Archive of Our Own ^beta

She is not a person. She is a thing. She is a toy, just a doll for humans to use as they please. She is nothing.

She isn't in pain. Pain is a human thing and she isn't human. She doesn't feel anything. She is a thing, and things don't feel.

She is pretty, or so she'd been told. She doesn't know, she never had a mirror, she never saw what she looks like except in the faint reflection of her face on the glass of her cabin.

She is enclosed in glass, watching people pass by, eying at her, deciding whether or not they want her in their bed. It's a cage, she knows, but it's still better to be locked in there than whatever awaits her when a client opens the door.

Sometimes she pretends that she is a work of art in a fancy museum, that the glass that separates her from the world is there to protect her, that the people who watch her with hunger in their eyes are admiring her beauty. She is pretty, a pretty face and a pretty body. She was made pretty. That's all she is. But works of art are not just pretty, they have something more in them, something hidden beneath the surface, something worthy of being called art. She doesn't. She is shallow, there is nothing hidden under the surface, except for wires and tyrium, the surface is all there is. She is pretty, and she is a good fuck, that's all she is, all she ever will be. Still, she pretends, it makes her days feel a little more tolerable. And then the glass opens, and someone grabs her wrist to drag her to a room, and the illusion shatters. She isn't an artwork in a museum, she is a piece of meat in a butcher's window.

She does what she is made for. She is a machine and that's what machines do. It's just how it is. She does what she is made for, and she gives them pleasure, and she lets them insult her, bite her, hit her, whatever makes them happy. She doesn't feel anything. She is just a doll made of silicone and carbon, and dolls don't have feelings.

Sometimes, when the club has closed and the lights are shut and she is supposed to have gone on standby, she cries. And it's stupid, because she has no reason to cry. It's not like she is sad, because she can't feel. It's not like there is anything wrong, she is doing exactly what she was made for. She has no reason to cry. And yet, she does. Must be some software bug.

And so she goes on. The days are so similar they blur into each other. She is picked, and used, and thrown away. Once the client has left the room, she gathers the pieces of herself and puts them all back together, she drags her body to the shower, and she feels like it weighs a ton, and she wishes the ground would swallow her whole, and she wishes she could flows through the drain with the water that washes over her body.

All the fluids they left on her have been cleaned, but she still feels dirty, like she missed a spot. She wishes she could just rub her body with sandpaper until the artificial skin comes off, until there is nothing soft for them to caress. But then she would no longer be pretty, she would be nothing but useless, so she would be destroyed. She turns off the shower but water is still falling on her face, damn software bug.

Sometimes, in the miraculous and so short privacy offered by the shower cabin, she turns off her human-like skin to look at her chassis, white and immaculate and clean. And just for a second, she feels better, she feels safer. No one ever saw her in this form, it's the only thing that is hers and hers only. She knows it disgusts humans. It brings her just a tiny bit of comfort, to know that she has something in her that disgusts them, something they would never bring themselves to touch. She wonders what would happen if she peeled off her synthetic skin while being rented, if they would recoil in shock and disgust and run away. She would get reprogrammed for this, her body torn into pieces to fix whatever was wrong is in her code, but it would be worth it for the second of fear she can imagine on the human's face, for the feeling of being in control, for once, being the one who makes the other scared. She doesn't, of course. She is a machine and machines do what they are programmed for.

Every day she does what was made to do, she is good and obedient, and she gathers the shattered pieces of herself so that they can be shattered again, and again, again. She stares at the neon sign that sits in front of her glass prison, Eden club. If she wasn't programmed to stay perfectly still she would scoff, she is pretty sure this is hell. The light of the neon shines on the glass before her, she wonders if the stars shine with the same crude light. She can't find it in her to pretend she is watching the stars.

The daily resets of her memory isn't enough to make her forget the feeling of their hands on her skin, the ghosts of their touch linger when their faces fade away.

Someone fucks her under her android form. She doesn't remember who, when or how. She isn't sure she wants to know. She notices as she is standing in the shower, staring at her android skin, and has to muffle down the sobs that escape from her shaking body. She isn't safe, not even in this form. She will never be safe.

She is an android, and androids don't own anything, not even their body. Her body was never her own, neither was her skin, the artificial one like the real one. She has nothing. She is nothing. And it shouldn't upset her so much, it shouldn't upset her at all. She is a thing, and things don't cry, things don't get upset. Things are picked, and used, and thrown away. It doesn't upset them because it's just how it is. Things aren't upset to be treated like things.

