. She made grabby hands at it. 

Khan went stiff as a board as the monster stopped in front of him. This would be his first time so close to it, and even after multiple encounters, Nori herself still felt that shiver of fear. It was over a head taller than them, and its body was so visibly built for attacking that it was impossible to forget its purpose.

It reached out, its hand so much like theirs, just a bit bigger, and let Uzi take hold of its fingers. 

“Baby steps,” Nori told Khan, nudging him. He gave her a weak smile.

The monster looked past them to the blocks. It made no sound, but its mouth twitched into a tiny smile. It started to step toward them, but stopped before it could pull its hand from Uzi’s determined grasp. 

It was comedic enough, seeing a monster that large and strong look so utterly torn between a pile of wooden blocks and a giggling baby, that even Khan chuckled. 

Figuring it’d be too soon to ask Khan to let Uzi go, Nori pulled him toward the pile. “Let’s not make the poor thing choose.” 

As a chain, Nori leading Khan holding Uzi gnawing on the monster’s finger, they settled down on the ground around the blocks. Uzi noticed them immediately, and then it was her turn to be indecisive about keeping hold of her friend or playing with her toys. 

Khan sighed. He leaned forward and set her down in reach of the blocks, more or less between himself and the monster. He kept one hand on her back for stability, and Nori, breathless, took the other. 

“If it wants us dead,” he mumbled, “whether or not I’m holding her won’t stop it.” 

“I still think it’s very brave of you,” she whispered, nudging their heads together. He sputtered, his eyes losing their hollow fear to a spreading blush. Hoping to keep him relaxed, or at least distracted, Nori asked, “Have there been any new contenders for the colony’s home?” 

As expected, Khan’s passion for finding a safe place for them all to live won out over his anxiety. He rambled adorably about their options and whether they were large enough or the walls thick enough or the location good enough. At the top of his list of requirements was a sizable entranceway where several extremely secure doors could be built to keep out the monsters and beasts. 

Though shelters and doors weren’t her own passion, his enthusiasm was contagious, and for some time, she nearly forgot about the monster in their presence. 

Until she realized Khan was gesturing with both hands at her, and if he wasn’t holding Uzi up, then—

Nori looked past her husband and sucked in a quiet breath. Uzi had made herself at home in the dip of the monster’s crisscrossed legs and was watching raptly as the monster solved a Rubik’s cube, of all things. Where had it even gotten that? It kept lowering the toy and letting Uzi move a slice, unbothered when she kept undoing its work. 

Khan, noticing her distraction, also turned to look. He tensed, but not as badly as before. What little she could see of his expression was caught between surprise and concern, but the fear had not retuned to his eyes. 

Even the monster was the most relaxed she’d ever seen it. A bright victorious feeling warmed her core. This was progress, progress on all sides.

Her eyes trailed down to the blocks, and her grin softened. The monster had spelled out UZI and NORI and KHAN. The rest of the blocks were left in a haphazard pile, some stacked into towers, except for one. A single N was placed in the lineup of their names. 

She blinked at that letter for a long, uncomprehending moment. But understanding struck her at last, and she gasped, latching onto Khan’s arm in her excitement.

“What?” he said, whipping back to face her. “What’s wrong?” 

She shook her head, laughing. Looking up at the monster, who was watching her, she pointed at the lonely wooden block. “Is that your name?” she asked. 

The monster reached out and picked up the N. Khan jolted as its X fizzled, sad eyes staring down at it for barely a second. It raised its head, offered her the block, and nodded. 

Nori took it almost reverently. This was—this was beyond a breakthrough. “N,” she said. “Hello, N.” 

The monster smiled slightly, then waved and tapped NORI. 

“Mos’er,” Uzi said, patting it to get its attention back. 

Nori opened her mouth, but Khan, her wonderful, kind, brave husband, beat her to it. “No, Uzi. It—” He squinted at the monster and guessed, “He?” 

The monster’s X blinked, but it—he nodded again.

“Uzi, sweetheart,” Khan said, “His name is N.” 

Uzi blinked at him, then tilted her head back to look up at N. N looked down at her, and after a pause, nearly split his face with a too-wide fanged grin. Both Nori and Khan startled, bolts of instinctual fear striking their cores, but Uzi immediately burst out into happy laughter. She tried to bare her teeth back.

“N!” she cried, waving her hand up at his face. “Hi, N! Hi, hi!” 

N turned a much-toned-down smile at them, and Nori couldn’t help but smile back. 

• • •

Two days later, screams from the entrance hall drew Khan and Nori’s attention, and they were among the first to arrive. 

“The door was already open,” one of the drones cried, cringing away. Another rushed off, babbling about alerting the medical wing. 

Propped against the wall near the scanner were two drones. Their visors were dark, but there was no way to tell if they were dead or not. If the internal damage was too severe, and that certainly appeared to be possible, then [Fatal Error] wasn’t guaranteed to display. Both were in bad condition—each missing at least two limbs, holes ripped through their casing, oil smeared all over them. 

“One of them must have scanned for entry before losing consciousness,” Khan said. He stepped forward to begin directing the assembled drones into carefully bringing them inside. 

Nori remained frozen in place, silent. Yeva appeared at her side, shaking her head. {They are lucky they made it before—}

“They didn’t,” she whispered. 

Yeva raised an eyebrow. 

“Look at the passage,” Nori said, keeping quiet. Past the chaos, the wide hall leading away from their shelter was free of oil. No drips. No smears. No footprints. “They didn’t walk here.” 

{But then…} Yeva’s eyes went wide. 

There was only one person outside of the colony who knew where the door was. And those wounds were indicative of a monster attack. 

Medics swarmed the scene, pushing others out of the way. The door slammed shut, sealing them all safely inside. Oh, but it was such a false sense of security, wasn’t i?

{You think N did this? That he did not just bring them here after finding them already injured?}

“They’re alive!” one of the medics yelled. Everyone became more frantic. Stretchers were rushed forward. 

“You don’t find drones injured after a monster attack, Yeva.” In her mind, she saw her own arm hanging from N’s mouth. Her solver itched to be used in response to her pounding core. “The other two would never let them get away. And if he'd rescued them...” 

N usually waited at the end of the hall to make sure drones he rescued made it safely inside. His absence now was damning.

{Why would he attack them, then stop? He has not gone after any of us since…}

Since he let Nori live. “I don’t know.” She watched the medics rush off with their patients. “But I’m going to find out.” 

And if N had been tricking them all this time and Nori had fallen for it, leading the rest into blind complacency, then she’d do everything she could to fix that mistake. 

{He brought them here. Alive. That must mean something.}

She hoped so. She really did. 

Chapter Text

Simmering with anger, Nori set out from the colony armed. All she needed was one knife, and her solver could replicate it into however many she needed to kill N. 

If it came to that. 

Did she want it to come to that? 

Her core ached against her will. It was foolish, she knew, to struggle like this. To feel betrayed meant she’d trusted him to a degree she hadn’t realized, which felt both obvious and like a revelation. Did a few moments of gentleness outweigh a year of ruthless killing? Could a monster really change so much so quickly? 

She tried to remind herself that this had always been a possibility. Nori herself, at the meeting, had emphasized that they didn’t know if the monster could be fully trusted.

And yet she could not forget the care in his every move when he interacted with Uzi. His smile. His patience as Khan struggled to accept his presence. The way he’d been so happy, yet so sad, when they called him by name. 

He was not tame. If nothing else, this incident was a painful reminder of that. But his kindness had not been faked; she believed that much. Maybe that made her a naive fool. Or maybe it meant her hope was not easily extinguished. 

Nori reached the parking garage they used for their meetings. She doubted he’d be there, but it was the only place she could look. Otherwise, she would have to wander and wait for him to come to her.

She wondered, if she did so, whether he would be coming to kill her. 

All told, she was surprised to find him in their usual spot. She was more surprised to find him huddled in a tight ball against the half wall. 

He was trembling, his head pressed to his raised knees. She saw the oil dripping damningly down his talons, and she instinctively reached for her knife. But then she saw the way those same talons were buried in his own body. One set had skewered his leg; the other appeared to have gone through his face, sharp points sticking out of his ruffled hair. 

There was more going on here than what she knew on a surface level. It was a truth that was incredibly frustrating at times like this.

Slowly creeping closer, Nori said, “N?”

He curled in tighter before slowly peeking up. As she’d thought, his talons pierced through the left side of his face, one beneath his visor and the other two in it, surrounded by spiderwebbed cracks. 

His right eye was an X, but in the mess of fractured visor, an ordinary hollow eye stared miserably at her. 

Nori sagged in place and dropped her hand from her knife. “Okay. Look. I’m not… all right, I’m a little mad. But I want to understand.”

He raised his head completely, revealing the oil smeared around his mouth. 

It wasn’t a surprise. They already knew the monsters ate drones. 

“What changed?” she demanded. Her temper was a wild thing, wanting to be let out, but fickle. She was as upset as she was angry. “I thought…” She huffed. 

Practicality had demanded she bring the knife; hope insisted she bring the blocks. Nori straightened, then marched over to him. He didn’t move. 

“Enough of that,” she said, swatting at the arm leading to his cheek. He hesitated, then slowly began to remove his talons from his body. Satisfied, she dumped the bag of blocks at his feet. 

He hadn’t even finished the painful looking process of un-impaling his face before he reached forward with his free hand and arranged a few blocks together. 

SORRY

She had the inexplicable thought that if he’d had the option, he’d have punctuated it with a :( face. 

Nori stared at that word as he finished freeing his head. The cracks healed quickly, smoke drifting off his visor. As soon as it was whole, the X and eye glitched back into the singular broad X. 

“Do you want to hurt us?”

N shook his head, hardly able to look at her. 

“Something’s making you.”

He nodded. 

“So at any moment, you could lash out again. The next drone you try to slaughter could be Uzi.” 

He shook his head vehemently. 

She snorted, derisive. “What, you can’t stop it, but you can predict it? Right.” 

After a moment of hesitation, N nodded. 

Nori narrowed her eyes. “I don’t believe you.” 

He didn’t move for a minute. When he did, he reached for the blocks. She crossed her arms and waited as he shifted through them, putting together whatever he thought was an adequate excuse or explanation. 

SELF PRESERVATION OVERRIDE

She barked a laugh. “If you think you can make me believe those two attacked you and you were acting in self defense, then you’re an idiot. I can accept that you trying to kill me was a different situation. But you—“

She stopped; he’d leaned forward to tap the word PRESERVATION. 

N tilted his head up to her (though he didn’t need to tilt it much), and her gaze landed once more on the oil smeared around his mouth. 

Preservation. Not defense. 

“You stopped hunting us,” she realized, and her anger quickly began to drain away. “Which means you stopped eating us. You got hungry, and your code wouldn’t allow you to ignore it.” 

N hunched in on himself again, which was a very obvious and very ashamed, yes. 

Well damn. That was pretty different from senseless slaughter. It complicated things. 

“You’ll get hungry again. Soon, probably, because you stopped yourself from killing them. You’re not full.” 

There was something about his stillness that set off an alarm in her head. She realized he was looking at her knife. 

“Hey!” she snapped, stepping closer to jab her finger in his face while turning her body so the knife was out of sight. “Out of the question. I am not putting you down like a rabid animal! You—you snapped out of some crazy mind control code and you just want to give up as soon as things get hard?” 

He scowled. 

