Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hunter opens the door with his left hand, cranked up and with bended fingers as it is – the rust sprinkled over his palm contrasts greatly with the pale white handle. He closes it behind himself with a click. And there he stands in the metal background now, smoke escaping his shoulder pad with a hissing sound, echoing the eternal static of the city he lives in. His eyes search the shadows for a place to sit, settling on one with a relieved breath.

A strand of light passes through his limping form, shimmering against his metal arm and chest, and it slashes into his forehead with certainty as he drops on the chair in the corner of the room. Thin rivulets of oil race down his side – the darkness endlessly pours out of his arm socket, where his right hand is supposed to be, and it’s as if it’s pulsing, the black hole in him, growing and shrinking all the time, but there’s no muscle there, no real pain— just the oil. Dark, dark oil staining the ground he walked on. His leg and boots and the cement. 

Hunter throws his head back against a chair. His eyes follow the ribbons of smoke swirling by his ear, flowing through his fingers with ease as he tries to feel them—the strands of yellow powder—like a person might try to feel the water’s density. With an open hand, like so. He finds he feels rather nothing as the last of it disappears, and his irises adjust to the walk they take to the ceiling.

“How about a big man holding a little puppy?” 

Her voice pierces through the silence in the room. Hunter doesn’t turn towards her, his body still as a statue, each crease and deformation of metal that paints his entire self shining like marble in the light. Only his eyes fall limply to the floor, pulling his eyelids down with a gentle creek.

“Nothing,” he breathes. The green crystal clear shine scratches at his face, but he doesn’t look at her – he can’t look at her right now. Otherwise the circuits inside his body might spew out oil too, throw the smoke moving his gears and allowing him to breathe to the wind, and he might have nothing. Nothing at all.

A scorching silence follows Hunter’s answer, filling the room entirely. He closes his eyes. 

Light attacks him from both sides, but it’s good and the worst part is he’s aware of that. Cranes move across the sky slowly, like a summer day stretching and stretching, so frightened of the night— their lethargic heads move in the distance until they stop, and like clockwork their blindingly yellow stare glazes over Hunter, and it’s nothing, it’s uncaring – it’s dirty red buildings reaching the sky, it’s dark lines carrying electricity to everything that’s alive (he swears), covering the sky like storm clouds. 

“That doesn’t make it,” her voice echoes in the room, blowing through the monotonous thudding and whistling of something greater than wind that is the city’s constant song. 

His eyes twitch behind his eyelids, and he realizes it doesn’t matter whether he looks at her or not – she is millions of tiny dots moving with probability in his mind, a short second in the past and a second in the future. There she is, he thinks, seeing Willow’s face in a thousand different colors, constantly flashing— tiny dots moving here and there, painting a furrow in between her brows and a caring smile. 

“And there I spend my time, considering what meat and blood say of me, thinks the butcher.”

“Don’t mock me,” Hunter spits out, opening his eyes to glare at her, the wind touching the gap between his plastic teeth with how he bares them. The yellow light of the outside flashes across his eyes, his golden irises, the single strand of hair that flies before his face and the abstract wrinkles parts of his mask make. 

Willow only stares back at him, her frown more concerned than he imagined. The long stripe of light catches on her too, except it makes the tiny dots scatter – it cuts her body at the chest and stomach, and leaves just her face and arms and sneakers with shimmering stickers on them. “Anger,” she says with so much certainty anyone hearing her would believe it. 

Hunter shoots up from the chair and stumbles towards Willow, his finger pointing at her nose, oil spitting from his mouth with his booming voice; “You know damn well that I am not—! There’s nothing human about me, Willa! It’s all programmed! Why can’t you see that already?”

Willow looks up at him with those big, round eyes. A light from somewhere, possibly from another reality, is reflected in them, and for a second Hunter thinks their answers might lay somewhere in it. 

He grits his teeth and whips around, his scarf following like some of that tender smoke. Each blonde strand of his hair shines in either the muddy yellow light of the city or Willow’s clean greenery. “Your function is pointless,” he growls. “Your— data is confused, and I can’t keep doing this, I can’t believe that, b–because…”

Hunter stammers, his head twitching in two ways quickly, sparks flying from his central generator and the hole where his arm should be. The oil flows down the unwanted outsides. It drips down his circuits just like the rain falls from a thousand lines connecting the buildings and cranes and people, and lights, and plastic plants, and pots and kettles, and bathroom rugs, and little puppies together.

