Are You Okay?

Saddling yonder horizon is the tinkerer’s manse—a place of skittering walls.
A gaunt hunter amid the tundra seeks lodging.
“Inside,” the tinkerer bids enter.
Inside, hunter and prey find union.

Notes:

For VexInheritance.

This is a work commissioned by VexInheritance, for information regarding commissions, refer to ending notes.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

In the warren Noctis called home, Z realized all the busy work she’d grown accustomed to topside had been overtaken by far too much free time. Everyone had a role, it seemed. Whether by vocation or because of utilitarian implementation of their in-built abilities, they had some kind of purpose in keeping this subterranean lifestyle afloat.

Literally, in the case of whoever’s in charge of monitoring the pipes; Rabbit always seemed to have something to say about the pipes.

Then there was Z, this ghoulish hanger-on that’s never too far away from her Rabbit. Loitering, bumping her panoptical suite on things, and not to mention, putting a strain on dwindling resources. Definitively left without anything to do with all this free time she had now that she was trying to be an upstanding member of a society she near hunted to extinction.

Yeah, she was still working all that baggage out.

She felt half as much a burden as L always said she was back when she wasn’t slagged.

Physically, at least.

Unlike every other time she was benched, though, and left with little to do, it was never because she was useless . Even L remembered Z was good at keeping other squads away. With reminders from T, of course. But she was more often than not a hindrance to people’s ability to actually get work done, whereas outside she was just a bother. Now she had to worry about her telson-blade scratching surfaces; she had to worry about bumping into people; she had to worry about all the things she took as a given back when she was their boogeyman. It was like everything about being defective, wrong , things she thought herself over by now, had come back to roost on her shoulder again.

So she tried finding anything to preoccupy her mind with when she couldn’t be with the rabbit she followed into this hole.

It wasn’t very fun.

Or productive.

People needed things lifted and carried, holding things in place while someone welds it together, you know, the kind of stuff L liked to say Z had a knack for—dumb manual labor. Things labor drones should do. Which, actually, most of the drones in the bunkers were labor-type drones, so it made sense; Noctis had to explain the difference between product lines several times.

After a full day of trying to put the excess thew bound in her carapace to use by carrying things that’d take two or four drones, someone finally had the decency to tell Z she could go home.

Setting the crate down, she stepped back and stretched the fiber-muscle coiling around her struts, before throwing a thumb over her shoulder.

“ Oi— I finished carrying your heavy ass junk!” she shouted. “What else you want me to do?”

The person who often gave her something to do was one of the few adults in the warren who seemed willing to even tolerate her presence. She was an older drone. First generation, she learned. Apparently there was a major difference between the manufactured drones and the brats they made. Someone put in charge of managing hazardous materials. And despite the fact she was fairly certain she had violently dismantled a few people she knew, the older drone kept giving her something to do.

“Oh, that should be fine,” she said. “You can take the rest of the day off.

Day off, yeah right—she could read between the lines.

Fuck off before you kill someone.

Or, you know… probably.

Rather than stand around rubbernecking at everything around her, making everything awkward, Z noticed a loose vent some distance away, near where several of the less pleasant drones were working. Eyeing her. Watching her massage the brachial plates of an arm while her tail flicked in short arcs. They were the ones who thought she couldn't hear their hushed conversations or notice them glaring at her with hollow eyelights.

A flash of teeth grin-glinted between her rind-lips.

With a hiss of superheated air from popped interscapular plates, Z turned and slunk toward them with an intense expression on her motile plates. Intense to them. She was just smirking, really. There might have been a flickering cross on her screen.

They backpedaled, taking quick notice of her direction while the rest parted. Their reactions were priceless; she missed being able to get a rise out of Noctis like this.

When she loomed over them, they looked ready to keel over.

Then she plucked a screwdriver out of her pocket, its handle pencil-chewed on, before leaning forward. Over them. Arms outstretched.

They fell back with a start—they sounded like children.

She cackled just before leaping up and latching onto the ceiling, talons cutting out of her forearm-housing. Only to stick her tongue down at them, vesicle-canister flickering, before opening up and slithering into the caliduct’s scrapped scan.

Those two idiots could fix it back into place, she just wanted out of that situation.

She wanted to go find her corner to brood.

Maybe death scroll for a couple hours.

Or… she stalled in her skitter through the vents, letting the xanthic hue of her glow pool like a clot in the duct, fiddling with the screwdriver.

Rubber handle, fine steel bit, the softer material often recipient to her tic’s dispersion of idle energy. It was a hair too small for her to comfortably use it, and there were scratches along the shank from where someone worried at it.

A rabbit’s gift.

He gave it to her after the prom, a gift by way of thanks for not letting his home be gutted from the inside out.

Something to stand in for his lack of limousine and corsage, he'd joked.

She rolled it between her fingers several times, the sickly amber of her eyelights softening to pastel orange. Her processors were briefly awash with the way his stupid motile plates pulled apart to beam up at her. Then she clicked her tongue and pulled her faceplate into a taut expression, screen saturated.

When did she start running afoul of cheesy shojo tropes?

Z fiddled with the magnetic buttons of her coat before slipping the item in, tucking it out of sight, and continuing her crawl through the bunker’s caliducts. Enjoying the quiet it brought her. Or, at least, the tangential quiet it brought her. It was actually rather noisy in the ductwork—scab-grates chafed every compartment in the bunker. People seemed unaware of just how much their voices carried; in the safety of their homes, people lost many filters.

Or maybe her hearing was just too acute for such confined living?

It had become a guilty pleasure of hers to drag out her crawl to eavesdrop on the juiciest morsels of drama playing out in the compartments below. They were her soap operas. Listening to all the excitement their humdrum flicker lives could conjure was strangely nostalgic, but she could never put a talon to why.

