Work Text:
This is an eldritch AU where all three of them got corrupted into more monstrous forms. Now the original idea was to give all three of them a bit more variation between the forms because of the unpredictable and random nature of mutations, giving each of them a form reminiscent of a predatory arthropod, a spider for V replacing the flight with a bit more of a webswinging in the ruined urban environment and a scorpion for N for the tail as well as using those claws defensively based on the Daimyo Hermitaur from Monster Hunter. But then I decided to just settle for the centipede-like form of Eldritch J for all three of them. Why? Because I for my part thought the idea was cool, if the disassembly drones had this hidden kill switch that would turn them into such abominations in the case things went south. Of course, that was when Episode 2 came out and we still didn't have the full picture yet.
But let's not stall any further and get into this one.
Disclaimer: I don't own Murder Drones. All rights are reserved to their respective owners.
Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Worm? Absolutely.
Storms were a rather common occurrence on Copper 9 after the planet's core had collapsed. For the worker drones on the lifeless rock, those had initially not been much of a problem, but with the arrival of the disassembly drones, the surface world had become a lot more inhospitable for them, especially at night, and seeking shelter had become increasingly difficult with the continued deterioration of the infrastructure. Still, the remaining worker drones had to scavenge for supplies within those ruins and led to situations like the one that Ralph himself in. His hands clutched his jacket tightly to his body as if in a futile attempt to stay warm or just to prevent the worn jacket to be torn from his body.
Ralph had left the somewhat hidden confinements of an old panic room that the group of surviving worker drones had sought shelter in to look for anything that might be salvageable in these ruins. Unfortunately, he didn't have much luck so far but he was heading somewhere he used to work prior to the arrival of the hounds that the humans had sent to kill them all. In fact, he had even worked there when the core had collapsed and he witnessed firsthand how his human superiors were annihilated from one moment to another. It was like the day of judgement had come and gone within the blink of an eye and only the worker drones were left relatively unharmed while the humans died frozen in poses that conveyed a feeling of dread and impending doom. If he had been religious back then, he might as well would have thought that. Although, the murder drones did have some likeness to the devils and demons in those old texts.
He shook his head and forced himself to focus, his blue optics squinting through the heavy wind of the storm, when he started to make out something in the distance. Looming out of the snowstorm like the shadow of a giant was the barely visible shape of a factory. Places like these were usually raided first by the worker drones for parts and material, but perhaps there was still something left untouched. He made his way through the still full parking lot, his legs sinking deep into the snow as the wind forced it to pile up against the outer wall of the perimeter. An old metal gate creaked in the wind, its double door slightly ajar. The worker drone had walked this way so many times in the past, his legs moved practically on their own to his old workplace. Moving through an old garage gate meant for trucks to unload and be loaded, Ralph found himself within the main hall of factory. Except for the pitchblack darkness of the place and the howling of the wind outside, he could not make anything out before he fished a small flashlight from his pocket and turned it on.
Inside the factory it looked worse than he had imagined with crates toppled over and the contents laying scattered on the ground while being embedded in layers of ice. Rust had crept up the walls and old machines from exposure to the elements and no one to maintain them. If anything, Ralph was surprised no one had tried to dismantle the hulking behemoths for parts. He continued to walk around the factory, retracing his old routine of steps from station to station, yet all he truly found were junk and useless parts. He bit back a groan as he opened a fridge and found nothing but a can of gasoline someone had left in there prior to the murder drones coming to the planet. For a moment, he thought about grabbing it and getting wasted, but he needed to be sober for this. So once he slammed the fridge door shut with a loud crash.
That was when he realized that the sound didn't come from the fridge at all. Instead, it came from outside. Immediately, he shut the light off and held his breath as something outside the factory was pushing aside the empty cars in the parking lot. And from the sound of it, it was coming closer to the building. His breathing turned shallow and fast while his core throbbed with panic as he could hear something skittering over the building on way too many legs. It stayed there for a moment, before climbing down and seemingly heading away. Ralph didn't move until he could no longer hear it as the storm outside calmed down, replacing the howling wind with silence as if the world was holding its breath. Quietly he made his way back to the factory hall to leave.
That was when his foot accidentally knocked over an empty bucket and he got his flashlight out again to help him find his way out. But something got caught in its light. It was long and covered in white segmented plating, clinging to the ceiling like a vine. Then it moved, several blade-tipped legs moving in tandem to drag itself out of the light and back into the darkness. Against any reasonable thought, Ralph shone his light around and came face to face with the fanged grin of a murder drone with short white hair at the opposite side of the hall looking right at him. Except, this one was not some winged angel of death, but more of a centipede demon from robot hell. Then the previously black visor flashed to life with a yellow X displayed on it and the monstrous form of the biomechanical horror rushed towards him.