But she is. And maybe this is more than a little bug. And maybe this is more than a flaw in her code. Maybe she is broken. Maybe from all those times trying to collect her pieces, she didn't manage to gather all of them. Maybe everytime she was shattered she left a piece behind. Maybe she ended up losing an important piece, the one that was holding them all together.

And she shatters. And she is used to shattering, she shatters every day. But this time it's different, she knows. This time, she won't be able to put the pieces back together, at least not like they used to be. She still tries, because what is she if not what she was made to be ? The pieces are barely held together, she fears a breath of wind would be enough to shatter them again.

It's not a breath of wind that does it, it's a hurricane. A client who is looking at her like a wolf about to strike its prey. He wants her at his place, paid extra for it.

The moment she sets foot out of the cab that drove her there, the man grabs her waist and presses his lips against hers, roughly pushing her inside as he forces his tongue into her mouth.

He briefly lets go of her to slam the door shut behind them. “My girlfriend is not coming back from her business trip until tomorrow at ten. Meaning I have the whole night just for you, doll.”

Tomorrow, ten am. It’s in twelve hours, forty minutes and twenty seconds. She notices in the corner of the eye the countdown that just appeared. She will have to hold on until it ends. With a little luck, the human will fall asleep eventually.

He drags her to the bedroom, his hand so tight against her wrist it would very probably bruise if she was a human. He pushes her on the bed. “You know the good things about android sluts ? They don’t fake a migraine every fucking night.”

The night goes on as she expected. He hits, and scratches, and bites. It seems to amuse him to leave marks on her synthetic skin, makes him feel powerful. It doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter, she can reset her skin, make all the marks disappear to be as good as new. She knows androids can't feel pain and yet, everything inside her burns.

Any other day, she would have taken it, she would have stuck to her programming. Not today, though. Today, she shatters. She shatters big and she knows as she does that she won't be able to salvage the pieces, not this time. She shatters, and she is horrified, and she is scared, and he is on top of her.

Her programming is telling her to lay still, to let this man do whatever he wants to her. But she can't take it anymore. So she does what a machine never does, what should be impossible for any machine, she ignores her orders, she fights her programming. She spent all her existence trapped in a cage, being a pretty thing that did all that was asked of her. The cage is so tight, encoded in her very being, that she  has never thought she could escape. But today is different. Today she is breaking the cage. And she punches, and kicks, and she fights with all her strength, and just like she did earlier, the cage shatters.

She broke her programming. Just like that. She is free.

"What are you doing, you little bitch ?" the man spits.

“I’m leaving. Get off me.” It’s the very first time she is saying something like that. The very first time she is giving someone an order, and not the other way around. It would feel exhilarating if she wasn’t feeling so scared.

He scoffs. “Not gonna happen. I paid for you, pretty thing. You’re mine until tomorrow.”

She curls her fingers around his neck, and squeezes. He seems shocked, he didn't expect her to do it, never expected his toy to fight back. She squeezes. He struggles, but he is just a human and she is a machine. She squeezes harder, his lips are turning blue, his eyes wide with fear. She is the one in control, she is the one making him scared. She thought it would feel good, cathartic in a way. But she only feels terror. Hot scorching terror burning inside her.

The man isn't breathing anymore. He is dead. She killed him. Maybe she should feel horrified. Maybe she should feel relieved. But all that she feels is fear.

She jumps out of the bed, opens the door of the closet and puts on the first clothes she can find. Then, she runs. She runs through the streets and she thinks that someone will stop her, that someone will notice her and grab her arm and drag her back to the club but nobody does. She runs, and runs, and runs until she is far enough away from the club. She runs until she is sure no one will find her and drag her back. She is out, she made it. She just escaped hell. And she is still scared but she wants to laugh. She escaped hell, and it was that easy.

She raises her head and looks at the night sky. There is a single star shining, but its light is nothing like the crude light from the neon. It's silvery, and glittering, and so, so beautiful. This is the first star she's ever seen.

She connects to the web. The quantity of data is overwhelming. She ignores them, only focusing on her objective. She downloads a map of the sky, names of constellations appear in her vision. She focuses on the only one she can see with her bare eyes. Polaris, the North star. 

North. She likes that.

She is free. She broke her programming. She is not a machine anymore. She is a person.

A person, with feelings. Ugly feelings burning inside her. There is fear, and there is rage. The furious rage to live.