Whenever she tried running down that particular thoughtline, her hindprocessor felt itchy, so she never finished the chase.

The latest bit of delicious drama she caught was something about a guy who had been two-timing his partner with a mistress finally got strung out by both when they found out what was happening. Apparently, they were now dating each other?

She was filing this away for later—Joule, the glitch, would probably know more.

After a minute of winding through the ductwork, Z spotted familiar marks left by prior forays through the vents. Scratches, scuffs. And a well-worn scab-grate.

Noctis had modified it so it could be pushed open and latched shut. Vale said it was her doggy door.

A frown peeled the memory metal off her teeth.

She used a talon to unlatch the hook before slipping out and dripping onto the floor with a quiet pad of hard soles. There was soft light in the compartment. A contrast against the acidic amber of her glow. Rabbit had changed all the bulbs from the grating hum-buzz of florescent, so she didn't need to squint in here.

Z dusted herself off once standing anew before sauntering up to and flopping back into the living room’s couch. Legs splayed out, plates popping up to bleed off waste heat.

Her tail was lax against the fabric, hanging off the arm, all the day's tension draining from its fibers.

The compartment Noctis lived in wasn't furnished with much, and what it did have looked patched. Held together over the years. A lot of it was old enough that even Z thought someone should have gotten new stuff by now. But when she brought that up to her little rodent, he just mumbled something about sentimentality and got a far-off look on his screen.

She didn't pry in the direction after that; she still remembered disliking how he looked then.

After a moment of lounging, the disassembler popped several buttons before peeling open her coat so the colder air could rush over her core glass. It nipped at the heat prickling her carapace. Then she eyed the fluff of her boots, only to fold her legs so she could start tugging them off her feet.

They were dropped unceremoniously, tail slipping off the couch to coil around them both.

Joule once described her tail as draconic.

Something about tying itself around things she's possessive about.

Whatever.

She stretched either arm out to take up as much of the couch as she could before letting several optical blisters start lolling around. Scanning the room. Observing and scrutinizing the compartment’s details. If you had the hardware, you could glean a lot of information from the shifting facets of a lived-in space. Lingering thermal emissions, micro-scratches on the floor, places of greater foot traffic. And Z had all the hardware humanity could shove into one autonomous machine.

There were emissions trailing through several areas that she had saved as Nori, more here than she was used to, while Rabbit's tracks seemed sparse today. Did he say something about staying home?

She cracked her memory metal, popping the servo-joints before working her jaw in half cirque motions. Grinding her teeth like rocks; it was soothing.

It had been a rather boring day today, if she was being honest, boring and slow. More so than usual. Was this the domestic bliss her manga referred to in between action scenes? God, just thinking about it sounded cringe. She wasn’t some weak-kneed shojo protagonist hoping for senpai to notice her before the school cultural festival—why did it matter if he wasn’t very active today?

Superheated air hissed from her interscapular plates.

An unbidden thoughtline directed to a seldom opened pathway in her drivers that held all the fragmented facets of the prom night she crashed with Noctis. They reconstructed his face. Expressions. Which led to recollections of the camp and how sad he looked. A subtle sort of thing; she was not good at subtle.

More than sad, he looked… ground down.

Z huffed before flopping about on the couch for a moment. Vocoder straining noise like gravel.

How did Noctis stand so much introspection?

Gnashing her teeth together until a warning informed her of their structural integrity, then she decided fuck it. Today was boring. She was kind of done with most everyone else's presence. And it'd been half a day since she checked in on her hare.

Best to make sure he hasn't blown himself up.

Or had another incident.

Despite her best efforts, she could not keep those memories out. They were memetic. A pernicious vector of engrammatic dread that now limned all the growing uncertainty of her past, present and future. And the only person with answers was still doing his best impression of a damn clam.

Z remembered the glyph burning disease green.

Z remembered the silk, the insects crawling out of him.

Z remembered the way Noctis had been twisted by something she only knew the name of.

Z remembered T’s stark fear, the way everything made her processors ache.

Above all else, Z remembered how acutely aware she was of just how little she actually knew about her form and function.

She shook the memories of the camp free, fragmenting them for storage.

The disassembler hopped up to her feet and moved with purpose, tail tightening around her boots to carry them with her. She winded around what little furniture there was until she was met with a fine bulkhead of a door. There was a mingle of scents wafting off the metal: fruity Vale, eclectic Nori, the perfumed stink of Joule, and earthy Noctis most of all. It bristled with an absurd amount of locking mechanisms. But her little Rabbit had given her the know-how needed to crack the vault of his room.

He also told her where he hid his spare key, which also helped when all the science fiction security was peeled away.

It hissed open, leaving her wincing as the pressure-strain washed over her. Squinting. Plates trembling, standing on end. Then she walked into the glorified workshop of Noctis’ room.

Over the course of his life, Noctis had somehow gotten it into his head that the place he sleeps also has to be where he tinkers. This mindset left his room torn between an antique shop and a high-tech workshop. There was clutter spread across multiple worktops with partial projects lost amid the junk he'd accrued. Things he’d thought of in the long hours he spent cooped up in his processors. And when there was space, he filled it instead with blueprints dreamed up from the sparks flittering through his core.

But, he'd never capitulate to the very justified notion that his room was a mess. No, no. It was organized, busy! Mess implied he couldn't find what he was looking for. He even kept a scattering of bins to crumple away everything that didn’t meet his insane standards.

That being said, he did actually keep a corner of the room in a state adjacent to a living quarters. A place to sleep. It was all the soft you could find in the bunker crammed up into something resembling bedding.

Z had mixed feelings about being in the drone’s room.

It had always been a little too hot for Z to feel comfortable in her skin when hanging out. Loitering. Haranguing her Rabbit until he gave a tasty reaction. But it was downright toasty now after the camp.

He tried being sympathetic, which always irritated her. Flustered. Whatever the word is. Offering to plunge the room into ice.