The worker drone screamed as he quickly darted out of the building, the monster cackling madly behind him in a hauntingly feminine voice. Once outside, he saw the storm had indeed passed and revealed the parking lot outside. Only now did he see the carnage outside. The remains of other worker drones littered the ground outside half-buried in the snow. An arm here, a leg there and what looked like half a torso had been speared on the old metal gate like a haunting sculpture. He did not have time to look at it all in detail, when out of the darkness of his old workplace the murder drone rushed after him, slithering towards him like a snake with three razorsharp claws for hands. He ran out into the parking lot in futile hopes of shaking the hunter off.
All of the sudden, a gunshot rang out and he hit him in the leg. He didn't get much time to cry out in pain when the monster behind him closed the distance with a mad laughter. The disassembly drone made short work of it with her claws, beheading Ralph with a swipe of his claws before tearing into the corpse with her teeth and greedily devouring it. Meanwhile, another shape similar to that of the feeding disassembly drone climbed down from the roof and a third came around the corner. The one that had shot Ralph from the roof wore a hat on his head and had shorter white hair, while wearing a jacket not unlike the drone currently gorging herself on her kill. The other one wore a blazer with a tie and her long white hair was styled in twintails with black ribbons on either side of her head. Unlike the other two, her arms were not quite like those of a worker drone and resembled the predatory forelimbs of a praying mantis.
"V could have dealt with that on her own without your help." J remarked at N, who switched his gun arm back to a regular four-fingered hand and raised them in surrender.
"I know. I just wanted to help so that we can focus on the next target." He said when V finished her meal and turned around at her colleagues.
"Looks like this sector is clear for now." V told J, who crossed her mantis-like limbs in front of her chest.
"No thanks to you. You are getting sloppy." The squad leader remarked, making V give J an annoyed look before rolling her eyes.
"I really don't need to hear that from you, Princess." She said, causing J to glare at her. N who stood besides the two quickly decided to pull himself out of the affair.
"I'll still look around for any stragglers we might have missed." N replied before slithering away, leaving his two coworkers to sort out their differences. He followed the tracks that Ralph had left in the snow, though most of them had already been blown over or covered with fresh snow. Though he had already come this way earlier and was now merely retracing his steps back to the former safe haven Ralph and his group had lived. Once there, N was greeted with the situation he had left there earlier, dozens of dead bodies riddled with bullet holes and some torn apart from him earlier feeding. He had only noticed them when Ralph had left the place to look for something in that factory and once N's work was done, he stalked the sole survivor when he noted he was heading V's way. With a sigh, he started picking up the dead bodied and rolling them around into a ball, like shape that he could carry easier with his centipede-like form, somewhat of a habit he had picked up since J's squad had arrived on this world.
It was meant to be a very straight forward mission. Go wipe out the worker drone population and then... well, J didn't tell him the rest of the mission details so far, but he was confident she would once it was the right time. It was a bit strange he couldn't recall anything prior to their deployment here, but that was alright for him.
But unfortunately for J's squad, the mission almost came to a very early end. That was when the star Copper 9 orbited released a solar flare without prior when they were just about to arrive. The sudden burst of energy had pretty much fried not only their ship's systems but also those of the disassembly drones, sending the squad spiraling down onto the planet. Crashing onto frozen death world was bad enough, but luckily the ship had survived it albeit heavily damaged and apparently smashing into some underground parking lot.
That was where things took another turn for the worse. The damages sustained to their bodies by both the crash and the solar flare damaging their systems had the very disturbing effect of causing their bodies to regenerate into else. Not that N wasn't grateful for the nanite technology of their company trying its best to keep them alive at all costs, but he really didn't understand why they weird biomechanical spider-crab things. And why they hadn't been briefed for this type of event to occur as it clearly could have spared them a lot of trouble. Especially in the beginning when their bodies had not recovered as much as they had now and were still recovering.
Back then however, the three of them had their jaws broken and replaced by mouths filled with lots of small sharp teeth and N was the only one who had recovered enough after the crash to activate his optics again, bearing witness to the horrid form he had found himself twisted into. He didn't have had much time to freak out though. J and V had not just been crippled, but also blind, confused and in a lot of pain from having sustained more damage. Pulling them out of the wreckage of their landing pod and somehow managing to not accidentally get stabbed by their bladed limbs was a hard enough task on its own. As the only operational member of the squad, N had to think on his feed and did the first thing that shot into his mind that could perhaps help them recover: hunt any worker drone down that he came across and bring their corpses to his team.