“Get this through your thick skull,” Nori said, flicking his visor. “Dying is never the first option. You fight till the end, got it? If not for my colony, who are all growing increasingly fond of you, then for Uzi.” 

N sagged. He had the look of someone who was having the worst day of their life for the hundredth day in a row. But he nodded. 

She hesitated, then kicked lightly at him. “And for me. ’Cause I care too. Or whatever. Shut up, don’t look at me like that!” 

Ignoring his silly smile, Nori crouched down and shoveled the blocks closer to him. She sent one flying at his stupid face with her solver, and she nearly flinched when his hand shot up and caught it. It didn’t even make him stop smiling. 

“We’ve got a lot to figure out, N. Top of our list is the eating innocent drones thing. So start talking—does it have to be us?” 

He sat up from the wall, pulling his legs into a crisscross, and began rearranging the blocks. 

• • •

“Nori, dear,” Khan said, standing in the entrance of their living room. “What are you doing?” 

She looked up from where she was draining a bit of her oil into a bucket. A similar tube was leading out from Yeva’s arm. Yeva snickered. 

“Science,” Nori answered. 

“Uh huh… What sort of science?” 

“Trying to see if my solver can replicate oil.” 

“And is there a reason…?” 

N had made it clear that the types of fuel worker drones consumed didn’t work for him. It had to be the oil byproduct that ran through their veins. It’d be incredibly handy if Nori could just create an infinite supply for him, but since “singular solid object” appeared to be the requirement for replication, she doubted she’d be able to do it for this. But she still had to try. 

{I think that’s enough,} Yeva said. She started to detach the tubes. 

“Gotta feed our colony’s guardian monster.” 

“Does this have anything to do with the survivors who have no memory of actually making it back here, implying someone else, perhaps their attacker, brought—”

“Psh, why would those two things be related.” She stared at him super innocently, unblinking. 

Khan looked at Yeva. 

{Yes.}

“Yeva!” 

{If we cannot replicate the oil, then we will have to get it from somewhere. And somewhere is drones, Nori.} 

“So it was N.” 

Nori straightened, almost shocked at how quickly she was ready to defend him, but her husband only sighed. 

“I hope you know what you’re doing.” 

Abandoning the bucket, Nori went and took his hands. “I wish I could say that I do, but I don’t,” she admitted. “But I know why I’m doing it, and I think right now, that matters more.” 

It hadn’t even been a full day since her long conversation with N, but the image of him impaled on his own talons, waiting for her to come and kill him, would not leave her mind. She saw it every time she blinked, and if she thought too long about it, an image of herself overlaid him. There had been a time when she had looked up at Yeva and hoped for the same.

She took a moment to consider her words. “If something happens to one of us here, we have dozens of friends and neighbors to help us. He has no one. He’s fighting against something that wants to consume him, and I—I know how that feels.” She glanced back at Yeva, who gave her a small, bittersweet smile. “There are some battles that can’t be fought alone.” 

{She is also quite fond of him.} 

“Shut the hell your mouth!” 

Khan blew out a quiet breath, squeezing her hands. “Just promise me that I won’t lose you to this.” 

She swallowed back a bit of snark. “I promise. We’re figuring things out, and I… I have a really good feeling about this. About N.” 

{Yes, we call that feeling ‘affection.’} 

Nori blindly flung the couch pillows at Yeva with her solver. “She’s worse than me sometimes,” she muttered as her friend yelped. 

“That’s why you two get along so well,” Khan said. “What if you can’t replicate the oil?” 

“Then I figure out how often I can afford to donate some. His body is trying to overheat itself into shutdown, Khan, and the only reason it didn’t was because a self-preservation override kicked in. His code is trying to kill him, and he was killing himself by refusing to eat us.” 

Her husband groaned. “Why couldn’t you have found a lost orphan that you begged me to adopt?” 

{Is that not what’s happening?} 

Nori giggled helplessly, thunking her forehead against his shoulder. It shook with his own chuckles. “He’s less orphan child, more feral cat, thanks,” she muttered. 

{Does that say more about him or you?}

She flipped Yeva off, refusing to otherwise move. She and Khan stayed like that for a minute, tucked against each other. 

Until Khan said, “We.”

“Hm?” 

“How often we can afford to donate oil. If N’s going to be the colony’s guardian monster, then as co-leader of the colony, and also as your husband, we’ll keep him alive together.” He raised her hand to kiss her fingers, whispering against them, “I’m not letting you fight this battle alone either.” 

Starry-eyed, Nori said, “Yeva. Nikolai has the kids, right?”

{Yes?} 

“Good. Get out. Khan and I are going to be busy for—a while.” 

Yeva sighed good-naturedly and picked up the bucket. {I will continue the science on my own, then, yes? Ping me when it’s safe to return.} 

Nori barely heard the front door swish shut. 

• • •

She didn’t know who tattled, but either her best friend or husband had let slip N’s oil situation. The whole colony knew within a day.

Nori stared at the community board, unable to keep tears from pooling in her eyes. 

Sign-Ups for Oil Donation, the sheet read. A second page had already been stapled beneath it to allow for all the signatures. A little doodle of N’s head grinned from the top right corner. 

She made sure to save a clear image of it to show N later. If anyone needed to see this, it was him.

Chapter Text

Having solved the immediate issue of N being kept fed to avoid his murderous override code taking over, Nori was ready to tackle the root of his problem. Namely, that such stupid coding existed in the first place. Seriously, overheating to death? The hell was that good for? 

Meaning—she wanted to remove the code. She doubted it’d be easy. Because of course it couldn’t be easy. But she was going to do it come hell or high water.

The hardest part, actually, might not be finding and removing the dumb program. It’d be convincing N to let her try. 

He could be shockingly skittish for one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet, and she’d come to recognize that sometimes his tendency to maintain distance was a kindness to those who were frightened of him, and sometimes, it was wary hesitance of his own. She didn’t take it personally. If there was anything she’d learned about him, it was that he was a walking tragedy. 

Something or someone out there had taken a kind and gentle drone and warped him into an oil-thirsty monster. An air of sadness sometimes seemed to weigh like a planet on his shoulders. 

What were you like? she’d wondered. Before you were this. 

She never asked. Firstly, because it felt pointlessly cruel. Secondly… Nori was pretty sure she knew the answer already. Whatever else that thing or person had done to him, she could never, would never forget—I am still here. N, at most, was probably just a bit taller and pointier than he used to be. 

But back to the skittishness. There was a high chance that past trauma she knew little to nothing about would win out over his trust in her. She would have to tread carefully.

Which was why she’d come prepared.

N landed on the parking garage half-wall and immediately faltered. His X blinked twice. 

“Look,” Nori said. “I’m going to cut right to the chase. This is bribery.” 

“N!” Uzi cried. She was finally getting a handle on the concepts of movement and balance, and she proved it by wobbling to her feet and taking a few steps toward him. 

He shot forward when she stumbled, catching her before she could face-plant. 

“Hi,” Uzi said, patting his arm. “’S time to color. Please.” 

They grew up so fast. Nori blinked a tear or two away. 

N slowly stood, hunching over for Uzi to clutch his hand and totter back to the child-sized table Nori had dragged all the way out to the parking garage. He shuffled after her, when he probably could have crossed the distance in two or three steps. That was a memory clip for the photo album, damn.

Doll watched, crayon limp in her hand and eyes wide. She hadn’t met N yet. Yeva was a bit put-out that her daughter would be introduced before her.

Nori watched her carefully for any signs of fear. 

Doll’s head ended up tilted all the way back as N was tugged to the table. {Tall,} she said. 

“Very tall,” Nori agreed. She sat at a normal-sized table placed beside the little one. Doll looked between Nori and N, frowning lightly. “N doesn’t talk, Doll,” she explained. “But I promise he’s very nice.” 

N waved at her, and Doll waved back with the sort of bewildered awe someone might have if they saw a cloud wave at them.

“Do you like coloring, N?” 

He nodded slowly, then helped Uzi wiggle back into her adorable tiny chair. He looked up at her, and she gestured invitingly at the coloring supplies covering the girls’ table. 

He twitched, head tilting down enough for Nori to know he was staring at her equipment. 

It probably looked intimidating. Digging into someone’s code wasn’t a small task, after all, and the technology needed for it reflected that. 

Nori laced her fingers beneath her chin. Aiming for casual, she said, “Phase two, N. We’ve got the oil situation under control, but wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t need oil at all?” 

He shuffled away, just slightly, arms raising to hug himself. There was something utterly core-breaking in his posture, his expression. He shrank inward, and Nori could feel his urge to flee. 

“N?” Uzi said. She offered up a purple crayon to him, which he couldn’t know the significance of. Uzi rarely just let someone else have her favorite color. 

Wavering for a moment, N knelt down and took the crayon from her. He scanned the table, then picked up a pretty green one to offer in return.

She beamed at him. “Thank you!” 

Staying on his knee, he stared for a long time at the girls as they worked. Doll wasn’t a chatty kid, and Uzi hummed to herself as she scribbled away with the green crayon. Finally, N looked back up at Nori, purple crayon comically small in his hand. 

“Can I explain what I’d like to do before you make any decisions?” she asked. 

He smiled, close-mouthed and weary, and nodded. 

“Ideally, we’ll link you into my setup here and keep the connection live. You’ll be awake the whole time. It will almost definitely feel uncomfortable, and I can’t promise it will be painless, but you’ll be able to back out whenever you want. On my end, I want to search for the program that makes you overheat and see if I can remove it completely. While I’m at it, I could look for other bullcrap coding.” 

Such an invasive procedure—not just reviewing code but actively poking around in what she was sure would be a tangled, unfamiliar mess—was usually done while the drone in question was unconscious. It was borderline barbaric to do it otherwise. But the likelihood of N being willing to go under had seemed slim to none, and this was the only way she could give him any control over the situation.

He glanced between Nori and the girls, probably realizing the bribery was meant to keep him sitting still and distracted while she worked. 

“It’s your choice, of course.” She made no threats or pointed comments or ultimatums. She refused to influence his decision. She would not coerce him.

Because—Nori doubted he’d been given many chances to make choices for himself. She wouldn’t add herself to the list of those who had forced him into doing something against his will. 

N relaxed a scant amount. He took a deep breath, which was about the only sound she’d ever heard him make, before slowly sitting down on the concrete. Even like that, he was hilariously oversized for the table. 

He gave her a single sharp nod, then bowed his head and went still. 

Nori stayed seated for a minute, breathing carefully through the feeling that this was a sacrifice of sorts. She gathered her gear and slid off her chair. N was seated across from Doll, with Uzi to his right and Nori and her table to his left. 

She wasn’t much taller than him even like this. She stopped behind him—the first time he’d ever let her be at his unprotected back. 

“For the record,” she whispered, “I’m sorry.” 

His tail thwipped up to wrap delicately around her wrist and squeeze before slipping away. 

The first bundle of wires ended in a circular plate that attached magnetically to his temple—another big factor in drones going offline for this, so they didn’t have to feel the interference. He winced slightly but didn’t stop her. 

His flinch seemed to catch Uzi’s attention, and she watched in confusion as Nori carefully hooked N up to her equipment. Two cables went into hidden ports at the base of his head. A third clicked heavily into his spinal configuration. She offered the final bunch of wires to him. He pulled his coat open a bit to expose his upper chest. His casing plates shifted to allow for access to his core. 

The moment everything was in place, the link went live, and N folded forward like he’d been punched in the stomach. 