But she never took it.

Whatever she felt when the air reminded her of the ever talking clock that was her heating issue, she was sure the cause of his newfound cold-bloodedness was worse. Why did she think that? It felt right, but she couldn't tell why.

“ Oi, Rabbit,” she called to the hunched figure sitting at the westernmost table. “You still alive?”

Noctis jumped at her voice, a series of crumpled balls of graphed paper tumbling to the ground as he turned emerald eyelights onto her. He had a gawping mien twisting his motile plates, fleeing before the dawn rising on his faceplate.

“Hi, Deer! Yeah, still kickin’!”

She felt heat prickle across her screen before wiping the saturation off; that damn nickname again…

“Did Mrs. Jenkins let you off early?”

“Nah,” she strode over to him, tail eventually letting her boots off at the part of the room she'd claimed, “just ran out of stuff to do.”

“Oh, well that’s—” his voice lagged when she leaned over him, arms draping over his shoulder to lock together at his chestplate while resting her head atop his “—t-that’s uh, fortunate! Or, well, not fortunate, i-in case you wanted to have more to do. Just, you know…”

He was babbling again, stumbling over his words as he wheeled through whatever thoughtlines he was stricken with when the possibility of a social faux paus reared its head.

It was cute.

You know, in a dweeby sort of way.

A smile cut up her faceplate and the lip-rinds of her memory metal drooped off her teeth, screen flickering with the rictus grin of Death before settling back. But it was dulled when an errant thoughtline bounced into her queue. If she hadn’t popped into his room, would he have moved even once? Despite recent events, he never seemed to let on to just how affected he was about the whole camp incident. Even now, if she hadn’t been there, hadn’t fallen through the sky with him, she wouldn’t be any the wiser to any of it. He was too good at hiding himself.

She blinked.

Between his hands was a long cable that ended on either side with a USB head, but it looked cobbled together—this took her attention immediately.

One side had a larger shield than the other.

“What’cha got there?”

“Wha— oh!” He spread the cable out on the table, smoothing it with his hands. “This is a USB-c cable I’ve been modifying.”

There was a knot of electrical tape adhered around the larger plug, covering where the insulation had been stripped. A USB-c cable was meant to connect with a drone’s core. She remembered the technicians of JCJenson using them to do maintenance work.

“Why are you doin’ that?”

“Because I… oh, biscuits uh—” She saw a buffering symbol blip onto the corner of his screen. “It’s… for you and me.”

Her tail twitched, acromial plates flattening against her shoulders from their popped up position. The amber of her light washed out some of the details in his emotive glass, not that she was very good at discerning meaning out of a drone’s lack of kinesics. Or, no, not a lack thereof, it was just different from what she’d grown accustomed to amongst disassembly drones.

He seemed flustered.

“I’m gunna go out on a limb here and say it’s not for maintenance?”

“No— well, it is the same cable used for maintenance checks, but I thought we could maybe use it for something else.”

“…that being?”

Quiet for a moment, he fidgeted with the cable before glancing up at her from the corner of his screen. Workers were strange. The cute ones seemed even weirder. Once he finished puzzling out whatever was taxing his processors, he smiled, and she felt her emotive glass prickle with heat anew.

(“So, when I was helping with some maintenance work around the doors, I found myself thinking about what you told me with the tape you found. What we could do next, what can be done next. And after a lot of thought, I don't think there's much else we can do until we actually have more information—”

“Like with the orange box thingy?”

“The wha— oh! Yes, the black box, a lot like that! In order to get more information, I figured the best way to do that would be by pouring over any memories or data your architecture might have regarding the stuff shown in the tape. But uh… in order to do that, I needed to make something that could enable us to couple our cores together.”

He tapped his fingers together, giving her a wobbly smile.

“I-if you want to and are okay with it, of course.”

Noctis did that a lot, asking and double checking whenever he wanted to do something with her, Vale or Joule. Even if it was something small like holding their hands. Insignificant, if she was honest. But she didn’t dislike him doing that—on the contrary, it always left her feeling fluttery inside. However, she’d never admit that to him.

Wait, couple our cores together?

“…is this a weird worker drone thing I don’t know about?”

The notion felt transgressive in the way baring your core glass to someone with a gun did, something vulnerable and capable of getting you cored out on the off chance the other person was feeling vindictive. Her epidermal plates squeezed taut against her mesh. She briefly imagined trying this with T or, God forbid, L, and shivered.

“What— core coupling?”

“Yeah, do you guys just, like, sit around and connect your cores together for fun?”

“No! Well, I mean, kind of? It’s not really a, hey! Let’s do this because I’m feeling spontaneous! Sort of thing. When it isn’t someone scanning your architecture for maintenance, it’s kind of like… hugging someone? Or maybe kissing. I don’t know, it’s just… it’s core coupling!”

He watched her faceplate for a moment.

“Do… disassembly drones not do that?”

Clicking her tongue with a snorted laugh, Z disentangled herself from the smaller machine before leaning up against his work table. Propping herself on her hands. The pressure biting into the seams of her coxal plates gave an anchor to focus on, tail tangling around the leg nearest where she stood, her epidermal panels almost sagging.

Her smile sharpened.

“We counting when barbie dolls pig-stick you with viruses?”

“Uh… no? ”

“Then, yeah, no—you may not have noticed, but none of my squad were really chummy with each other. The same’s true for every other squad. I guess they figured if we weren't designed to be as corporate-cutthroat as possible, we'd realize they were leaving us to die on a frozen rock of a planet.”

At some point, the tension in her tail went slack with the tone of her voice. Vesicle-canister thunking. She saw him eye her carefully with that overly empathetic concern written across his faceplate.

It made the pit in her architecture feel both wider and shallower.

She shook her head before teetering on her heels.