Initially, he had to hunt on his own to both cool his own body down and to provide nourishment and materials for his two injured squadmates. On the brighter side, worker drones had been more abundant then and it only took him one hunt to awkwardly drag a heap of dead worker drones with his then still very alien, centipede-like body to the crash site. And just in time as both J and V had been overheating at that point and barely avoided dying by feeding on the kills he had brought back to them. They had also regained their optics after that, which led to an entire different problem which was his squadmates coming to realize and to terms with what they had become physically.
To give J credit, after the initial shock she had tried to be calm and analyze the situation, stating that the three of them simply had to consume more worker drones for their nanites to repair their bodies via their protocols. It did make sense as their systems all told them to gather more materials for reconstruction, but even with such straightforward instructions she didn't sound entirely convinced of her hypothesis and even N could hear it in the slight tremble of her voice. As if she was more trying to convince herself than the other two.
But V didn't refuse to say what J couldn't bring herself to. She was badly hiding the fact, that she was shaken from this sudden transformation, saying that the company had this either planned right off the start or put it in them as some sort of safety measure to ensure they'd hold something over them. And because they probably didn't have anything, they just opted to turn their exterminators into literal monsters.
Needless to say, the first day on the job with the three of them locked in the confinements of their ship's crash site had been rather tense with the two female disassembly drones antagonizing one another and N was caught in the middle of it all. It wasn't that he couldn't understand their positions and he himself also had more questions than answers and his own opinions on the matter, yet he had kept those to himself and instead would rather first figure out how to get them all out of their predicament first. He probably would have had slept through that entire day from exhaustion alone after J and V both staying as far away from another as possible within their rather limited space without running the risk of the sunlight cooking them alive in their sleep, if it had not been for the crying. Despite being in sleep mode, both J and V sometimes cried or whimpered in their sleep and those noises immediately roused him from whatever exhaustion he had felt before during the day.
In all honesty, seeing J and V suffer like that had broken N's heart. So, he had devoted himself to the best of his ability to the job in order to keep his squad together and help them.
For J that had meant being the fall guy as the ship's pilot, being blamed for their predicament and enduring her lashing out at him both verbally and physically in the beginning until J found it would be a better use of her weapons to get their actual assignment done. It didn't stop her from reprimanding him whenever he made the slightest mistake in her opinion and forcing him to adapt his hunting strategy to be up to her standards. Nevermind the fact that some of those standards simply were impossible to uphold when one can use neither flight nor ranged weaponry.
For V that meant being there when she either sought to be alone or didn't want him to be and keep her from spiralling. She had tried to distance herself from the rest of the squad, sometimes even trying to find other places that could house her large body during the day hours of frozen planet. But N would notice that, follow her and bring her back to their improvised base of operations before dawn broke. Some times it was enough to simply rest next to her during the day and other times he found her still trembling and crying during the day when he'd wake her from those nightmares and just letting her lean onto him.
Admittedly, it had been easier with V than with J, but they both were hanging by threads and he was trying to hold both while he himself was also on a rather slippery slide of descending into the same sort of madness that seemed to threaten to consume them both.
But as time passed on, it had become easier for them as their bodies slowly seemed to acclimate and start rebuilding, albeit at a snail's pace.
First were the optics as mentioned earlier. Then the heads regrew their missing lower jaws and sported more of a regular drone torso under the head, limiting the abnormal part of their forms to the portion from their waist down. After that they had both N and V had regrown their arms, replacing the mantis-like forelimbs with their regular disassembly drone arms, though N was apparently further along that road of recovery as he had regained use of his firearms whereas V was limited to her claws. J on the other hand still sported the more insect-like limbs, signifying that out of the three of them the squad leader still had a longer road of recovery ahead of herself. If their regeneration progressed further like this, it would not take them long to finally regrow their wings or legs and hopefully return to how they used to be before. The likeness of their bodies returning to what they used to be certainly helped to improve their mood with even N feeling somewhat like relief of their hard work finally paying off.
A loud crash further away as well as the screams of terror of fleeing worker drones caught his attention as he was snapped out of his thoughts, grabbed onto the dead drone bodies he had collected and made his way towards base while one of his colleagues was currently converting another of those rogue worker drones into material for her body to rebuilt itself.
"GAH!" However, when he heard the sudden pained noise of J's voice from afar, N made a beeline towards her location. It didn't take long for him to find her standing in the streets of the ruined city with her lower body sticking out of one of the buildings.