Uzi gasped and leaned up on her knees. “Hurt?” she asked, furiously looking between Nori and N. “Mama hurt N?” 

Doll stopped too, looking on with a frown.

Nori sidestepped to crouch between N and Uzi, putting a hand on her daughter’s back. “Someone else hurt N a long time ago, baby. We’re trying to help him now. You remember when you got that icky virus and the doctor had to help you get rid of it?” 

“Yes. Ow,” Uzi said. 

“It’s like that. Even though he was helping you, what the doctor did didn’t feel very nice.” 

Her absolute gem of a kid gave Nori a stricken look before clumsily getting out of her chair and nearly tripping to the bag of toys they’d brought. Uzi dug through it for a moment before toddling back over. She squeezed in front of Nori to lean against N’s knee. 

“Here,” she said, pushing her bird plush at him. “Helps.” 

N made an effort to uncurl and accept the gift. He carefully set it in his lap before patting Uzi on her head. She beamed back. 

“If you had any idea what I have to do to get that thing away from her just to wash it…” Nori shook her head, amused. “Outrageous favoritism.” 

Uzi gave her a dirty look. “Not for Mama.” 

“But it’s for N?” 

“Yes,” Uzi said with a duh tone. That’d be a word that’d see a lot of use from Uzi once she learned it, Nori imagined. 

Nori laughed and returned to her equipment. “I see how it is. All right, I’m—” 

{Wait,} Doll said. She got up and began dragging her chair around the table. 

N started to reach out before realizing he couldn’t go anywhere without pulling the cables free. His tail instead snaked over the table and scooped through the handle hole in the chair back. He tilted his head at her, waiting. Doll paused and poked the glowing glass canister. 

What was it with lil baby drones and being drawn to his deadly syringe? “He’s going to help you move it,” Nori told Doll. “Where you going, kiddo?” 

{There,} she said, pointing beside N. 

Nori furrowed her brows, confused—but not for long.

Uzi lit up. Giggling, she latched onto her chair and began to wiggle it around the table’s corner to N’s right. Doll helped to push it as N effortlessly lifted her chair to his left. 

Oh, Yeva, Nori thought, so so proud. We did good with these kids. 

The girls climbed back into their chairs, bracketing N close enough that they were practically on top of him. 

{Mama says we make each other brave,} Doll told N. She patted his leg. 

Uzi nodded vigorously. 

It was too adorable. Yeva was going to be furious that she missed this. 

“Now that everyone’s all settled in,” Nori said, choked up but trying to hide it. “Ready?”

{Yes.}

Uzi leaned into N’s space when he didn’t move to respond. “Together?” she asked, holding out her hand. 

Nori had to look away and blink rapidly for a moment. 

N’s hand pretty much swallowed Uzi’s up in his palm. She giggled about it, then brandished her crayon at Nori. “Ready, Mama!” 

With a little shudder, N gave Nori a look that perfectly managed to convey no, I’m not ready, but you should start anyway. 

“You pull any of those off, and you’ll cut the connection,” she reminded him. Information was already spilling across her screens. “Might make you dizzy for a minute, but I won’t actually be doing any editing without very explicitly telling you so, and probably not today at all. So you don’t have to worry about sync issues.” 

For a long moment, he stared at her. Then with a last, quiet exhale, N turned to the coloring supplies. 

That was as much a go-ahead as Nori could expect. She settled in and got to work. 

Chapter Text

“I’m so glad we acquired a guardian monster before Uzi learned how to run,” Nori mused, her hand laced with Khan’s. 

They both watched Uzi dart through the snow, kicking up drifts and trying to climb every broken car they passed. N stayed on her heels, infinitely patient, and gently guided her away from potential danger. And then Uzi would switch gears and become more interested in playing her new favorite game: chase. Didn’t matter who was doing the chasing, but as long as she was running after or from someone, she was happy. 

Something would inevitably distract her, and, well. Rinse and repeat.

Nori’d never seen a drone keep up so well with a hyperactive bottomless pit of energy before. This was game-changing, honestly. Just wait until all the other parents of youngsters found out. 

“I’m still not letting him babysit her,” Khan said, eyeing them with more caution than Nori. 

She sighed but refrained from starting an argument. It’d been a good day, a satisfying day. She wouldn’t ruin it. 

A relatively large group of them, numbering around twenty, was on their way back from a neighboring outpost. The near-constant snowstorms of Copper-9 created too much interference for reliable communication between individual colonies, but simple SOSs usually made it through. Six days earlier, they’d received one with only two words attached: beast attack. 

Khan and Nori had gathered up medics and engineers and builders and a handful of volunteers able to lend a helping hand. Everyone else was on shelter arrest until they came back, both because now was not the time for their outpost to experience a problem and because the emergency response team was taking N with them. 

Nori didn’t want to say they were growing to be reliant on him, but… now that they’d had a taste of safety, there was no going back. 

The damage had been bad, but many hands made light work, and many hands plus a monster made extra light work. 

She was still on a high after watching the members of the other outpost slowly relax around N. They’d been terrified and disbelieving over his presence at first, only allowing it at all because Outpost 3 vehemently vouched for him, and they couldn’t afford to refuse any help. They’d been downright friendly to N by the time they left, and she was pretty sure only part of it was because of how efficiently he moved enormous pieces of debris. 

“Is it blackmail?” one of the other colony leaders had asked her. “Coercion? Have you found some way to take over his programming?”

Nori had bitten her tongue to keep from snapping in offense, instead shaking her head and saying, “Nothing like that.”

“You just… truly trust him?”

“It took time, but yes. Completely. And he’s great with kids.” She’d nodded off to the side, where a small gaggle of children, Uzi among them, oohed and ahhed over his wings. He’d been keeping the younger drones out of the way of major repairs for hours without losing their attention. 

When they called it quits that night, and various parents went to collect their children, they found a dozen little drones flopped over him, already deep in sleep mode.

After a few days of work, the shelter was in much better condition, the injured colonists had been seen to, and N had gone off to kill the nest of beasts that had been plaguing them for months, resulting in the most recent attack. Their neighbors had seen them off with sincere gratitude, even for N. 

And now they were on their way home on a shockingly clear evening. Nori marveled at their group. Drones were chatting as they walked along, the mood bright. They weren’t huddling in shadows and sneaking between buildings. For the first time since she’d arrived on the surface, they were able to move around outside with almost no fear. 

Up ahead, N pounced on Uzi—a move that, not too long ago, would have sent panic through Nori’s veins, her trust still so new and fragile. But now, she only smiled fondly as he rolled them through the snow before ending up on his back, Uzi triumphant on his chest. 

“We’ve got company,” someone further back called forward. “Looks like a sniffer!” 

N lifted his legs and raised up on his shoulders, holding Uzi in place. His feet went over his head, and the rest of him followed, seamlessly curling then uncurling in a reverse somersault, leaving him crouched. 

“Just watching that made my spine hurt,” Khan said, massaging at the small of his back. 

Nori snickered. It was as painful as it looked; monsters must be built to be more flexible than workers. Her multiple failed attempts had been worth it, though. N had smiled so much that day. 

He set Uzi down, wings flashing out, and he soared over their heads, then darted off in the direction he was pointed in. Gunfire echoed down a side street a moment later. 

“Wild that someone can notice a beast without sounding the least bit panicked,” Nori said. She twisted to do a quick head count, and that was when it happened. 

Khan gasped at the same moment that Uzi shrieked, and Nori whipped back around in alarm. She barely had time to notice a flash of yellow and silver before a blast of air blew her hair back, and then the monster was high overhead, Uzi in its talons. 

Nori’s core just about stopped. 

It was one of the squad from their area, the one with high twin-tails. That yellow X examined Uzi, a fanged grin slowly spreading wide. 

She hadn’t feared those features in months, and it was with the strangest sort of disconnect that her processor still said those sharp teeth and blinding X belonged to a friend.

Chaos immediately broke out in the colonists—they chattered and yelped, pressing together into a panicked huddle. Khan’s grip on her hand turned almost painful. 

A second monster dove to the ground in front of their group, sending up an explosion of snow. There was gleeful hunger in this one’s expression. 

Her solver sputtered, the numbness of utter terror rendering her powerless. She’d thought she knew fear when N first attacked her and Uzi, but this—this was a world of difference. 

“Lemme go!” Uzi cried, trying to twist away. 

“No,” Khan choked. “No, no—”

Where was—N had to be—

(The thought that he’d left them, or betrayed them, or led them into a trap never even crossed Nori’s mind. They were beyond that, so far beyond that.)

And then the monster holding Uzi, it—it spoke.

“Aw, look, V,” it said, twisting Uzi upside. “The mute found a pet.” 

“Barely a mouthful, that one,” the one on the ground said with a giggle. “I mean, just look at this feast.” 

Nori felt stuck in place, frozen. A feeling of calm clashed against her core-stopping horror. She felt distant from her own body. 

“Keep your claws to yourself for a second.” The X fizzed and was replaced by two ordinary eyes glaring imperiously down at Nori and Khan. “It’s nothing personal,” the monster said, flippant, “but traitors must be punished. He looked fond of this one, so the last thing N gets to see before I trash him is its innards.” 

The monster squeezed, slicing shallow lines into Uzi’s torso. A few drops of oil fell to stain the snow. 

Horror turned to rage like a wick being ignited. Dual solver symbols hummed at her fingertips, already close to overloading her with the sheer amount of energy pouring into them. The ground monster, V, yelped as every bit of loose debris on the street rocketed at her. The air itself warped around the flying one, forcing the monster to zip backward to stay airborne. 

Her solver still refused to work on them, no matter how much she strained to snap the one holding Uzi in half. 

“Oh hell no,” a dented V snarled, her machine gun arm snapping up at the colonists. 

Nori didn’t even have time to wonder if she could stop a dozen individual bullets all at once, because at the same moment that V let rip, a second explosion of snow right in front of her and Khan blinded her. For a moment, she could only hear the sharp pings of bullets on metal, and a terrible dread that Khan had been hit stole her breath. 

When the powered snow cleared, though, she saw only the backs of N’s flared wings. Wisps of smoke from the bullet impacts faded away into the air. His tail lashed back and forth. 

Just past his bladed feathers, Nori watched his hand curl into such a tight fist that it shook from the force of it. 

V bared her fangs in a frustrated scowl.

“Oh look,” the first monster said flatly. “The traitor, come to protect his pets. Y’know, I thought you being mute was supposed to make you less trouble, but—”

A wretched, grinding growl interrupted her, and it was so loud that Nori and Khan both startled. V stepped back, her X becoming hollowed eyes. 

Nori thought at first that it was N somehow using his voice box when she’d thought he couldn’t, but it was Khan who caught on first. 

“Is that his core?” her husband whispered. 

And he was right, she realized. It sounded like gravel being ground up in a rotating crusher, but it was definitely coming from N’s body. She hadn’t even known he could purr, much less make… whatever that noise could be called. 

“N,” Uzi whimpered. She tried to push at the talons around her tiny body, but she only ended up cutting her finger. Her frightened purple eyes turned to him, wobbly with tears.

N’s tail stilled.

There was no playful wiggling, no shift in posture, no sound other than his fury made impossibly audible. N went from perfectly motionless to a blur of movement faster than a blink. He was colliding with the monster before Nori had even registered his absence from in front of her. 

“J!” V yelled. Her wings unfolded, and she took off to help her squadmate. 