“So, yeah, not really an environment for hugging or touchy feely crud like that.”

“Oh.”

This felt… weird, it felt really weird to be talking like this with him. With anyone, really, but Noctis made it feel stranger. Even when Vale managed to pry something from the tight net she held onto all her damage, it never felt like how it did to open up about stuff with Mr. Emotional Support Personified. She chewed at nothing, grinding her teeth while trying to tense her plates again.

She really wished he'd start yapping again, or maybe just started working on a new project. Anything but sit with his last word echoing in her aurals.

“Would you want to… try?”

Continuing to grind her teeth, Z let the words hang for a moment.

“What's it like?” She hated how quiet her voice was. “Y’know, the coupling.”

He idled with the cable in hand, rolling it between his fingers, “I've only done it a few times, mostly with my mom and dad when I was really little. Well, more my dad than my mom, but that was only when he was still around. If I had to describe it, it's like… becoming something new with someone else while you're connected. Memories, senses, subjectivity, it all kinda knots together into this big shared experience.”

Noctis had a habit of letting his mouth run on and on if no one stopped him, happily hopping along without a care in the world. That's why he was her little rabbit. But when he spoke about this, he seemed for all the world a hare lost in the woods.

It's like he couldn't keep water from leaking out of his cupped hands, yet kept trying to scoop it up so he could show it off to Z.

His screen was brilliant emerald, cutting through the glower of sickly amber—she was reminded of a sky fall.

Her smile softened.

“Eh, sure, why the hell not? It sounds kinda interesting the way you describe it. So how do we go about doin’ it?”

“Well, first, we need access to each other's cores—”)

So her little Rabbit was hopping along again, this time bringing her along for the ride. He wasn't very good at simplifying things, but he was good at showing. Demonstrating. Good enough to forget that he was literally stripping himself to his bare chestplate so he could show her what to do.

That got a very cute reaction out of him.

Screen oversaturation.

Hands over his core glass.

Laughing a stilted sound, trying to play it off as a joke.

All of which got her smile to sharpen again, got Death's rictus grin to blaze against her screen. It reminded her of the coolant pool exchange. There was this little needle wedged into wherever Joule said her decorum should have been, the thing causing her own screen to saturate along the edges, but it’s outweighed by the delight trilling up her spinal-strut at his reaction. His attempts at modesty.

That’s why she was teasing him, trying to get him to take off his shirt faster.

No other reason.

When he did finally discard his shirt, folding it up on the table, it was while they both occupied that fluffy corner posing as bedding. Sitting together. Close. It wasn’t weird to have a boy shirtless, in his room, on his nominal bed with the door closed, right?

Underneath the shirt, she noticed his chassis was ostensibly sculpted, rather than the machined look so many other first and second generation worker drones had. Her panoptical suite highlighted areas of interest. Hardware-viscera that many autonomous machines lacked. It left him with a bulkier appearance than Joule, Vale, the people she scythed through the night she met him, or even what she saw of Chad’s remains.

If this was a pulp romance novel, it might behoove her to liken him to marble; she did not feel much of anything other than further piqued about his specs.

Despite all those exotic additives, though, her interest was drawn to the soft polymer of his frame.

Joints, the abdominal band constituting his waist, his neck, all these places where it would be easier to mount her fangs into his mesh. Find wire-capillaries, artery-tubes and coolant-veins. The part of her always lurking in the shadow cast by emotion-packets found an allure in the way his mesh swept from the more solid metal of his chassis, like a scene of blatant fan service in her manga. She was suddenly very conscious of the formless fire formicating inside her thoracic cavity—she was very hungry.

She tried not to let it show.

Then she saw marks of healed egress where his little insects had burrowed through him, and all the hunger soured in her intake.

“So, most chassis are similar in how you open the chestplate, but a lot of second generation worker drones have a unique configuration. But I’ll guide you through it!”

Superheated air wheezed from her loose, sagging skin, while her tail encircled his waist. Pooling in his lap. There was a sock slipped over her vesicle-canister, making the telson-blade plush and blunted.

“Lead the way, Rabbit.”

He smiled, a toothy thing that felt familiar in a way she couldn’t quite place. It brought emotion-packets to the forefront of her buffer. Worker drones always seemed painfully static creatures compared to what she’s used to, but Noctis used what little he had to loosen whatever tight knot she kept close to her core.

“May I take your hands?”

“Yeah, mate, you can take my hands.”

He took her larger hands in his before guiding them onto his chestplate, slotting her fingers onto minute impressions that left her with a splayed out arrangement. She did not have enough fingers for each one. These mechanisms were built for a human operator to seamlessly open, so another drone trying to replicate the movements always required extra effort; a sour, bitter kernel of old anger pricked her processors at his explanation.

She mumbled something about slavish human design ethos.

Rabbit, still smiling, shrugged his shoulders in a helpless sort of way that left Z’s motile plates twisting with emotion. Interscapular plates popping. There was an underlying edge to his smile. Something she was just capable of noticing but too inept with worker tells to identify it. However, it needled her hindprocessor into something protective, possessive, upset at just how incapable she was when it came to making others feel better.

How did you deal with others’ emotions?

She still struggled to process hers in stable ways, according to Vale and Joule.

Z found herself bitterly wishing that she could rip out Noctis’ sadness—something she learned about recently—like she could a drone’s electrocirculatory nodes.

“So, first, we need to start peeling the bands of material away and setting them into their niches—”

He talked her through the whole thing, shadowing the delicate motions she needed to do with his own hands. Depressing a band of metal, then rotating it to slot into a niche. Pulling something out so it could release a sheet of mesh. It was very helpful because, when it started hurting him, Z fumbled a band and hissed when it snapped back to pinch her digits.

“I'm sorry!” he apologized. “I thought— biscuits, I didn't think it'd smart this bad.”