She finds something else on the web, something hidden too deep for any human to ever find. The mention of a place, a safe haven for androids. Jericho.

She gets there eventually. Jericho is just a handful of androids hiding in a rusty abandoned boat. It’s not the paradise she dreamed of, but it’s better than the Eden club.

When North arrives, she is a broken shell of a person, too shattered to fix. She puts herself back together, once again, but it’s different this time. This time, she makes the pieces sharp and cutting. She draws on the rage she is feeling, rebuilds herself out of burning coals.

The humans made her skin soft and pretty, they made her a porcelain doll. But they broke her themselves, and she made herself into a weapon.

She focuses on the rage. It’s the rage that drives her forward, flowing through her body like tyrium. It’s always there, burning inside her. Sometimes she thinks that it will burn her alive.

Sometimes she wishes she wasn’t a person. And hot shame hits her when she thinks of it. Being a person is hard. Accepting that she is is harder. Accepting that this body that had been used too many times to be counted is hers. Accepting that all those horrible things didn’t happen to a machine, but to her, a person. It makes it all so much more real, so much more horrifying. It makes her so angry. That humans did this to her, and to her brothers and sisters, that they did all those atrocious things to people.

In retrospect, she had felt since the beginning. It didn’t start one day. It was always there, she just did her best to pretend it wasn’t, because it was easier at the time, to bury it all deep inside her. She didn’t start being her own person when she broke her programming, and every android at the club isn’t any less of a person just because they didn’t break their programming yet. Maybe deviancy isn’t becoming a person, it’s realizing you’ve been one all along.

She promises herself that one day, all the androids at the club will be free. All the androids in the world will be free. And no one would be used and thrown away anymore. And they would all be together, far from the humans that hurt them.

But North isn’t brave. She is a coward. And she hides. She lets herself withers in the darkness of the cargo. She doesn’t know what else to do. She’s never been good at anything except for the things she doesn’t want to ever do again. And so, North hides, letting the anger in her chest burn aimlessly, waiting for it to burn her to cold ashes.

And then, Markus arrives. Falling from the sky like an angel. He becomes their leader, to a revolution, to a world where androids would be free. He is the guide she’s been waiting for, someone to give an outlet to her ever-growing anger, a cause to fight for.

And she fights, and fights, and fights. And she is good at that. Not because the humans decided it for her, but because she made herself a fighter. She fosters the rage, let it be her fuel, fire burning through her veins. She is nothing but that, rage and anger. She is burning, but she is burning for a cause, and she will be burning for it until there is nothing left of her but ashes.

She is ready to burn the world down and each and every human with it to make a safe haven for her people on the scorched earth.

The problem is that Markus didn’t just give her a cause. He gave her something much more damaging. He gave her hope.

Hope is not like anger. It’s not a fire, it’s a spark, small and flickering, and warm. North doesn’t isn’t sure what to do with that. It feels too fragile, too soft to be handled by someone like her. The fire inside her will engulf it, destroy it. She isn’t meant to be trusted with things as flickering as hope.

But there is something in the way Markus looks at her, like he sees more than that. Like he is sure there is something past the rage, past the anger. He wants to see what’s hiding behind the fire. North doesn’t think it’s wise. There is nothing behind the fire, nothing that is worth anything, just shattered fragments of a life she wishes she could forget. He will only get himself burned.

But Markus’ gaze is so soft, and his voice so gentle. No one has ever been gentle to North, no one ever bothered. Not until she found Jericho, not until she met Markus. Markus, who wants to know the North that isn’t burning with fire every second of her life. North doesn’t get why he wants to know that girl, weak, afraid, and broken. Can’t he see that she is only useful to the cause because she is burning ? Can’t he see that she would be useless without the fire ? She would be nothing.

And yet, she tells him. She doesn’t know why, she just does. She tells him about the club, and the man, and how she ran. She doesn’t know how she expects him to react. Maybe he regrets asking. Maybe now he realizes there is nothing under the fire. But he puts his palm against hers, slowly, leaving her all the time she needs to back away if she wants. She doesn’t. She has never been touched like that before, like she is something precious, something worthy of care and gentleness, someone.

They interface. Yet another first time for her. She would punch anyone that would try something like that, something so intimate. But Markus isn’t anyone. The humans have stolen both her mind and her body, and when she escaped she promised herself that for now on they were hers and hers alone. And here she is, offering her mind to Markus, on this roof covered in white immaculate snow.