N and J tumbled through the air before shooting apart, and Nori’s relief sent her to her knees. He had Uzi in the crook of his left arm, tucked against his chest. He turned so his right side was forward, his sword held out threateningly. 

Knowing N, if they’d let it go and retreated, that’d have been the end of it. But she wasn’t surprised that these two didn’t back down. 

Something felt different with them. As if whatever N had snapped himself out of didn’t exist for his squadmates. As if they weren’t buried under layers upon layers of cruel coding that Nori was still trying to figure out how to undo without killing him. 

V snarled and bolted at him as fast as he’d gone for J, both swords leading her charge. N dropped in the air and surged back up in almost the same moment, catching both swords on his one and bringing V to a harsh stop. 

The size difference between them wasn’t as stark as between N and a worker drone, never mind Uzi or Doll, but with his wings fully flared and his shoulders squared and an angry scowl on his face—he didn’t need to be bigger. 

Nori shuddered. 

J crashed into his back, and she seemed to be trying to go for Uzi, but N snapped his left wing down to block her hand, even as his legs raised and kicked forward. V grunted as she careened backward. N twisted, his right arm coming around his front to stab through a gap in his feathers. J yelled as she swooped away, clutching her leaking shoulder. 

V darted around to her side, and J bared her fangs at him. “Big mistake, idiot. Now you’ve really pissed me off.” 

N’s sword switched to his talons. His left hand tightened around Uzi’s back, his fingers splaying to better protect her head. His X narrowed. 

It became a true blur of movement after that. Nori couldn’t hope to keep up, and she could only clutch at Khan as the three monsters clashed and collided and retreated over and over again. The only times she got a clear view of N and Uzi was when he broke from the fight to intercept stray missiles and bullets heading for the colonists.

She had the thought that they should move, get to cover, run, anything, but she choked on the fear that moving would draw attention to them, and the last thing N needed was for one of the monsters to target them too. 

There was a core-stopping moment when, after N delivered a brutal kick to V that sent her rocketing through a window in the nearest building, J rammed her talons up through N’s stomach, pinning him in place. Nori knew, had seen, that he twisted to take that hit himself because those talons had been aimed at Uzi.

“—and I’m sure the boss will be interested to know about your little rebellion,” J was in the middle of sneering. “Did you enjoy your reprogramming so much the first time that you couldn’t wait to do it again?” 

N’s X glitched into lined, hollow eyes for a split second, and the fear in them… Nori itched to smack the damn monster for making him look like that.

“Maybe I’ll keep your pet for you until you come back from your rehabilitation,” J continued, twisting her talons. Her tail snapped up to carve a glowing path down his cheek. “And then you won’t think twice about killing it yourself.” 

Nori watched steel thread itself into N’s spine, and with his free hand, he latched his fingers into her mouth and yanked her head down. She cried out in surprise, then released a pained shriek as he smashed his forehead into the sensor nodes on her head, exploding them. 

He wrenched himself off her talons, dripping sludge-thick oil. His right hand was missing its fingers. 

J flew backwards, clutching at her head, and V suddenly shot like a missile past her. N danced backward, staying just out of reach of her talons as his fingers regenerated.

And as soon as they were, he lunged at her. It surprised her enough to give N an opening to grab her coat in a fist and violently whip around in tight maneuver that slingshotted V straight into the approaching J. They both cried out and tumbled backward in a tangle of limbs. 

He bared his fangs at them as he readjusted Uzi, who had remained untouched through the whole fight. 

For obvious reasons, Nori hadn’t ever seen monsters fight each other before. It was a different level of terrifying. She’d known they were fast, were vicious, were armed to the teeth. But all those ambushes and attacks paled in comparison to this. Because if this was what monsters were really capable of, if this was what N was really capable of, then it was nothing short of a miracle that their colony hadn’t been wiped out long before N snapped out of the mind control code. 

“What the hell?!” J shrieked, an anger mark pulsing over her narrowed eyes. “You’re supposed to be a useless, incompetent idiot! How are you—”

N’s arm flashed with an attachment Nori hadn’t seen before, a sun-bright glow at the end, and J’s words cut off as a laser beam sliced straight through her neck and up across her face. The pieces of her head slipped forward and toppled to the ground below. Her body hung in the air for an extra moment before crumpling to the snow with a crash. 

“You actually just…” V gaped for about as long as it took N to shift and zero in on her too. She froze in place, eyes wide; it was the first time Nori had ever seen a monster look like prey. “You’re choosing them? Over us?” 

And she actually sounded upset about it. Nori wanted to smack her too for that—for the audacity first and foremost. In what world would N want to be around drones who were so cruel to him? 

N’s laser began to glow again, which would have been answer enough, but he didn’t hesitate to shoot the laser at her to really drive the point home. V’s eyes lined with fearful stress as she rushed to scoop J’s body up. She zigzagged, dodging the continuous beam as he followed her with it, until, with one last look of shock, she vanished into the city with her downed teammate. 

N only deactivated the laser once she was fully out of sight. He waited, watching and still aiming, for a long moment before seeming to accept that V had truly gone. His hand returned. He glanced at Uzi before swooping down, landing gently. 

Nori was already stumbling forward, Khan at her side. She was shaking, exhaustion from overpowering her solver making her weak. 

N tried to offer Uzi to them, he really did, but she stayed pressed tight to his chest, clutching handfuls of his coat. 

“Oh, baby,” Nori croaked. “I—c’mere.” 

She stubbornly shook her head without raising it from the front of N’s shoulder. 

“You’re hurt,” Khan said, sounding as shellshocked as he looked, and it took Nori a moment to realize he was saying it to N. 

N raised his free hand to the burning wound in his cheek before shrugging. As if he’d forgotten about it. Having felt the awful pain of nanite acid, Nori frowned. “Fix that,” she demanded, her core still racing. “You—heal yourself right now, N.” 

He blinked at her, once, twice. He smiled, tiny, then stuck his tongue out, just managing to reach it far enough to swipe up and down the length of the cut. The glow immediately faded, and within seconds, the shallow slice vanished as if it’d never been there. Just like Nori’s puncture wound had. 

N looked between her, with her hand on Uzi’s back, just above N’s own, and Khan, pressed to Nori’s side. And then his wings shivered open again as slowly as he was probably capable of. He curved them forward, around Nori and Khan, and they stumbled as N knelt and nudged them to the ground with him. 

With a bit of shuffling, he folded both of them into his arms, Uzi sandwiched between them all. His wings stayed raised, a protective barrier. 

Nori blinked, then just about collapsed against him, feeling Uzi’s little core hum away against her own. Khan squeezed closer too, his right hand going around Nori’s back. Her left hand was tucked against Uzi, so she couldn’t return the gesture, but she grasped N’s coat with her right, as tightly and desperately as Uzi was. 

N rocked just slightly to the side, and she imagined Khan had just latched onto him as well. 

She heard whispers among the rest of their group, nearly forgotten in the terrifying rush of the fight. But then there was the crunching of snow, the shuffle of boots and coats, and then—N raised his wings. One by one, everyone pressed in around them to form a great big group hug, a monster’s bladed wings settling carefully back around them all. 

Nori was rarely the tallest drone in the room. Khan had a few inches on her, and even Yeva was smugly the taller of the two of them, barely. She was used to being the smaller member of a hug. But it was an entirely different feeling with N. 

He was so much larger than her, than both of them. His arm felt sturdy and strong at her back, holding her in place. The whole of him felt immovable. He engulfed them, two adult drones and a child in her stage one body, with ease. 

Nori was part of the last generation made by humans; this was the only body she’d ever had. She’d never been Uzi’s size, never had a parent pick her up and cuddle her. But she imagined that this was what it was like to be truly small in someone’s arms. 

It felt safer than it had any right being. 

Tears welled in her visor, and she began to tremble in earnest. Khan clutched her tighter. Their friends and neighbors were a warm presence all around them. And N—N began to purr. 

It wasn’t as jarring or loud as his jet-engine growl, but it was louder than any worker drone’s purr. It rumbled through her like gentle thunder, and she only wasn’t embarrassed for immediately melting into the feeling because Khan and Uzi and everyone else reacted the exact same way. 

They stayed like that for a good long while. 

Chapter Text

It’d been a week since N’s squad tried to kill him and Uzi, and Nori still felt… off. Not from nightmares, though she’d had a few, or residual panic. Actually, all things considered, the three Doormans weren’t doing too badly in the emotional department. 

The happy ending to that particular horror story of an evening helped. 

No, it was from overusing her solver. A persistent headache had taken root in her processor, and she was suffering from near-constant weakness. Even just shuffling around their home exhausted her. Her vision blurred at random times, and her right hand had developed a twitch. 

Her initial attempts to brush Khan’s concern off—she’d had bouts of illness after some experiments back at the labs, so she wasn’t completely unused to these symptoms—had grown less and less convincing. Even to herself. 

{This is not normal, and you know it,} Yeva had said a few days in. She’d arrived to help around the house while Khan fulfilled both his duties and Nori’s. {The headaches never lasted longer than a day or two, and the weakness was cured with rest.}

“It’s gotta be the overuse,” she’d rasped. “Khan brought a medic by last night to make sure it wasn’t a coincidentally-timed virus. She didn’t find anything.” 

Perched at Nori’s bedside, Yeva had frowned. {I don’t like this.} 

Nori coughed. “Can’t say I’m loving it either.” 

Yeva had been hesitant to leave her alone, but Nori waved her concern away. Khan had been much warmer to N since he fought his own squadmates for Uzi, and N had been welcome in their home to play babysitter to both of Khan’s most important people. 

{I cannot believe you have not introduced me to him yet,} Yeva had pouted. {I still have only seen him at a distance, yet my own daughter asks after him nearly every other night.} 

“He made a good impression, then?” Nori had smirked. “Sorry, Yeva, but he’s out right now.” 

HUNTING, he’d written with his blocks. His expression had been thunderous, so Nori had a pretty good idea of what, or rather who, he was periodically hunting for.

Nori’s condition only worsened after Yeva’s visit. She spent more time in sleep mode than awake, plagued by disjointed nightmares. 

Dark silhouettes. Grotesquely fanged grins, bright X eyes. A crooked spire reaching toward the sky. Burning fire, red-soaked streets, collapsing buildings. The solver symbol, over and over and over. 

Even her nightmares felt wrong. Glitchy. 

And then—

“Nori!” she heard like a distorted, wavering echo. 

She paused in her jerky movements. Her joints were stiff, cracking every time she shifted in place. Her vision blurred. She was surrounded by sheets of paper, dark smudges baring their teeth at her. 

Her eyes glitched, one persistently flashing an error. 

The bulb overhead flickered, and in that flash-bang moment where light met dark, rippling shadows spiraled out from her. 

002’s core stuttered along, too fast, too uneven. Her right hand kept twitching, fingers snapping in and out of their sockets. 

She stared blankly at the wall. She felt floaty and buzzy and out of her body. Like she was static given physical form. 

The error popup fizzled yellow, warping between a warning and a solver symbol. 

“We’re home!” the echoey voice called. “And Yeva said she’s coming over and like hell you’re getting out of introducing her to N tonight!” 

“Mama!” Little footsteps raced closer, sounding like thunder. “N took me flying!” 

“N took both of us flying,” the first voice muttered, not without humor. “Prefer my feet on the ground myself.” 

002 creaked and lurched to her feet, turning toward the door. Her spine popped once, twice, thrice, her head lolling limply before crack-crack-cracking into place. 

The door slid open. 

Something small and purple bounced into the room, pausing belatedly. “Mama?” 