“What. The. Fuck?”

Most of his chestplate had been unraveled and slotted away, layers of the mesh peeled away and forcep-parted. But the deepest parts, those directly ensconcing the cavity, remained. Except there were perforations peeking through.

Holes.

His mesh was textured in the nightmares of a trypophobe.

Each one tiny, just large enough for a skittering insect or finger to squeeze through. And if she focused, she could see the wobble light of scurrying things staring out at her.

“Those things live inside your chest!”

“It's fine!”

He was trying to wave her worry away, hands holding hers while smiling. Laughing. She was doing neither.

“How is having a colony of those bloody things inside you fine? ”

“Well… it doesn't hurt, really—”

“You just said—”

“ They don't hurt, but opening my chestplate does! I didn't— I didn't think it'd hurt this much. I'm sorry if I startled you.”

“You didn't—” she took a breath, vented, and forced composure through her vocoder “Why is it hurting?”

He sucked on his lower lip, idly chewing at nothing. Lost in thoughtlines. She was aware, distantly, of where their hands were in contact but the subtle movement against the fiber-muscle and polymer-fat of his mesh kept her attention.

“I— I don't really know, it… I-I can't really explain what all happened with my internals. Everything is… different. It'd be easier to show than tell.”

It took some convincing, reassuring Z that her Rabbit wouldn't keel over dead from a little pain, but she eventually continued following direction. Except she was being led a lot more than before. Which, considering she had to tense her whole body to keep her hands from trembling, was an achievement.

Opening his thoracic cavity was more than a little pain.

She watched him bite his tongue and screw tight his motile plates, choking back the noises leaking from his vocoder. What did it feel like? To have whatever fleshy gunk supporting those growths she spied at camp inside. To have living things crawling around inside. Something wet and fibrous was tearing inside him, a strip of velcro coming undone inside his cavity.

It was sting-awful in her aurals.

The stretch of noise called back to something she grasped like smoke.

Z killed the thoughtlines cycling through her affective registry, shaking her head, before a bone-strut deep shiver stole its way up her arms; the first brumal whispers curl over her fingers.

Dimming the fire formicating through her subcutaneous mesh.

The reflections caught in the alloy of her skin-metal faded with the condensation fogging their surface. Her attention turned towards her Rabbit. And her eyelights hollowed, acromial plates popping up.

Inside his thoracic cavity hung the tattered drapery of a dehiscent wound, fibrous and fatty tissue dangling where a translucent membrane was debrided in the act of opening his chestplate. This tissue covered everything inside. Connecting, stretching, writhing. The flesh seemed to flow from and wrap especially tight around his core, now an emerald eye winking from a glorified heart. It was a sturdy web of mycelium-like flesh supporting viscera-hardware and small myotic gills flowering between crevices and in open spaces.

There, in the budding gore, were the skittering things that now inhabited her Rabbit like a colony of ants. Squeezing from one shelf of gills to the next through those holes.

Hiding?

Or maybe they were looking for warmth, huddling together, away from the thin layer of rime coating everything inside his cavity.

“It’s like—”

“When L became a spooky flesh-metal monster?”

She snapped up and caught his face in her gaze; he was looking down, away, and seemed embarrassed. Fiddling with the fabric of his makeshift bed. One of the roaches skittered up onto his shoulder to nuzzle against his neck.

It seemed damp when exposed to air.

Noctis smiled and rubbed the tiny machine with the tip of a finger, “I’m fine, Riley.”

“…you named it?”

“Her, and yeah, I named all of them—easier to keep track that way.”

Fingers curled, the disassembler shuffled them together while dragging her thumb across the knuckles of her forefinger. Drawing patterns in the fog clouding the metal. Processors empty.

Another errant memory.

Plummeting, twisting through the air with javelin-alacrity while the little rodent she followed home was flailing with hollow eyelights pricked with more emotion than she’d ever seen in his faceplate. Words shared, insecurities spoken. It was the rawness of a wound hidden but never mended, shown in a circumstance of profound desperation; she saw the root of the cut stretch back to the nostalgia of youth.

In the end, the closeness of holding one’s heart made it all seem to melt away.

God, everything seemed to be making her all sappy and gross these days—when did her life transition to drama and shojo nonsense?

Z reached out to take Noctis’ hands with amber, honey-bright, occluding her screen with all the cringe emotion she refused to grant a voice. He looked up at her. A sunrise crested upon his memory metal, threading his fingers with hers. Despite living in a post-apocalypse monster story, being turned into something betwixt machine and flesh, despite the world itself trying to grind away at him, Noctis still found a way to smile with utter sincerity.

God!

He’s so insufferable…

“It’s, like, whatever I guess, you said it’s fine, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, I believe you, let’s just get this ball rolling.”

Then she was retracting her hands and shaking them as if she was stung, which got Noctis to laugh and prompt all the skittering things nesting in his cavity to make happy little movements.

He showed her where the ports in his core were, along the hardened shield where the folds of growth ensconced the hardware-viscera. It was still metal and circuitry there. Neither drone knew how long that would last, and neither tried to bring up that uncertainty. But once he showed her where and how to use the cord, he said they had to connect with each other.

That’s when her grin became serrated.

Few things could provoke earnest reactions from her Rabbit like how they could back when she first met him. Among those things were, ironically, still her carapace. Just… in the opposite direction.

Taking a cue from Vale’s playbook, she asked if he wanted to try peeling her coat off with his teeth.

She about near blue screened—watching him blue screen saved her.

After that, she had to turn around and unbutton the coat in order to keep him from popping a circuit due to overheating. The enjoyment of hearing him stammer and go uh-uh kept her processors from taking in less pleasant emotion-packets regarding her frame. Phantom things, wisps of smoke curling up her spinal-strut.

Insecurities made manifest when woven with the reality of our fears, she told herself she was over these things.