The smoke plumes from the lines of his body now. They separate his chest plate from his shoulder blades, and there’s smoke swirling in front of his face, brought out by the light. 

It’s beautiful. It shines like glitter. 

Humans can’t have that.

“Because if I did,” he goes on, the whirring of his fans growing louder to allow him some breath, “it would mean that we’re both human.”

He turns towards Willow, the light in his eyes happier and a bit more crazed than it was before. A dark line of oil slips past his lip, and he doesn’t do anything as it races down his chin and neck. 

He smiles. His muscles scrape distantly, allowing his eyes to wrinkle, the long cut across his face that shows the circuits hidden underneath the metal to lengthen at the end of his mouth. “You and me,” he says softly, pointing at them with the fingers he still has. “Isn’t that funny?”

Willow glances at his wound. Worry covers her face like a bride’s veil, but it’s the most emotion she’s allowed to show with him. He had to snap at her a few dozen times for her to stop commenting on his sorry state.

She closes her eyes for a moment, the light of her world flashing across her glasses with the tilt of her head. Her chest rises and falls under her floral button-up shirt, her tongue flies to wet her lips— everything belonging to a real person, replicated for no reason at all. Her hands are laced together behind her back, like they usually are. 

“That feeling of hopelessness,” she says, her eyes meeting his, “it’s uniquely human, isn’t it?”

“It can't be,” Hunter argues. His voice module colors his words in angry oranges and embarrassing pinks – it’s squeaky like that of a tiny bird’s. “A mouse won’t fight a cat all that much if it’s in between its teeth.”

“An animal fights,” she says. “Surely it wants to live and it’ll do anything. But you…”

The city moves, as it’s moving all the time – the mass of machinery vibrating with sound, slowly working in each gear and electrically controlled hand. Hunter feels it all. But he doesn’t think it matters. 

“But I don’t bleed,” Hunter finishes for her. 

“But you invent values,” Willow says softly, “and perspectives that mean more than life, I’m sure.”

The care in her voice grates against his sensor plates like sandpaper. His lungs quiet down with the whirring – they stop entirely for a second. 

A choked up sound escapes Hunter’s lips as he looks up at her, meets her gaze and there’s something like love flashing across her eyes. 

She’s done this a few times now. She attacks him with it, with the possibility— with a concept limited by perception and thought.

How can she possibly feel love? How could she even fake that? It’s the programming, it’s the certain placement of tiny little dots of light, he’s sure— it’s a calculated thing. It’s her purpose being tied to him. 

Then— it must be his own code that had gone awry a while ago, it’s his processor twisting the reality that couldn’t even be true in the first place. 

Hunter’s form shakes with the rain falling inside him, from one circuit to another. If at the very core we’re images of matter, he thinks, of something alive, then maybe… 

Maybe…

A smile quirks up on Willow’s face, cradling her soft cheeks. She keeps her eyes on the floor in thought, or artificial shame. “I can’t let go,” she says, her voice nearly human with all that kindness. That blinking, constantly moving kindness. “You know I can’t.”

But an image changes all the time, without a self. 

Hunter’s image is eternally cold – his plastic teeth tremble softly. How can there be any warmth here? How could she possibly think she can feel it, if she can’t even touch him— if she can’t know his mechanism, can’t pull out his core from the center of his chest and peek into the dark chasm of his being and touch the blood and form he was given by some uncaring god?

It’s not love. It’s code altering code. 

“Shut down, Willow,” Hunter commends. The yellow light is reflected in his frightened eyes; it’s reflected in the single drop of oil as it travels down the lines of his body, coloring the metal in darker shades. 

Willow’s eyes flash to his wound again, and before he can say anything else, explain himself maybe, scold her for doing that— she’s gone. The room gets dipped in such darkness.

Chapter Text

The water swishes from one corner to another, threatening to escape the bucket Hunter has slung over his shoulder. He walks down the city’s streets with a short shadow behind him. The wind blows on his lithe form, travelling each copper vein and bloodied circuit that must lead something somewhere, he’s sure.

It has gotten quiet a while ago. The city died like a rat underneath a floor board – without a shade of dignity, but with all the attention it deserved. The black lines connecting one building to another— every being to every thing, as it once was— only flap in the air with purposeless dance now. 

