Chapter Text
“I’m sorry.”
Mensah’s words echoed in his ears as Gurathin swayed unsteadily, bracing himself against the counter in their hotel suite as he vomited into the sink. No. Fuck. No, no, no, no. No, this can’t be happening.
Pin-Lee failed. No, that was wrong, Gurathin shook himself, it wasn’t Pin-Lee. It was the Corporation Rim. The court injunction had come through just a little too slow, and by the time they had gotten to the recycling area, SecUnit had already been melted down. He had its memories, burning through his augments, but he was too late.
“Oh, Gura. We didn’t think. We shouldn’t have brought you here,” Mensah was saying, rubbing circles on his back, but with the combination of SecUnit’s memories and the feverish chills currently shuddering down his spine, the touch felt like a thousand burning needles poking into him. He flinched away.
“I- I didn’t relapse,” he managed to get out between bouts of nausea and grief, because despite everything he needed them to know he wasn’t that weak. I have it, he almost said after that, but the words caught in his throat. How could he explain I tried to save SecUnit, its memories are in my brain, and that’s why I feel like death warmed over when they had no body to put those memories in? When it could never come back?
It would crush them. He couldn’t be the one to give them false hope only to snatch it away again because the Company was a piece of shit that melted down their SecUnit before he could get its memories back.
Gurathin tried to look up at Mensah, which turned out to be a mistake, because the combination of his own guilt and the eye contact (and holy fuck, that pure discomfort was the worst feeling in the world, he was never going to make SecUnit do that again… oh, never mind, he couldn’t, it was dead. Right.)
He couldn’t face them. Mumbling something probably not very believable about a stomach bug, he staggered his way over to his personal room, where he only barely managed to collapse to his knees in front of the toilet before retching again. Shivers wracked his body, from a combination of grief, anger, guilt, and overloaded augments.
After a little more heaving, Gurathin sat back on his heels, still squatting on the bathroom floor, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His augments whirred loudly inside his head, the noise of the processors in his feed trying to hold on to all of SecUnit’s compressed files making his already unpleasant headache so much worse.
Shit. What was he going to do? He had planned to steal the memory files back from the company, because fuck the Corporation Rim, but without a SecUnit to download them to, what the hell was he supposed to do with a rogue construct’s worth of memories?
For a brief, painful moment, Gurathin considered deleting them. There was no more SecUnit, it had been scrapped. It would never be rebuilt. Maybe it would be best just to let it rest, and grieve like a normal person. He couldn’t very well keep them; after all, it wasn’t like his current augments could handle the sheer processing power of a construct’s entire being. They were already struggling with the compressed files enough to make him sick.
No, the smart decision was definitely to erase the memories and admit defeat. Sometimes, he imagined Mensah saying, you just have to let things go.
But Gurathin was one weak, stubborn son of a bitch, and after everything he’d put SecUnit through, he refused to let it die like this. He couldn’t. He wasn’t going to. There had to be another way, some way he could give it the chance it deserved at a life free from the Corporation, a life like his.
It probably deserved that kind of life more than he did, after everything. What had he ever done besides hurt the people he loved?
…Huh, that’s an idea.