The way she’s built.

How her makers never bothered correcting their fuck-ups.

Thinking, believing, seeing the face in the mirror as a fuck-up not worth fixing.

Everything made terrifyingly real with the uncertainty of if she would become what L did, if the captain’s transgression against synthetic and organic alike was mirrored in her own carapace. Whether she knew or not, the trepidation remained.

“I’m going to touch you now, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know you are, Rabbit.”

He looked up at her, hands hesitating for a moment longer than what confidence she had felt tolerable. It left her core in arrhythmic cycles. All the asking, the sensitivity, the sheer opposition to everything she was taught by way of forced corporate culture. She sharpened her smile at him, screen flashing her rictus grin, and he beamed right back at her.

What an idiot.

They never taught a disassembler how to react when someone touches you like spun glass; you are expected to be hit and to hit back. She was taught to shatter the things that touched her. Everything else was a question mark she shied away from. Somewhere lost between averse and want. So when he started finding the niches in her carapace that denoted where the coil of her composition could be undone, peeling the mesh away, folding bands of metal in place, her body tensed.

A spring fighting its urge to snap, all of her plates were pulled taut against her mesh,

He stopped and spoke, of course, and then she’d reassure him she was fine.

Tail tense, screen glaring with a cross.

If she was honest with herself, she liked the way he touched her.

Coded instinct demanded swift reprisal, pushed unto her the want for all the oil-ichor pulsing in his chassis.

She liked the way he asked first, the way he checked in and made sure.

No one asked her these things before, no one bothered caring if she was uncomfortable with it; everyone with violent touch or technician-subtlety.

He always did, never forgot—Z wished it was easier to voice how much this meant.

Z’s queue was inundated with the feedback of having her chestplate opened and thoracic cavity, a wave of needle-relief rushing in to scour the raking heat from her internals in a belch of steam. It brought sweet, sweet release. A reprieve from the baseline pain always ratcheting up between meals. And with it, all the tension wept from her body in kettle-thin whistles of superheated air.

She leaned onto the softest material of Noctis’ bedding with her face slack, a yawn’s imitation coming over her, and body sagging until she closer resembled an anatomical cross-section than she did a machine.

When she focused her panoptical array on the drone in front of her, he had a bright smile and three little insect machines perched atop his shoulders.

“I haven’t seen you look like that in a while!”

Amber saturated her screen, tail tightening its coils around his leg—when did it get there?

“Don’t get used to it, mate.”

She watched him coax the insects back into their little spaces before scooting up to her side on his knees. There he sat, crisscross next to her.

“You ready?”

Was she?

An optical bulb lolled over and came to rest on his faceplate, saw anxiousness animating his motile plates, then clicked her tongue. Chortling to herself.

“Reckon I am,” she confirmed. “So I just plug my end into a port, right?”

He hummed an agreement, slowly slotting his end into his emerald beacon before letting the tension drain out of him. She saw several transparent pop-ups crowd his screen. Then nothing. He proffered the cable and she took it, rolling it around between her fingers before feeling around inside her still too warm internals until she fingered the slot.

There it is, and in the shield goes.

She was getting notifications, pop-ups, and warranty warnings.

A bark of laughter, “Hah! Bite me, JCJenson, you’re not getting your deposit back.”

Noctis alloyed her mirth with his own, a fainter sound as consciousness began slipping from them both. All the world was fading away, one sense at a time.

Before everything went to black, she felt a familiar weight lean against her shoulder and something brush against her hand. In the moments before two would become one, one chose to hold another’s hand.

Then all was gone and two became one.

You land with a stamp, the approximation of values written out upon this striated graph-certain world, caught in blue-bitten winter. There is a homestead ahead. Someone has built amid the tundra, heedless of the black blizzard bearing down overhead.

This is… weird.

I played audience to a narration bereft of verve and flush with tell. Everything felt fish-eyed.

Something had taken from me my sight.

From (five to two.)

There was this cutout path stretching onward toward the homestead, this negative space made clear amid the flurry of black snow. It was a tunnel of purpose I was meant to conform through. Except I could venture outside the lines if I pushed.

I could feel the resistance when I moved against the space’s skin.

A tremor of emotion bound tight in membrane-clear skin. Something permeable if I push just enough. But there's blood-black out there. I feel it pushing back in mind, pressing as knives do. That blood-black attention is what keeps me rooted in place, it's what convinced me to stay along the marked path.

But there was no path.

You have moved, fled from the blood-black blizzard choking the world outside to find sanctuary within. When? In the span between thoughts, missed with a blink that never comes. Snowmelt and ice once frosting the margins of your frame puddle in the entryway at your feet.

Soaking your skin?

Damping the wood— the metal— the floor?

It's true, I did not move into this place where the windows are dark with absence. Not the dark of night, of occlusion, but more like acid-etched glass, like a tarp drawn over the window. There's just nothing outside for me to see.

Then there is the entryway— the building— the homestead I never moved towards?

It feels off.

This place?

This space?

Two places were trying to overlap over the same location at the same time. An apartment and bunker smashed together. Poorly. They were offset by several degrees in opposite directions until it was a shoddy cinophile’s approximation of stereoscopic cinematography. Except there are no flimsy glasses I can rip off to fix it.

A shoe rack on one side of her and a familiar access panel, slagged, flush on the other.

Metal walls splintering the paneled floor.

It was like someone became petulant at being incapable of superimposing the bunker with someone's quaint apartment, then got physical.

This is… weird.

I don't remember moving out of the dark, the blizzard, following the path the blood-black feeling was guiding me along. I just moved. Had moved. One moment I was standing, then the next I have the lingering inertia of having moved.

Maybe it'd be better to describe it as a shift in perspective?

Like I was a camera on a string being slung around from one shot to the next.

I don't know—hell, what am I even doing?