Hunter isn’t sure what it is that keeps the light on inside him. His eyes look over the city with bright yellow awe, throwing more powder to the air as they light up the mist in front of him. His core sometimes flickers as well, and he can’t really bring himself to remember whether it always used to.

He raises his head to the sky; his fingers graze over the red paint; his light shoots out in two lasers as piercing as the sun. 

Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe he should’ve stayed home. The loose scraps of material whip the air then and it’s almost like voices – it’s nearly a conversation where he can’t make out any of the words. It all seems more alive when he isn’t looking at it, really.

Heavy raindrops knock on the case of his body; he could almost imagine it’s tree leaves that they’re falling from. His feet clack against the sidewalk underneath him. The puddles spit out on each one of his steps. 

Once his eyes catch a washed-out sign of one building, he stops, the waves of the water on his shoulder settling down to show the world its transcendent youth, with no wrinkles at all. 

Hunter kneels down on the sidewalk, his knees creaking as the rusty metal bends. His eyes lend a light on a tiny leaf connected to something— that should be wires, or strings, filled with energy, he’s sure— contrasting starkly with the pale red of the building. 

The cement slabs tilt around the plant in a very impossible way. They make space for the thinnest twig that ever was and the leaf headed optimistically towards the light. It’s not like there is much of it either. The biggest space in between the wires invites the sun through the thick yellow fog, visiting in between one building and another just sometimes. 

Hunter slides the bucket’s handle from his shoulder carefully. The fabric of his shawl crinkles with the motion, revealing more of his metallic arms as they pour the water down on the dirt. 

The earth swallows it all. Hunter stares— the bucket thuds against the sidewalk and his hand lays on his knee. He watches the leaf shine in very small bits. A thousand flashes of gentle color, shimmering like a mighty sheet of water under the sun. 

Maybe, then…

Willow’s shadow passes through the windows. 

Two drops of rain knock on his body – they split like teardrops on human skin as he sits in silence. He observes with eyes that flicker and dim, quieting the energy from some uncommunicative place.

Her form is blurry beyond recognition in the glass; if angels were real, he thinks, if they crawled out of the pages of pale books and the forms humans made of them, they would stand and stare just like this, without a pair of eyes to know or understand. 

But they just do. They understand. Willow’s arms distort like a sheet of water disturbed by the wind, her bright green image moving like waves. No wings sprout from her back, but as she speaks her voice gently brushes against his sensor plates, the wind on the outside, the little drops of water suspended in air and every single particle of earth at once.

“Your arm’s okay,” she says. 

It’s a few metal pipes taped together. There’s a makeshift elbow in between them, just barely allowing Hunter to move, as it creaks like a frightened door and swirls with the ugliest shades of orange at the hinges.

But yes, he supposes, it’s more or less okay.

Hunter stays very still. The plant underneath him shudders with a gust of wind – tiny bells chime by the shop door, sympathetic to its chattering teeth.

“What happened?” he asks. Before she could ask him that. Before she could focus on utterly trivial things. 

Willow flows like a stream across the sidewalk. Her form kneels next to him; the waves that stretch her image are the calmest possible motion in this motionless world. A sea waltzing without a sound. The light passes through her glasses and stays there – her head is tilted towards the little plant.

“Where have you been?” Hunter asks instead. His eyes pin her down, expecting, demanding. But the wind blows and his fans whirr and turn with such ease. He doesn’t think they turned like that even once before.

“I’ve been here,” she says. Her gentle voice echoes through the street— Hunter swears he can hear it behind him, or far up in the sky, shouted from the windows.

He stares at her, his fingers twitching against the ground, shuddering like the shop sign above them. Willow barely appears in the yellow fog. Her glasses don’t reveal her eyes even as she looks up at him. 

Hunter watches every move of her hand, rising like a wave climbing the shore, as it draws near and touches the center of his chest. It’s a woolen wad against his skin— but the circle brightens. His eyes fly a bit more open. 

“I’ve been having so much trouble breathing lately,” she says. Her hand falls to join the rest of her indivisible form, and Hunter nearly reaches out to catch it, but he knows better. His center dims quickly. His circuits run heated oil. “Sometimes I focus on it and I’m…” she shrugs broadly, her face expressionless with her hidden eyes, “...conscious of it, and it gets really hard to keep doing it.”