“Uzi? Is Mama sleeping? Don’t—” A larger thing stepped inside. A drone.

002’s arm stretched out, hand splayed. Her solver burned. Its match flared over the drone. A gasp was punched out of it as her solver sent it flying backwards. 

The purple thing ducked with a cry, then scrambled out the door. With dragging feet, 002 followed. 

“N!” 

The drone was picking itself up from the floor, the wall above it dented. 002 raised her hand again, static screaming in her head, a black hole yawning wide in her chest. 

Her solver, flickering between purple and yellow, engulfed the drone, pulling it up until its feet were dangling over the floor. It choked, scrabbling at its throat as the metal slowly crushed inward. It tried to say something, eyes wide and hollow with pain and confusion. 

A chorus of sharp snicks cut through the static. There was a blur of movement, a flash of yellow, and—

[[ERROR: LIKE OBJECT NON-INTERACTIVE]] 

A pair of massive wings spread wide between 002 and the drone, blocking her view completely. Her solver strained, but it would not be used against the X-eyed monster no matter how furiously she tried. 

Beyond, she could only hear the drone gasping for breath as it was sent crashing to the ground once more. 002 narrowed her eye—the other a solver symbol—and just as she contemplated alternatives, the monster leapt forward, talons outstretched. 

Her vision blurred with memory and nightmare. 

Shocks of pain raced up her arms, and 002 stumbled backwards. Her severed hands clanked to the floor. Fully cut off from using her solver, the symbol flashed wildly on her visor, glitch lines warping her eye. 

The monster tackled her, swaddling her in its arms and wings. 

“Mama!” 

Its head snapped up and to the side. She tried to kick at it in its distraction, but it was unwavering. She heard a frustrated grunt; just through a gap in the blades of the monster’s wings, she caught a glimpse of the small purple thing dangling midair, wrapped in a thin black cable. 

Yellow continued to encroach across 002’s visor.

Footsteps. 

The monster twisted and tensed. There was a moment of complete stillness in the room, even the purple thing going quiet. 

But only for a moment. “Aunt Yeva! Help please!” 

The drone 002 had initially attacked made a gurgling sound. 

{An interesting first impression, N,} a new voice said. 002 nearly hissed at it, something about it grating at her. 

She watched the X on the monster’s visor blink. 

The footsteps came closer, and part of the monster’s wing peeled back. 002 looked up into the newcomer’s—into 048’s red eyes. 

{Ah,} 048 said. {That is… not ideal.} She looked around before crouching beside them. {You got her hands—good. Oh, Nori.} 

002 didn’t so much as blink while staring back. 

{Damn incomplete patch,} 048 muttered. To the monster, she said, {I have already pinged the medics. But they cannot help her.} 

The monster looked between 002 and 048. 

{I don’t know of anything I can do either. Not this time. We thought the worst was behind us, and she has not had an episode like this since our time in the labs. I… had hoped they would not occur again.} 

With a bit of a droop to its shoulders, the monster contemplated 002. She contemplated it right back. 

They held their staring contest as more drones flooded the room, voices blending together into a muddle that she couldn’t understand. The monster’s expression was fairly blank, a pout at most, but flashes of wicked fangs kept overlaying its lower face. Her solver writhed. 

Spirals and spires and smiles and steeples and solvers—Xs and crosses and chains and yellow and yellow and yellow and—

Static surged through her, ringing and electric and making her body seize. 

Her mouth moved and her arms twitched—it’s coming it’s coming it’s coming, they’re here they’re here they’re here—and she grinned and it grinned and they grinned and it buried its claws in her chest and its tendrils wrapped around and around and around her, burning and squeezing, teeth in her core, hand reaching and twisting and—

• • •

Nori came awake in stages. She was warm and felt heavy. Stiff. A dull ache buzzed through her entire body. A motor was running loudly in front of her, vibrating against her visor. It was… nice, though. 

She drifted for a while, thoughts syrupy slow. 

She gradually became aware that she was not in her bed. She didn’t know where she was instead, but she knew how her and Khan’s mattress felt, she knew the sounds of an enclosed room in the shelter—and this was not that. 

While comfy, Nori could hear the wind. She was lying on her side on something soft but not overly plush. Hard ground was just inches below her. 

Her visor began to come online, frustratingly slow, and she made a weak attempt to move. Something held her in place, something immovable and metal. It was locked around her back, pressing down on her legs, holding her wrists in front of her. Her hands tingled strangely. 

At a total loss, Nori waited impatiently for her vision to return. And when it did, finally, she was met with dark cloth literally pressed to her face. 

For a long few seconds, she indignantly thought she’d been blindfolded. But then details filtered in, and she realized she was staring point-blank at a piece of clothing. A coat, to be exact. N’s coat. 

She grunted, and N shifted. It wasn’t a motor—it was his crazy loud purring. 

Nori was able to look down just enough to see one of his hands holding both her wrists together between them. Further, one of his legs was thrown over hers, trapping them in place. His wing blocked her view of their location, functionally caging her in. 

“What the hell,” she croaked, voice box sore and choppy. As if she’d been screaming. 

She looked up as he leaned back a little, peering down at her with a frown. She narrowed her eyes at him—or more specifically, at the piece of paper taped to his visor. 

SOLVER EPISODE, N BABYSITTING YOU UNTIL YOU AREN’T TRYING TO KILL US :) EVERYONE IS FINE — Yeva

“I tried to…?” She jerked in place, eyes blowing wide. “Oh hell, I tried to kill Khan.” 

N winced. 

In shock as her memories returned, she stared blankly at his chest. Shame burned in her like a wildfire. Her eyes hollowed and shrunk.

N contorted into a hunch, gently bonking his forehead against hers. The paper stared her straight in the face. Everyone is fine. 

He unwound from her only when she nodded. She examined her regrown hands as he sat up and twisted around for something. They looked no different; if not for the lingering pins and needles, she wouldn’t have known N had cut them off. 

“Uzi saw me like that,” she said quietly. “She must think I’m—”

A monster.

N pulled the paper from his visor and gave her a wry little smile. 

“Damn it. Sorry. I didn’t mean…” 

He whisked out a flat, square board with raised edges, and with a quick bit of shuffling, he presented her with it. In small tiles, complete with punctuation, was a response:

IT’S OKAY. BESIDES, SHE LIKES MONSTERS :) 

She barked a laugh. “Y’know what, fair point. Where the hell did you get this thing?” 

He rearranged the tiles, and she saw he had a small pouch full to bursting with more. 

GIFT FROM YEVA :D SHE SAID IT’S EASIER THAN BLOCKS

And then, beaming: 

I LIKE HER. SHE ALSO SAID TO TELL YOU TO PING HER WHEN YOU WOKE UP

“She’s been excited to meet you,” Nori said. Well. As excited as Yeva ever got. 

She pinged an apology at her friend and got an immediate ping of concern back. Mere seconds later, N straightened, head lifting as he listened to something she couldn't hear. BRB, he wrote, and then he was bounding up and zipping off through—not a window, she realized. 

They were in the parking garage. Based on the view of the surrounding skyscrapers, it was a higher floor than they used for meetings.

And she was sitting in the middle of something that could only be called a nest. A couple blankets, mismatched pillows, a half shredded identical copy of N’s coat, a handful of shirts—it was all arranged together into a cozy little heap on the concrete. 

Beside the nest was a concrete block that seemed to function as a table. Her eyes grew sad as she examined the objects on top of it. 

A purple crayon, a book about animals that had been torn in half, a chipped cup with a tiny plant sprouting from its dirt, and a drawing she knew Uzi had made. Morbidly, her own arm laid on the floor in front of it. Right at the head of the nest was a folded piece of paper with a paperweight designed to look like Earth holding it down. Nori curiously pulled it free. 

It was a picture, the fold lines worn and the ink faded in places. The edges were crinkled. It was of poor quality, the type that came from a damaged printer, and it had the look of a drone’s memory turned PDF file. 

The subject was a young human with a book on her lap. Her dark hair fell messily around her face, which was scrunched up in a happy smile directed at the viewer. On the couch on either side of her was a dozing worker drone. They bore a frightening resemblance to N’s cruel squadmates. 

One of the human’s hands was raised upward, and just at the bottom of the image was a faint blur of a drone’s hand beginning to reach back. 

Nori carefully folded the picture back up and returned it to its spot beneath the paperweight. It was, she noticed, within easy reach for someone laying in the nest.  

It was one thing to suspect that N hadn’t always been a monster, but it was core-wrenching to see proof of his old life. To see that, at some point, he’d been somewhere safe and comfortable, perhaps even a place he called home, with someone who had clearly cared about him. 

And now he was here, living in a freezing, barren parking garage, mute against his will, victim of mind control, and alone. Alone but for Nori and her colony, who had only very recently begun thinking of him as anything other than a monster to fear. 

The rest of the “room” was just as depressing. Gouges were scored into the walls and floor, scorch marks and bullet holes littering the space. There was dried, splattered oil, and more than one severed limb that certainly looked like they came from N’s body, not a worker’s. 

He could not be allowed to stay here. Nori had made up her mind on that by the time N swooped into the garage with Yeva in his arms. 

{Have you flown with him before?} she asked as he set her down. {That was quite exhilarating.} 

“No, but… it sounded like Uzi and Khan have.” 

N grinned and nodded. Yeva wasted no time in hurrying to the nest, falling to her knees, and wrapping her arms around Nori. Nori squeezed back and sighed. 

“So much for it being over, huh?” she muttered. 

{It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Take comfort in that, at least.}

“I tried to murder my husband.” 

{Haven’t we all?} 

N silently jerked in a way that implied a laugh bursting out of him. He turned away, hand concealing a smile. 

Nori rolled her eyes. “I’m trying to be serious here.” 

Sitting back on her heels, Yeva gripped her shoulders. {What good will that do? No—shut up and listen.} She gave a firm nod when Nori closed her mouth. {First, as I wrote, everyone is fine. You did not so much as touch Uzi, who has already finished pouting about N wrangling her so effectively. Khan sustained several injuries, yes, but nothing that the medics couldn’t handle. N neutralized the threat you posed before you could do any serious damage.} 

Nori swallowed and looked over at him. “Thank you,” she whispered. She could only imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed through the horrible what-ifs. 

N gave her a little salute. 

{Second,} Yeva continued when Nori was ready, {Khan knew this about you. He knew the dangers—I distinctly recall you trying to scare him off in the beginning.} 

“He said it only made him fall harder for me,” she whispered. She’d mellowed out on the surface, especially once they had Uzi, but back when the solver had still been a little too loud in her head and she’d been “poorly socialized,” as Yeva had put it… 

Khan had loved her through some of her worst days, when she was snappy and brusque and sharp with the burning sort of frenetic energy that came in the aftermath of being fully possessed by the entity behind the solver powers. 

Bonking their foreheads, Yeva smiled. {Determined man, your husband. And I certainly remember the look on his face that time with the collapsed building…}

Nori had yelled her voice box hoarse that night, fighting exhaustion and solver overuse to painstakingly unbury a group of colonists one chunk of metal and concrete at a time. She’d been so angry, at the world, at all the surface’s horrors, at the dead humans, at her cursed powers. 

But she’d done it, and she’d been half caught in the memories of being similarly buried after the core blew. She’d felt like a monster, a nightmare made of twisted metal and rotting core, wild with the damn solver trying to swallow her whole. 