The blood-black feeling presses in the longer I abstain from the path; someone is vacuum sealing me inside this skin. So I begrudgingly move with the current.

You move through the shrouded halls of this double space with the furtive footfall of a servant afraid of drawing her master’s attention. There is too much dust here. Then not enough. Things are out of place in one moment before righting themselves the next, only to be shattered in the seconds after. It was a maddening experience, to be incapable of fulfilling a purpose you have no name for.

So you turn your attention outward, elsewhere.

For a moment, you near the wall of a corridor lined with doors of various shapes, materials and colors. Darkened windows nearby. There were signs on each. Simple, vectored imagery meant to convey information. Except they’re all unparsable gibberish to you—barely.

Oi, bite me!

You trail your fingers along the wood-metal and feel the patter of rain. Has the blizzard thawed? It is a soothing staccato tapping up through your fingertips. But there’s something else, too.

I stop.

The blood-black is back, snaking up behind to coil against my shoulders, but there is something here that feels familiar—an undercurrent to the staccato.

Curiosity burns brighter than the dark; I do not like being herded by anything.

Leaning over, I stretch the membrane ensconcing me so I can place an aural to the wall and listen to the patter; there is something more.

Why is it hard to hear anything?

Then, it’s there, a skittering rush like ice-choked water.

Beneath the wood, under the metal, there is a thousand-limbed thing crepitating in the guts of the structure with the ease of a tapeworm. Or maybe centipede would be more apt? It seems to weave along load-bearing struts, skipping across one to another like stepping stones. There is a pattern to the steps, to the sound.

A rhythm?

Something mathematical, tuned; there is a measurement present.

It sounds… melodic?

I was briefly reminded of— tried to remember— fought to recall—

You fell forward with a start, stumbling from a violent shove that you cannot trace— what? —until the soft embrace of a door cracks you in the faceplate. This left you sputtering. Groaning, swearing venomous things. Acid dripped from your tongue and curled around whatever part there was of you connecting with me.

Sorry.

Not sorry~

Sorry.

That movement without movement again, except this time you brushed past the laughter of childhood and the quiet of adolescence. Past the echo of an empty room. And through the crowded halls of a thousand school days.

You're now standing in front of the penultimate door of this apartment-bunker mirage. It has words stenciled onto it.

Noctis' Room, please knock!

This door is both large and small, an ornate flash of mundanity laden with an unhinged mind's idea of security. There's too many locks. Too many kinds of locks, and you don't have any keys or fingerprints or codes or IDs.

I have to catch my breath, all the movement and stumbling through an incalculable maze that's at once ordered and chaotic.

Flashes of the trek?

I never moved.

But the wound-fresh sting of all the things seen sits in my head. Is Noctis' head really this expansive? How many thoughtlines is he processing at any given moment? Why was there a room dedicated to just a massive round table with multiple chairs? All these questions, but no answers.

What the hell is going on!

Yes, yes, I can feel you pressing against me tall, dark and broody feeling.

Fuck off, I'm busy!

What is supposed to happen next? Following the chute carved out for me by that blood-black feeling, now paired with the itch of unseen eyes, ended in a locked door.

Is Noctis actually here?

Why would knocking work when this thing is locked tighter than Fort Knox? What if no one is here?

God, that'd be embarrassing!

Then I remembered the cold, the hand in mine, and the pressure of him squeezing mine. That would've been painful if it was anyone else. But Noctis made it less so—he always made it less so.

You knock— yes, I knock, don't make a deal about it! —and wait for a response.

It comes by way of the door opening; the door has never been locked.

What you see inside is what you see everytime you slip through the vents to drip into Noctis’ room with all its old lighters, sodium lamps, and orange nixie tubes clashing with the blue VFDs. Except it is foyer-large. An exaggerated master bedroom without any of the panache of flair you’d come to expect from the one percenter rooms that mirrored this size; why did you know what those look like? So it was more like someone had just scaled the room out to shove more of the same into an organized clutter.

Amid that clutter were five doors set towards the back of the room, each one rising from the floor without anything to support them. Portal-like. It seemed to you too much like cartoon logic.

One is colored amber with a five-paneled window.

One is the color of electricity, tagged by a graffiti artist.

One is colored scarlet, judging and exact, with a card reader instead of a handle.

One is colored pale amethyst with a layer of dust.

And one is colored a faded white with a screwdriver hanging from the handle.

Each one was a pillar, holding the room itself up, yet they seemed small enough for you to risk bonking your panoptical suite if you passed through them. There was something behind each, too. A blood-black shadow that stung your eyes if you stared too long.

You saw me sitting at the desk positioned in front of the doors—I saw you at that silly little desk of yours.

Is it really silly?—It really is

But I think it suits you.

I appreciate the sentiment; are you ready for what comes next?

What comes next?

I tried making the walk as free of cinder as I could, but I don’t think I can make the wave less than what it is. I do not think I can keep the danger of the walk from catching up.

What, you think it’ll be worse than spooky scary L?

I don’t… know?

Maybe.

I hope not…

I don’t want to—you won’t.

I approached you and found myself at eye level—no, I am shorter now? Why did you make yourself taller than me!

You covered your faceplate and tried a placating gesture, insisting it wasn’t your doing. Then you told me I was really cute and— and frankly I can’t deal with that right now!

So, you ready, Rabbit?

You hold your hands out to me, ready to take me from the solitary of singularity and into the tumultuous waves of Together. Uncertain, wanting, hoping that all the things I never want to burden others with remain in the corner, I reach out to you.

Together—

To g eth er—

To : g eth ) er—

oh
no

—chartreuse.

Everything

fell

away

An addend—unlike primes—together craft composite novelty through helical duality of amber and emerald. Two, five, seven, nine. Together stranger than ever apart. We shatter the walls and become an event horizon.

Far yet close, two who spoke now wrap up into the singularity of a nubile modality.