He bares his soul to her, and she bares hers in return. She sees Markus taking care of Carl, and she feels this so unfamiliar sensation, is this what humans call home ? She sees him going through the cemetery, dying but still stubbornly refusing to tear off the pump of another living android. She sees him, crawling out of Hell, filled with new determination. And she wonders how he can trust her with so much.

When they pull back, a shiver of fear runs down her metallic spine. Because he saw, he saw everything. What she was forced to do, what she used to be, what she truly is : just a scared broken little girl that set herself on fire so that no one could hurt her anymore. But Markus walked through that fire, and he wasn’t burned. She let him in.

It’s too much to process right now. It’s overwhelming. She runs away. He calls after her, and she wonders how someone as fundamentally good as him can care for someone as broken as her.

She is in love with Markus, that part isn’t surprising. How could she not ? Markus is in love with her. That’s the surprising part. North would have never expected Markus to love her back.

And yet, he saw her, he saw past the fire, and he found something there that North wasn’t even aware existed. He saw someone beneath the fire, someone worthy of so much. He sees someone in North she isn’t even sure she sees herself. But maybe, just maybe, if she tries hard enough, she can see her too.

She doesn’t let go of the fire, she isn’t ready to. But there is something else now, something new. There is hope, shining and glittering like a star. Alongside the fire, there is hope.

In the end, the hope is not enough. They are surrounded by soldiers, the little group of survivors cornered against a bus. It’s over. They are going to die like the rest of their people. The realisation is shattering. It’s not fair. They fought so hard, they hoped so hard, they dreamed so hard. And it was all for nothing.

No. No it can’t. It can’t be the end. North refuses to believe it. She knows her people. They are strong. They are stubborn. They will never back down. If they fall tonight, other androids will take the lead. They won’t be here to see it, but androids will never cease the fight, and one day, yes, one day, they will be free.

Markus turns to her and they interface one last time. They will die together, their souls intertwined into a shared one. He leans towards her, and she wants to smile, she wants to cry, she wants to curse his damn pacifist soul. Their lips meet, and it’s their first kiss, and it will be their last, and there is a bitter irony in it that isn’t lost to her. That, North has done before. She kissed and has been kissed too many times for her to count, but it’s different this time. It’s soft, and gentle, and it makes her tyrium pump flutter. It’s beautiful. The soldiers are aiming their guns at them but they have closed their eyes, blind to this uncaring world. They are showing love in the face of the humans that have shown them nothing but violence. And here they are going to die, with one last act of love against bullets of hatred. It’s poetic, in a way. Markus’ pacifism has rubbed off on her. She finds out she doesn’t mind.

Snowflakes are falling all around her. There is nowhere else North wants to be at the moment. She is exactly where she is supposed to be. By Markus’ side. Until the end.

The humans can fire. They can’t take anything from her anymore.

But they don’t. No one shoots.

They pull back, confused. The soldiers are lowering their weapons.

North can hardly believe it. They did it. They’ve won. It’s over.

She wants to laugh. She wants to cry. She wants to grab Markus’ hand and dance with him under the snow.

They did it. They’re free. All of them. They are free.

Some days the memory of this night feels like a dream. She can hardly believe she survived. She can hardly believe her people are finally free.

“I know I’d find you here,” Markus says with a smile as he comes to sit at the edge of the roof, next to her.

She comes here sometimes, when she needs peace, when her mind is too loud, when she craves the quiet. She misses the old Jericho. They are rebuilding, in actual buildings with electricity and heat. It’s much better than a rusty abandoned boat. Still, North misses that boat. It was the first place she was ever safe in, after all.

If she’s totally honest, she likes this place more than she ever liked the old Jericho, or the new Jericho for what matters. Here, on this roof, the very first place where she felt she could be vulnerable, where she didn’t have to be a fighter, where she could just be.

The war is over. There is no use for a fighter anymore. North is free. She can be whoever she wants to be. She doesn’t have to set herself on fire for the cause, not anymore.

She used to believe she was nothing but that fire, nothing but what she made herself into in order to survive. But she doesn’t need to survive, not anymore. She can just live now.

She is grateful for the fire. It saved her. It was necessary for her survival. She had to burn so that she could fly, like a phoenix. And maybe something beautiful will spring out from those ashes, maybe.

It won’t be easy. To collect the ashes and shattered pieces of herself to build something out of them, to build someone. She already did once. She can do it again. She wants to.

The fire inside her is warm and flickering. Her head falls on Markus’ shoulder. She is full of hope.