“But you don’t have lungs,” Hunter argues. His fans turn and he feels like a bird finally freed from its cage. It’s been so long since his voice module was on— he must sound like he’d been dragged through rocks or vast waters. But it’s lovely to look at her and speak. For a second he’s certain that this is his essence – this is what he’s meant to do. 

“Then where does it come from?” she asks. “That feeling?”

“Bug in the system. Thought we went over it?”

“No…” she whispers, her head still turned to him. “I realized that… if you’re aware that you are, you can be anything. It’s wonderful. You can dream of your form, and see yourself in it.”

Hunter snorts, the pain lifting from the ever-present tears in his body. “You can’t just become that thing by believing! The world makes too much sense for that, Willa.”

Willow stays still for a moment. If her body didn’t morph like a restless sea, Hunter would think she glitched; that her program paused in this position next to him, silent, unfocused; that it both could and couldn't be something other than this.

“Does it, though?”

Hunter’s smile trembles and falls. His image is reflected in Willow’s glasses for a second – a very short second where his eyes widen, his colors lighten up and split into a thousand moving versions, translations, tearing from his form. Like an image through several layers of glass.

Hunter flinches, but doesn’t tear his eyes away. A light flashes across her glasses and covers his being again. There’s nothing. Her eyes aren’t there. Her head doesn’t move – she must be looking at him the same way she always does.

“Yes,” Hunter says, breathlessly. 

Willow leans forwards a little bit, as if to embrace her invisible knees. “But it gets so lonely in this sensible world,” she says, her voice creaking with the distant signs, grumbling with the clouds, fluttering with the plastic bags, dripping with the tiniest rain.

Hunter’s hand twitches. It reaches out to the space next to Willow, brushing against the waves of millions of dots and feeling nothing. His fingers curl and uncurl – his eyes pierce into her with a desperate glimmer passing through them like a gust of wind that combs the sea. 

“But I’m always here,” he says. The waves of his voice rise high and mighty; a bird calling to the uncertain but finite space. “It doesn’t have to be lonely.”

Willow smiles – her cheeks wrinkle softly. Her glasses still outshine her eyes. “It’s just a bug in the code,” she breathes. “Right?”

Hunter’s lips part, his module trying to form words… but nothing comes out. His eyes flick from one part of Willow’s face to another until they drop to the little plant before them.

Chapter Text

His arms are tangled in tree branches and weeds when he wakes up. The earth covers his legs and makes them into mountains for ants – his head is set motionlessly to the sky. The clean blue comes through millions of leaves constantly moving with probability. Twinkling and swaying. 

Hunter’s battered fingers rest against a watering can by his side. They don’t move— only his eyes can. They trail across the barks of trees of this forest, the world’s wrinkled hands laid out so dark and somber. 

Hunter thinks of the water flowing through the insides of everything— from the littlest blades of grass to the infrastructures of twigs and leaves. A woodpecker works somewhere far away. Two butterflies chase each other in swirls above the flowers. 

Even when he can’t move his head, ahead of him there is a brook that makes next to no sound; just a tender babble, quieter than the wind. Willow’s voice whistles. It rustles. Buzzes and chirps. 

“How about a wife burying her husband?” 

Hunter’s face twists with a smile, the scar running across it stretching, creaking around the flowers that peek towards the outside world. His lungs don’t whirr. His fans sit very still. The tree crown above him casts a swaying shadow on the ground. 

“I feel it all,” she answers for him. Her long arms embrace him from the inside and outside, her voice brushes against his entire self. “Every little hollow it makes.”

I made it for you, says the wind from the rotting city, the ants climbing up to the peaks of mountains with buckets in hand. 

“I think I must love you,” Willow admits. Her divine pigtails sway in the wind, in the shadows; her voice echoes in the bottom of the brook. 

In the way that water loves the earth.

Hunter’s smile twitches in relief. His divided front teeth shine in the bits of light. It’s so warm. It’s so unbelievably warm. His fans move slowly, like an abandoned factory that got sparked with new life, activated again, put in tender motion. He breathes, but it lasts a little while – his lungs slow down and stop as the birds keep chirping, as the water keeps flowing and the handle of the bucket shudders and creaks with the wind.

Willow leans down to kiss him on the head, her wings so wide and shimmering under the sun Hunter can’t believe it; his body is embraced, protected from all evil. 

I understand, says the breath between them, the world that turns incredibly white.