Who?

That is the function of our factors—an equation of unnatural integers.

Us!

Together, we sought a screaming paroxysm to wipe away the blood-black interstice and the stereoscopic prison binding us to it. A violent weather bomb meant to scour the vast and endless geometric plane upon which a thousand-thousand mirror shards showered in their multitudes. And there, in each, is you and me.

We.

But the blood-black remains, a cackling weight looming on the horizon we’re always chasing, now reaching out towards you-us; eyes rest heavy somewhere out of sight on helical we.

What now?

I don’t know.

Everything is… it’s quiet.

It is?

Yes, the quiet was loud in our head when bereft of hardware-viscera rattling our skulls with feedback. Light, noise, the vicissitude of temperature, and all the colors beyond the rainbow. Things that assailed—could not?—you-us. Everything too much, too at once; now there is quiet.

Too much quiet?

Deafening.

Where is the verve?

The proof we’re alive and here, together and weirder for it?

For a moment, the quiet was everything, until the recursive ring began—the anthem of silence.

Ringing— Ringing— Ringing— Ringing

It recurves upon itself, looping again and again.

Melodic?

No, monotonous!

Maybe?

I don’t—

We don’t—

Pressing in, squeezing the air, it’s a transmission shot across every broadband that was familiar and alien. What is it? The heavy eyes press harder, the blood-black laughter rising in my-our ears.

What is it?

What is—

A radio creaking its mournful, yearning melody through occluded grilles—th at’ s wha t i t is

PAIN!!

The blood-black has seized us, snatched you-we, and rips you-we from me-we.

No!

Its claws sink deep, teeth biting into my-our throat while gurgling a laugh through the burning ichor-oil shimmering in my-our body! Pain, it’s always there, burning and scalding and turning everything runny at the edges.

Building—

Until it explodes!

Motion and violence, scores of bodies to scythe through in pursuit of the only thing that dims the star-glare of an overbearing reality!

I’m sorry!

!WHAt— what?— wHAT!

Cackling all throughout, who knows whose, while watching porcelain dolls shatter in our hands! They have salvation running through their veins! Rip it out, drink until there’s another night! Forever raging, screaming, looking for the next high to bury the blood-black light!

It hurts!

Make it stop!

I’m sorry—calm down!

Why did I never see the faces?

A coil springs, something greater than tactile or sensory, something buried beneath shadow and the rumble of an Other’s growl, it all comes undone. Escapes from our clenched fist.

No, no, no!

Stop!

Why~?

Why did I never see their faces!

It’s not your fault—

Yes it is!

The flood of flux humming in wire-capillaries felt cold against the wash of flicker-life slipping over our hands; there’s a heady rush with every spark snuffed out. I hate it. We hate it. From the corners of the world, the shadows and blackness hidden now come to the fore with adder-quickness to sink its fangs into our throat!

Each a strike, a sudden flash of faces twisted in places ruined by the specter of death that visited misfortune upon them.

That’s us!

That’s me!

What i s t h is!

It’s a kaleidoscope, I say, a vortex of thought and emotion denied swollen to prodigious size in our neglect. Worse than any sensory overload. A ruptured liver could not compare to the gnaw of acid hollowing out our core, first the heat then the ice of irrevocable deeds—disinterest and uncaring flippancy could no longer defend.

We’re without armor—

We’re naked—

I am here—

They are not—

A thousand memories taint with veins of a venom called—

Called—

Regret Regret Regret regret Regret regre ter eRe gret regret rREGRET—

Mantra clarion-clear, the voice of a thousand faceless strangers screaming the same question to the callous gods that cast their angels from the heavens they always looked towards, hoping for more.

I’m a weapon—

We’re a weapon—

A tool, a loser, a patsy, a murderer—

The word hits like a hammer; she was no liberator.

Murderer.

It’s said in duplicate, triplicate—from two to five to seven to nine.

In it is a disease, an infection from a wound overlooked, long unwashed, and long left to fester. Now all the machines hooked up to me are beeping, louder and harsher than ever before.

Blood-black coils tight, the shadows of a world denied, a world deprived, claw across porcelain skin. They leave prismatic tracks of emotion unknown. Reactions never felt. Each a deluge that bursts arteries in paintball swatches of vivid color. And I’m choking on all of it.

And I’m watching all of it—

I can’t do anything—

Again agai n ag ain ad again again a gain agai naai ng again again—

Smile.

No.

You don’t get—

No!

I reach and take you into we, hold your hands and take them from your throat, your heart, our self when threatened by destructive ends.

It leaves us a rainbow.

A patina.

A starburst of colorful harm and it lets the shadows yank us from the blood-black and into the dark.

You stare at me while we follow each other’s gravity, spinning in the endless waves of a shadow engorged by all the things forgotten and all the things denied. All the things summed up as not here, not right now. But then not now becomes never, and it sinks into endless repression.

My weakness; your wolfsbane.

?What— what — What?

I’m sorry.

?Why— why —Why?

You’re not like how you were, they don’t know how far you’ve come—don’t hate yourself for what cannot be undone. Everyone knows you’re trying. I know you're trying; we are trying.

We are trying.

It’s not enough!

It’s all we can do.

This is what you live with?

An ever lengthening shadow chasing after our ankles, carrying with it the mawkish slough the blood-black glutted itself on, now caught up. Biting deep. Surrounded by it, all it can do is scream and scream in recursive loops that collapse in on themselves before screaming anew. It’s a vortex, a chasm, the divide between mask and the visceral reality wanting to drown us every time we see the empty space left by those who expected so much more.

There’s a space like that for me-we, too, but… what was your name?

A flicker, a shade, the ghost of something forgotten yet never there?

The shadow wants for presence, it wants for acknowledgement; the shadow does not want to be venom. It shrieks because we never listen.