And she’d turned, glitchy and wired all at once, all extra limbs and void, and saw Khan staring at her like she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

When her body gave out and she collapsed, he caught her. And according to everyone she’d ever asked, he’d refused to leave her side for the four and a half days she’d spent unconscious. 

She stopped trying to convince him she was poison after that. 

{Khan has always loved all of you,} Yeva finished. {At your best, at your worst, at your most dangerous. Today will not be the day that changes.} 

Nori sniffled subtly.

{And he is, of course, not the only one.} Yeva gripped her hand and squeezed it tight. {There. I have said my piece.} 

“How can I possibly argue with that?” Nori teased weakly. 

{You can’t.} 

Choosing the path of least resistance, Nori conceded. “All right, all right, so my banishment here was temporary. Still doesn’t change the fact that it was necessary to start with.” 

{We will take it as it comes. Given the timing…} 

“Overuse,” Nori agreed. “I’ll be more careful.” 

Yeva smiled gently. {We will get through this. All of us, together.} They both turned to N, and he gave them a double thumbs-up. {Now come—your family is worried.} Yeva pulled Nori to her feet.

N bounced forward, ready to bring them back to the shelter, but froze when Nori raised her hand to stop him. “Grab what you can carry,” she told him. “I don’t care if we have to knock down a wall to make a room for you in our apartment, but you’re moving in.” 

He blinked at her, then fumbled around for the board and tiles. WHAT

“Did I stutter.” 

His expression, limited as it was, did something complicated. Slowly, hesitantly, like he expected her to take back the offer (more like her demand, really), N scooted around the nest to his concrete block of belongings. 

She watched him slide the drawing, picture plus paperweight, and crayon into hidden compartments in his body. The little plant was carefully tucked into a pocket. He turned to the nest itself, sorting through the pile. In fact— “Y’know… those blankets look awfully familiar,” Nori said, amused. 

N’s shoulders hiked up, and he turned a guilty, kicked-puppy look up at her.

{You have no room to tease him for sentimentality,} Yeva said. {You keep the original N block on your nightstand.}

Nori wheezed as she went for her ex-best friend’s throat, but really…

The mild embarrassment was worth N’s full-body expression of soft awe—relaxed shoulders, ducked head, wondrous smile and all. 

Chapter Text

The best thing to come from Nori’s murderous little episode was the realization that LIKE OBJECT couldn’t be a coincidence. There was a connection between whatever had happened to N and the experiments that gave her and Yeva their strange powers and advanced healing. 

N, with some prodding and judicious use of Uzi’s pleading eyes, told them his story. An abridged version, at least, and there was plenty that he plainly skipped over, but Nori got the gist of it. 

He’d had a little sister on Earth who threw a kill-all-humans tantrum. Not too unusual; drones like that weren’t half as rare as humans would have liked to believe. The difference this time around was that this Cyn had been an eldritch abomination with the firepower, homemade army, and borderline invulnerability to back herself up. 

IT’S THE SAME, he spelled out, mimicking the three-point hand gesture they used for their solver powers. He’d been making himself smaller and smaller as the conversation went on, hunched inward and so visibly miserable that Nori had almost called it quits more than once.

Certain quirks of his behavior when they’d first started interacting were beginning to make sense. She’d thought before that he was a walking tragedy. It turned out that she wasn’t just right, she had underestimated the true depths of what had been done to him.

{They sought a defense against Cyn,} Yeva realized. {And they infected us with the same... virus, to put it simply, to test out their "cures."}

"The last patch," Nori said, "it worked, and now it's... I..."

Yeva gripped her hand. {It is not your fault, Nori.}

She didn't respond, couldn't even look at N. If she hadn't thrown the damn patch into the pit that would become ground zero of the core meltdown, they could've tried using it on N. He could've been freed in one fell swoop, but instead, Nori was left half torturing him with live connections to a code modifier as she painstakingly tried to sort out the dumpster fire of his code. 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, BUT I AM ALSO SURE IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT

Nori laughed because the alternative was to start crying from sheer frustration.

Overall, unsurprisingly, it was not a fun conversation, not for him or her or Yeva. And it felt like it just kept getting worse.

Yeva stared at the hurried drawings N had done of Cyn. {These limbs,} she said, pointing them out to Nori. They were bone-bleached and clawed. {The day the core blew, when you were under its influence… you had these.} 

When Yeva shared her memory of that day, N hesitantly confirmed that Nori's altered voice was Cyn's.

Nori’s memory of that day prior to the patch stabbing through her visor was near nonexistent. It had been the worst episode she’d ever had. She swallowed, tracing the way the joints seemed wrong. Her voice cracked when she responded, “Cool, great. So this thing’s capable of possession and mind control, and doing who-knows-what to our bodies in the meantime.” 

N put his hand over Nori’s where it was curled into a frustrated, fearful fist on the table. He squeezed gently, and it was so damn impressive when she knew the sort of strength that ran through his limbs. With his other hand, he said, I BROKE FREE. YOU BROKE FREE

And when she wasn't quite able to muster up a smile, he rearranged the tiles into the sharpest, most powerful reminder he could give her that they were not pawns or puppets or brainwashed slaves. That even in the most dire straits, when there seemed to be no light or hope or end to the dangerous mangled mess in their codes…

I AM STILL HERE

Nori breathed out, the words settling the roiling pit inside her, and gave him a smile that was just as much a determined baring of her teeth. “You sure as hell are. All right then. Let’s make a plan.”

• • • 

Nori wasn’t quite willing to rely on the dubious survival of the crucifix patch, so the hard way it was. Until they could find the time to go dig through endless rubble for it, at least. Comparing her code, N’s, and Yeva’s all together was a tedious job—but that wasn’t to say there was no progress. 

She was starting to see, using Yeva’s fully patched code and her own half-patched code, how N’s should look. Because they were more similar than she could ever have expected. 

“Don’t tell N,” she said to Yeva as they walked through the halls to the exit, “but I think I know how this is going to end.” 

{Sorting out his code?}

“Yeah. It’s all…” she waved her hand around, “tangled together. There’ll have been a dozen chain reactions of to fix this, I have to fix that and to remove this, I need to unlock that by the time his code won’t look like someone shook it up in a jar. Our monsters are nothing compared to the sort of monster Cyn is. The things she did to him…” 

The worst offense, in Nori’s eyes, was Cyn stripping away N’s ability to communicate.

(He shamefacedly pushed the board over to them after a long minute of placing tiles. I RESISTED. SHE DIDN’T LIKE THAT. SHE MUTED ME AS PUNISHMENT AND TOOK AWAY EVERYTHING ELSE. NODDING/SHAKING MY HEAD, I CAN DO, BUT THOSE ONLY MEAN ANYTHING IF SOMEONE IS LOOKING. I CAN’T MAKE ANY NOISE WITH MY VOICE BOX. CAN’T WRITE, TYPE, SIGN, NO VISOR MESSAGES. THE X IS LOCKED THERE

“Placing blocks was a loophole,” Nori said, simmering with righteous fury. 

He replied, MOVING PIECES OF WOOD ISN’T INHERENTLY ABOUT COMMUNICATING. I GOT LUCKY

He gave her a grim sort of smile. 

“One day,” Nori said, fierce. “One day, mark my words, I’m gonna make it so you can talk again.” 

He still couldn’t really cry. Not with the X, not with his voice box all but paralyzed in its uselessness. But she stepped up to him, and he hugged her, trembling through sobs no one could hear.)

{So how will it end?} Yeva asked as they passed through the door, held wide open on days like today. 

Smirking, she flashed her solver at Yeva, letting it twist and spin harmlessly at her fingertips. “He’s got the same gift we do, Cyn just did a damn good job locking down the parts she didn’t want him to have. Too bad for her that I’m more stubborn than she is.” 

Yeva chuckled. {But you don’t want him to know?}

“Not yet. You notice that he sometimes flinches when we use it? I’m hoping by the time it becomes unavoidable, he’ll have stopped associating it with the worst days of his life.” 

{A fair point,} Yeva said, and their conversation stopped there, on account of them stepping outside and being faced with N and his so-called “fan club.” 

Long gone were the days when only Uzi and Doll asked after N. Nori put her hand over her mouth, overcome by the cuteness of Doll sitting on N’s shoulders, Thad and Emily each sitting on a foot, Lizzy swinging from his left hand (and occasionally kicking Thad’s head as she passed by), and Uzi dangling from the back of her shirt in his right.

And close to twenty teenager and adult drones were simply… hanging out. Outside, in the light of the moon. Fearless. 

N stopped his dramatic stomping around when he spotted them, waving cheerfully with Uzi’s limp body. Nori might have been concerned if her gremlin of a child wasn’t laughing so hard she was hiccuping every few seconds. All the kids were. 

Yeva huffed, amused. {Their own personal playground.}

“Thank goodness he loves it. Can you imagine trying to keep them all off him if he didn’t?”

{I’m exhausted just thinking about it.} 

Nori chuckled and gave her best friend a pat to the shoulder before parting ways. She’d spotted her target, and though she was loath to disturb her husband’s peace and quiet on a rare day off, she’d been… all right, she’d been clingy. Since almost murdering him. 

“Got room for one more?” she asked. She had no idea where they’d come from, but the colony was in possession of roughly two dozen beach lounge chairs. And most, if not all, of them ended up outside and occupied when N brought the children out to play. 

“For you? Always,” Khan said, wiggling to the side. She joined him, curling up on her side facing him, letting her head rest over his core. He hummed, forever happy to hold her. 

He’d put a stop to the apologizing almost immediately. And he was so damn cheerful that it was hard to hold onto her guilt. But there was a slight scar, a crinkle of metal around his neck, that always made her core clench. She had a feeling it would for a long time. 

Uzi, at least, hadn’t come out any worse for wear. If anything, she only associated that day with N coming to live with them. She was a possessive little menace now that other kids were catching on to N being a fun playmate, so probably the only reason she hadn’t started biting any unfortunate child to get between her and her monster was because she knew N would be going home with her, not any of them. 

Nori watched the goings-on, contentment filling her. To think, just a few months ago, enjoying some downtime outside wouldn’t have been possible. But before her today were drones chatting and laughing in the snow, reclining in their lounge chairs, relaxing in the crisp fresh air. 

The children were laughing and shrieking in a thrilled sort of fear, scattering around the street that made up the outpost’s “front lawn” to try and escape N. He crouched on all fours, wiggling dramatically, before leaping upon his short-legged prey like jungle cats Nori had only ever seen in old human videos. It was a favorite game of all of theirs, and it’d been a while since Nori had seen any concerned parents tensing up in instinctual fear.

She sighed, long and slow. She nuzzled closer to her husband and let herself drift off to the sound of his core and the distant cackles of their daughter.

• • •

The colony’s wake-sleep cycles were… inconsistent at best. Drones required far less sleep than humans, and depending on how any given drone spent their days, they might need to recharge sooner or later than others. It’d made it easy to adjust to N’s own bizarre schedule, what with his very valid preference for nighttime. 

(Nori still couldn’t believe no one had noticed that the monsters were firmly nocturnal. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized it after befriending N—though to be fair to herself, he’d been impressively creative with working around his sunlight-related limitations. And he’d apparently also dealt with the sizzling burns when necessary, though he’d appeared guilty when he admitted it. So, less “when necessary,” more “when he was spiraling so badly that he needed a bit of pain to shock him back into himself.” 

Who would’ve thought a monster could need therapy so badly. But sorting that out was much further down on Nori’s N-centric To Do list.)

But every once and a while, the bunker went through a little reset of sorts. Anything with a power button was shut down and restarted. Updates were applied where needed. The building’s HVAC and oil production equipment underwent maintenance and cleaning via automated systems. Obsolete data was purged, and networks were scoured for viruses. Power was diverted to the massive incinerators, which couldn’t be run while the rest of the bunker was operational. 

On these reset nights, everyone went to sleep. 

Perhaps someday it would be different. There were hopes to establish a school once the colony relocated to a better, less cramped home. Drones’ duties would have set hours to eliminate the chaos of never knowing if the person you needed for something was awake or not. A better power source or more efficient system would make it so they didn’t need to do the reset just to keep things functioning optimally. 

It wasn’t the first reset since N became their guardian monster, but it would be the first since he’d come to live in the bunker. He watched the preparations with a curious head tilt. 

“We were doing a reset on the night you broke in,” Nori mused from beside him. “After the disaster of that outing, we basically ran through a chore checklist of everything we could do without venturing outside. Everyone was pretty shaken up.” 

He sent her a sheepish smile, then looked up to watch the lights flicker. 

“It’s about the only night Khan and I know for sure we won’t be bothered. We’re not technicians. If something goes wrong, we won’t be the first to know about it.”

N’s X blinked. And then he grinned, bounced in place, and darted off. 

She huffed, amused. 

Khan joined her a few minutes later, automatically wrapping his arm around her waist. “Ready for a well-deserved break?”

Nori cracked her neck. “It’s been a helluva month, huh.” 

He hummed, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek. “But we made it out the other side.” 

Barely, she didn’t say. Crazy that the close call with the other monsters of N’s squad was already a month behind them. 

“I don’t know about you,” he continued lowly, tugging her closer, “but I’m ready to sleep it all off.” 

Nori closed her eyes. “Mm. A nice long, uninterrupted sleep. Cozy bed. Soft blankets.” She giggled when his mustache tickled her neck. “Save it for later, handsome. I—”

The skid of metal on concrete brought them out of their little bubble, and they looked up in time to watch N hastily backtrack and round the corner at the next intersection over. He bounded up to them, beaming. 

Nori had the sudden feeling that she wasn’t going to get her husband to herself tonight. She couldn’t find it in herself to be upset about it, though. Not when N was nearly vibrating with excitement, fumbling to get his board and tiles out. It wasn’t as rare a sight now as it used to be in the beginning, but it was still a treasure to see. 

I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING 

“A problem?” Khan asked, straightening. 

N vigorously shook his head. A SURPRISE! A GOOD ONE! I HOPE

He paused, then stuck his tongue out in concentration to rearrange a longer message. 

GOTTA GO ON A QUICK FLIGHT. YEVA’S GOT UZI FOR THE NIGHT, AND SHE’LL PING IF SHE NEEDS ANY OF US. PLEASE :)

He topped it off with a pleading little pout. Nori snickered. “You’re going to be dangerous once we get that X gone. I bet your puppy-dog eyes will rival Uzi’s.” 

N wiggled, plainly delighted by the comparison.

“All right,” Khan said with a sigh that didn’t quite manage to be anything but fondly indulgent. “Let’s go, then.” 

They followed N to the exit without running into anything that would require their attention. His long, eager stride kept taking him farther away, and without fail, he’d eventually notice, skitter back to them, and then repeat the process. Nori and Khan exchanged stifled grins. 

Nori still hadn’t flown with N, unlike Uzi and Khan. She watched, intrigued, as N unfolded his wings, then crouched to allow Khan to climb onto his back. “I suppose that leaves me up front?” she asked. 

Her husband paused in realization, then smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, dear. This is just how we were when Uzi and I took him for a spin.” 

N’s shoulders shook with silent giggles, then he mimed hefting something under either arm, curled at his sides. 

“I’ll pass on being carried like a sack of flour, thanks.” She allowed N to scoop her up, feeling very small in comparison. The moment she was settled, N was shooting off the ground and a gasp was torn from her.

There was only a mild snowstorm that night, and it wasn’t an unpleasant journey. N was warm, and his hold secure. She bore witness to the meticulous corrections he made to his balance as Khan kept shifting around atop him, leaning out to observe their world from overhead. 

She didn’t blame him; she was just as entranced by the unusual view. The city passed by, an amalgamation of ruins and buildings that had more than withstood the elements. At N’s speed, they left the city limits soon enough, and he soared over an expanse of pristine snow broken up by a few low buildings and the occasional stubborn tree. 

Nori found herself dozing against him. The soft rumble of her husband’s voice drifted in and out of her consciousness. She had no idea how long they’d been flying when they finally descended, touching down with a gentle poof of snow.

It was especially dark here. They were in a different city, one that hadn’t been undergoing even minimal upkeep like they did back home. Not a single streetlight was on; no windows in the towering buildings were glowing. With the clouds mostly blocking the moon, N was the brightest thing there. 

She heard his hand swap out for something else, and a moment later, the bright beam of a flashlight cut through the snow.

Before them was a type of building Nori hadn’t seen before. It was low to the ground, not like the massive warehouses and skyscrapers that she was used to. Their own bunker occupied the slightly more defensible ground floor and basement of a former office block. 

N ushered them in, flashlight pointed ahead while he raised his tail high, creating a makeshift lantern out of his nanite acid canister. The entrance was huge, wide and taking up the full height of the building. It was tunnel-like, built of sturdy metal and thick concrete. It slopped downward, just slightly, but by the time they reached the end, which opened into a massive room, Nori had realized the bulk of the building was at least partially underground. 

As she and Khan peered around curiously, N pulled out his board. He frowned at his flashlight, then sat down on the floor to make use of his remaining hand. 

TA DA!! IT’S GOT A COUPLE MORE FLOORS BENEATH US AND HAS REALLY IMPRESSIVE GENERATORS AND THERE’S A BUNCH OF GOOD SCRAP METAL AND STUFF FOR YOUR DOORS AND

“Hang on,” Nori said. “You mean…” 

“This is for our colony?” Khan asked when she didn’t continue.

BEEN KEEPING AN EYE OUT, N spelled. He smiled sweetly, hand gripping his ankle as he leaned back, too pleased to be fully sheepish. I THINK IT HAS EVERYTHING YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

“How do you even know what we’re looking for?” Nori asked. She couldn’t remember ever sitting him down and laying out their list of needs and wants. A glance at Khan proved he was just as bewildered. 

YOU TALKED ABOUT IT WHEN KHAN AND I FIRST MET

Nori stared blankly. “That… that was two months ago.” And he hadn’t even technically been part of the conversation, just sitting beside them as they’d talked. “You remembered?” 

He went all bashful then, ducking his head with a nod. 

“Cyn’s an idiot for ever thinking she could keep you evil,” Nori declared. She let her knees thunk to the floor to better wrap her arms around his neck. His arms went around her back, tugging her closer and hunching over so their heads knocked together. 

It’d taken Uzi almost getting killed by his former squadmates, but N had finally started to treat his touch starvation. Aka, he had been very cuddly since then. Not that Nori minded. He gave excellent hugs. 

“Well,” Khan said, barely containing his awakened interest and excitement. He had his hands planted on his hips as he turned in a contemplative circle. “Care to show us around?” 

N tucked away his board and tiles—it had to fold up, right? Nori couldn’t imagine how else he always had it on him—and bounced to his feet, pulling Nori up with him. He gave Khan a cheeky salute, and deeper into their potential new home they went.

Chapter Text

Packing up the entire colony’s collective lives was… not as awful a task as Nori expected. While nearly half their colony’s population went ahead to make necessary modifications to the new bunker, everyone else worked together to prepare for the journey. It was only a few weeks before the halls were bare and rooms both personal and public had been stripped. 

Khan had led the team making the upgrades, and all Nori needed now was his go-ahead to lead the rest of their colony over. Hopefully, N would bring his seal of approval when he returned.

She felt a little bad that he’d been stuck in the combined role of glorified messenger and pack mule for almost a month. But only a little, since he didn’t seem to mind in the least.

He’d gone as far as somehow getting his hands on a hat for postal workers, and every time he returned with his little messenger bag full of letters, he’d bound up and down the halls, hand-delivering them with a beaming smile and silly salute. 

It was damn adorable on its own, but then Uzi demanded she get her own matching hat and bag, and suddenly N had a little helper. 

There was, of course, the added bonus that N’s frequent trips allowed him to keep his watchful eyes on all of the colony. Mortal peril was always just around the corner, and he refused to leave either half undefended. Worrywart. Said affectionately, of course. 

(YOU SPLIT UP, he’d pouted at first. DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT GENRE THIS IS?

“Dark comedy?” Nori had suggested. He’d had approximately three children trying to climb him like a tree at the time, so she maintained that her guess was entirely valid.

{Sci-fi?} Yeva was just as quick to offer. {Hero’s journey?}

N had done his level best to pout harder at them. He took his guardian monster duties very seriously.)

For better or worse, he’d been taking Uzi on most of his visits. According to Khan’s letters, their little escape artist had proven useful for finding sneaky weak points in the new security systems. 

She was also an early alert system to her and N’s return.

“Mama!” Nori heard, accompanied by the rapid pitter patter of little feet. She turned in time to not completely get taken out at the knees. “Dad said it’s time! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” 

N was coming to a stop just behind her, practically vibrating in that excited way of his. 

“All right, munchkin, slow down.” Nori laughed, watching fondly as Uzi threw her whole weight into trying to pull Nori down the hall. Nori didn’t budge. “I hear ya, but we’ve gotta wait just a little longer, okay?” 

Uzi let go and stepped back to give her poor beleaguered mother the most deadpan, unimpressed look a child could muster. Nori raised her eyebrows, impressed despite herself.

“You teach her that?” she asked, glancing up at N. 

N, who planted his hands on his hips all offended-like and adopted an expression that was a perfect match for Uzi’s. 

She snorted. Uzi twisted around, saw N’s look, and giggled wildly. “N’s got lotsa good ’spressions,” she said, rocketing back to his side and grabbing hold of the bottom hem of his coat. Which she was just able to comfortably reach. 

“I know he does, baby. You know what else he has?”

“Wings.” 

N turned his head away and opened his mouth, X scrunched up, in a silent scream of cuteness overload. Nori could relate. 

“Right again,” she said, just a tad higher pitched than normal. Don’t laugh, Nori, don’t laugh. You have the cutest kid this side of the core meltdown, but don’t let her know that or she’ll try to bite someone to regain her munchkin street cred. “But he also has a deadly allergy to the sun. That’s why we only play outside at night, remember?”

She huffed. “Yeah. ’Cause we don’t have any shade.” And she gave Nori a pointed look of disgruntlement. Oooh, little sass monster. Nori wanted to squeeze her cheeks so bad. 

N clutched at his coat over his chest in apparent agony. 

“We’ll see about having a cover or something set up at the new bunker, okay?” She very carefully didn’t mention anything about their surprise, which was mostly for N, but that the kids would enjoy plenty too. “But what I’m getting at here is that you and N just got back, right? And it’s the middle of the night.” 

“Mhm.” 

“Well, by the time we got everyone ready to go, the sun would be starting to rise. We’ve gotta wait for tomorrow, so we can all head out as soon as it’s safe for N. Because we don’t want to leave N behind, right, munchkin?”

Uzi puffed up like she was suggesting exactly that. Nori was saved from the righteous, bitey fury of her gremlin by N kneeling down, composed once more. He tilted his head, and there was something to be said about these kids growing up with N and his communication restrictions. Nori thought she did a damn fine job interpreting his expressions and body language, but some of the children were on a whole other level. 

“Yeah, ’kay, we gotta wait,” Uzi grumped after a moment of minute twitches in N’s mouth that even Nori would be hard pressed to translate. “Mama’s not leavin’ N.” 

“I would never, baby. No one would. We’ve all gotten attached.” 

N smiled and wiggled to himself. He stood and gave Nori a lil head bonk. His newest, increasingly favored, form of expressing affection. 

“Now that we’ve got that settled—” Nori scooped Uzi into her arms— “it’s time for gremlins of all ages to get some sleep. We’ve got a lotta walking tomorrow, and N’s not carrying you for all of it, missy.” 

She tickled Uzi, replacing imminent complaints with helpless giggles. To N, she said, “Will you let Yeva know it’s time? And then get some rest yourself, for god’s sake. You’ll have your hands full on this trip.” 

N saluted smartly. He turned to go the opposite way from the Doorman apartment, but they made it all of five steps away from each other before Uzi screeched. “Wait wait! O, please.” She made grabby hands at N.

Raising his finger in realization, N flipped open his messenger bag and produced Uzi’s bird plush. It’d seen a lot of names over the months of her having it, most the typical obvious ones for a black bird. Birdie, Miss Feather, Midnight, Shadow. Nori had no clue where her daughter heard Oracle, of all words, but she’d latched onto it, and it seemed to have stuck where the other names had not. 

Her tendency to just call it O sometimes, a little letter name, was just. Too much for Nori’s poor core. N had veritably melted the first time she did it.

He presented Oracle to her with a flourish that made its little plush wings flap, and Uzi giggle-squealed and hugged it tight. 

“Thank,” Uzi said, nibbling a little on the poor thing’s beak. 

N bonked their heads together, pressed his hand to Nori’s back and shared a can you believe how cute she is? look with her, and then waved them off with a skip in his step. 

Uzi settled easily on the short trip to their apartment, her blinks lasting longer and longer. She offered no protest when Nori finally lowered her into her big girl bed. Nori’s core swelled with love. There’d been a time in her life when she’d never even hoped to feel love like this, or of any kind. She’d loved Yeva as much as she’d been capable of in the lab, loved her with grief, loved her like each day would be their last—but even that paled in comparison to how she felt about her best friend these days. And now she almost had more love than she knew what to do with. 

Nori pressed a long kiss to Uzi’s visor. “Good night, munchkin.” 

“Night, Mama,” she said around a yawn. 

Smiling helplessly, Nori tucked her in. Not with a blanket. Uzi’s crib, then bed, hadn’t seen a blanket in months. She refused anything that wasn’t the coat N had left behind after he broke in. 

There was a lot Nori was grateful for. Too much to list. But right near the top, she would put this: that Uzi had never not known love in her life. It existed in all shapes and sizes, in hugs and kisses and coloring days and tiny hands slipping into bigger palms and tickling and giggling laughter and a guardian monster’s coat. And she would always, always have it. 

• • •

It’d be a long trek to the new bunker, especially since they had all the children and babies and N. The route had been mapped out weeks ago, all the buildings they’d take refuge in each day had been long-decided, and N had scoured the path more than once for beasts or sinkholes or buildings in danger of collapse or skulking monsters or—point was, it was as safe as they could make it. 

At their first stop, as the sun slowly rose, N joined Nori at the edge of the cluster of sleeping drones to play lookout, and pulled out his tiles. He wore the exact same sheepish look that both Uzi and Khan got when she caught them being troublemakers. 

Nori braced herself. 

BEEN KEEPING AN EYE OUT FOR J AND V, he started with, flipping tiles between his fingers in a thoughtless motion that spoke of practiced habit. The size of his hands made the little pieces of wood look so small. J SEEMS TO JUST BE GONE 

He punctuated that with a shrug, but no real concern. “Good riddance,” Nori said for him. 

He mimed a chuckle. V’S BEEN, and he paused, mouth scrunched up in indecision. ERRATIC, he decided. 

“Not coping so well? Or like she’s a ticking time bomb?” 

THE FIRST

“I’ll take that over a revenge-seeker,” Nori decided. 

N nodded, firm and vigorous in a way that implied he firmly agreed. And since he knew V better than Nori… 

“Good to know, but that can’t be what you really want to tell me. Not with that look you had.”

He avoided looking at her as he spelled out, I DID FIND HER

“Okay…” She narrowed his eyes, watching him fidget. “You obviously didn’t kill her, so—” She went still. 

He turtled into the fur collar of his coat. 

“You’re giving her another chance?!” Nori hissed, leaning closer to him. “After what she did to you—after what she didn’t do for you?”

N nodded slowly, X fixed on the line of sunlight just a few feet ahead of them. He jolted after a moment of tense silence, and his fingers danced across his tiles. 

I WON’T LET HER HURT YOU

“Like that was ever a concern,” she scoffed. “I’m worried about you, dummy. Who’s gonna make sure she doesn’t hurt you?”

He opened his mouth—a much more recent reflex of his; it gave Nori hope that the deepest, most hurt part of him was finally realizing he wasn’t being ignored at every turn; N was trying to speak in a way he hadn’t for months—before dramatically shifting his shoulders in a silent huff. 

I CAN HANDLE V

Nori rolled her eyes. “Don’t be obtuse. I know you can handle yourself in a fight, and you know that’s not what I’m talking about.” 

N fiddled with his hands, tracing the lines of his fingers to his palm. Finally, I WANT TO BELIEVE THERE’S MORE TO HER THAN, and he waved vaguely back in the direction of their old bunker.

Nori thumped her head against his shoulder. All right, against his upper arm. But she wasn’t short, he was just freakishly tall! “Ugh, and I can’t even argue with that.” 

He nudged her gently and tapped at a question mark sitting in his discard pile. 

“I mean you, Mr. Sunshine And Roses Wrapped In A Murder Machine. If you can be more than what Cyn tried to make you, than I guess V can be too. She’s got a long road ahead of her, though.” She grinned like she was the one with sharp fangs.

N spelled out I WASN’T, then stopped, tried YOU DON’T, didn’t seem to like that either, then shuffled it to, IT’S MY CHOICE TO GIVE HER A SECOND CHANCE, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU

He frowned down at his board, fingers twitching.

Snorting, Nori patted his leg. “You’re a panic rambler, aren’t you? Tiles make that hard, huh?” 

IT SOUNDS BAD LIKE THAT. I CAN’T

“If I knew you any less, I’d say it was a snub.” 

He winced and kicked at the snow. It wasn’t often N actually got visibly frustrated with his communication struggles. He’d taken to the blocks with patience and to the tiles with glee. She respected that greatly; Nori would’ve been throwing fits at the slightest inconveniences that came with the limitations of spelling out letter by letter her entire side of a conversation. 

“But I do know you better, and I’m pretty confident you don’t want us to feel obligated or pressured to also give V a second chance just because you are.”

He beamed and nodded. 

“Tone down the brightness, sunshine, you’ll blind someone with that.” 

N moved like he was laughing, and Nori was struck core-deep with a furious desire to hear his laughter. She had a feeling it’d be contagious. 

• • •

{They’re like his little ducklings,} Yeva whispered to Nori. 

Nori giggle-snorted, nearly fumbling the rope attached to the sled she was dragging. “I’ll never be able to unsee that,” she said. “You have no idea how much I’ve been saving to show Khan.” 

Yeva was far from wrong, after all. N had been left in charge of corralling the colony’s flock of children for the journey, freeing up the adults to haul their belongings. It wasn’t a difficult task for him. Not when the entire younger generation was, to varying degrees, fascinated with him. 

His greatest tactic had been a game of Follow the Leader. He led them on winding paths, through broken windows of flipped cars, circling street lights—and by the time they reached their shelter for the daylight hours, the munchkins were all tuckered out. Through the deeper drifts, N shuffled along through the snow, creating a narrow path for the kiddos to follow. 

At one point, it’d been deep enough that only their heads bobbing along behind N had been visible over the edge of his homemade trench. Damn adorable is what it was. 

Now, instead of a neat line behind him, they were clustered around him. As usual, the height difference was nothing short of comical. And N, of course, looked pleased as punch. 

{I am glad he’s enjoying himself,} Yeva said, only a little dry. {I would joke about wishing he was the one doing the heavy lifting, but I suspect he is anyway, and making it look just as easy as if he was dragging an entire apartment behind him.} 

“No kidding,” Nori said. “And anyway, I’m more than happy to do some physical labor in exchange for my menace not to be running around underfoot.” 

Enough parents were within earshot that Nori and Yeva found themselves in the midst of enthusiastic nodding. 

It was good entertainment to boot. The alternative was long stretches of white and gray and boring buildings, and little Thad staring up at N with stars in his eyes was far more fun to watch. The boy was the first of their generation to have transitioned into his stage two body, putting him several inches taller than the rest. 

“—and then the way you went nyoom,” he swept his hand through the air to accompany his choice of sound effect, “right at the beast and you had your sword out real quick and you slammed into it like bam! So cool!”  

The younger kids listened raptly. No one bothered to point out that Thad had been more than a block away during that particular incident several weeks ago. 

“And your coat was all flappy! Like a superhero!” Thad said. He sighed wistfully. “I wish I could look that cool. Or have a cool hat like yours.” 

N’s shoulders shook. Without breaking his stride—made much slower for the kids—he reached up for his hat and tugged it down over Thad’s blond hair. 

The surrounding adults did a poor job of stifling their chuckles as the poor kid visibly blue-screened. “Hat,” he whispered, awed.

With utmost innocence, Lizzie tripped him. She stuck her tongue out over her shoulder at her sputtering brother. 

N’s tail was quick to wrap around Thad’s waist and lift him before he could either be trampled by the rest of their procession or create a traffic jam. Pride burned in Nori’s chest for the way not a single drone gasped or tensed at the sight of that syringe so close to Thad’s core. 

Returned to his feet, Thad trotted back into the center of the group, pausing only to stick his tongue out back at Lizzie. He snagged N’s hand, looking up at him with big, wondrous eyes. The hat was too big, obviously, and it kept tilting wildly, but Thad didn’t seem upset at all by having to correct its angle every few seconds.  

On N’s other side, Uzi narrowed her eyes. Nori made eye contact with her daughter, then jabbed two fingers first at her own visor, then at Uzi. She pinged a general sense of don’t even think about it, missy at her for good measure. 

With great reluctance, Uzi subsided before she could try to bite anyone. 

• • •

Nori banished N from keeping watch that day, and to make sure he didn’t get any ideas about sneaking past her once she was asleep, she sicced the kids on him. They swarmed him, gleeful with express permission to wrestle him down. He barely had time to send her a betrayed look before the munchkins took him out at the knees. 

“Got ’im, Mama!” Uzi proudly shouted from atop his chest. 

“Make sure he stays down,” she called back. 

When she passed him on the floor after making sure the actual lookouts were all set, she paused and folded her arms in smug victory. 

“Comfy?” she asked. 

Buried beneath approximately two dozen sprawled, snoring children, he could only silently huff. And then he carefully unearthed one arm and, showing that elusive friendly bite she’d been delighted to unearth, flipped her off. 

Nori nearly woke the munchkins with the bark of laughter that burst out of her. Didn’t. But it was damn close.