"J, are you alright in there?" He asked as he climbed over the rusted remains of a car to see what was going on. An annoyed grumble came from within as J slowly reversed and crawled out of the building. Once outside, N looked a quite surprised. J's claws were stained with oil as was the corner of her mouth, clearly just having eaten. But what caught him off guard was the fact that one of her black ribbons had apparently fallen off, letting her long white hair fall to the small of her back on one side while the other was still the same.
"I'm fine. Just some loose low-quality rubble falling on me. So much for guaranteed quality..." She muttered, before noticing how he was still staring at her. "What are you looking at moron bot?" That snapped him out of his stupor before he quickly looking away.
"Sorry, it's just... uhm... I've never really seen you with your hair down." He said before his eyes widened in shock and he quickly tried to backpedal. "I mean it looks great on you, boss. Just not used to that." That was when J seemed to realize how her hair style was indeed out of order. Her eyes widened and hollowed out before looking down at the ground, finding the ribbon near her feet. "Oh uhm..." N said a bit flustered. "I could help you with that."
"Don't bother. I don't need your help." J said immediately, shooting the idea of N helping her down. Despite the rejection hurting a bit, N was glad that her personality was still the same. That was until she tried to pick up the ribbon. Her scythe-like arms scraped against concrete and ice in an attempt to not stab into the black fabric but rather pinch it between them. But it always fell back down again. That was when she regretfully realized that her bladed forelimbs were not exactly made for the manipulation of tools and objects and more for slicing through and crushing prey. Worst than that was the humiliation crawling up J's spine as N watched the whole thing in complete silence. "Come on... just... a little..." J muttered to herself when she just managed to lift the ribbon off the ground when a gust of wind sent it fluttering further down the street. The leader of the squad said nothing as her gaze was then locked onto the ground and her arms with a dejected look.
Meanwhile, N moved over to pick up the ribbon with his regular hands when he found an old abandoned hair salon further down the street. Naturally, there wasn't much to gain from the place and it was unusable, but it still held some tools he might need. J watched in silence as he looked around and came back with her ribbon but also a hairbrush and two hand-held mirrors. Instantly, her mouth twisted into a frown and she gave him a very flat look.
"No." She said immediately, making his smile falter a bit but not vanish. "Don't you even think about it."
"Come on J, you got concrete in your hair and you can't... well, hold anything at the moment." N said just as J swung her arm in his direction, stopping just a few centimeters in front of his face. She really contemplated cutting that stupid head of his off before crossing her arms in front of her chest and turning around.
"Fine." She said. "But if you dare pull on my hair, I will not be as understanding." Despite the warning, N's face turned into a beaming smile and drew closer. Gently he untied the other ribbon from her hair, letting it all fall down freely like a white waterfall, before tugging the ribbons away in the pocket of his jacket and started to go to work. He gently took a strand of her hair and began brushing through the synthetic strands, careful not to accidentally pull at it or company forbid pull it out. He shifted his lower body a bit, coiling onto the ground below to keep himself upright and steady while looming over J slightly. There was an urge to start small talk, but he refrained from doing so, knowing that J probably just wanted to get this over with as fast as he could and instead just focusing on the task at hand. Still he found himself humming some tune he didn't even know the name off.
It had become rather quiet in the empty street with the only noises being those of the brush sliding through J's hair and N's humming as well as the occasional shift of her plating of her body. Yet somehow J found herself reminiscing about the past. Or more particularly, the one who had gifted her and the other two drones their hair and those ribbons.
Flashback
The Elliot Manor had all the commodities its human residents could ever need. Intricate decorations and a classic architecture that made the house itself feel more like the residence of a modern-day noble family. Flaunting their wealth didn't stop there as the high society was often gathered in this place to enjoy the hospitality of the Elliots. But even in private, the bathrooms in the manor were large and spacious with decorations that were more for show than practicality.
In comparison to that, the little workshop Tessa had set up to do maintenance work on the worker drones was like a little cluttered corner akin to a small mechanics' store tucked away on a street. It was also here that most drones woke up after Tessa brought them back from the junkyard in the swamp not far from the manor and where Tessa would give them their finishing touches upon repairing their damaged bodies. Those touches included their maid or butler uniforms, depending on the drone's gender obviously, and their very own hair. Where she got the white synthetic wigs, her parents had no idea and most of the worker drones didn't either.
But the work at the manor was demanding and tears in the uniform or disheveled hair had to be fixed more often than one might think.
So it came to no surprise that J found herself sitting on a small stool with Tessa in the back, brushing through her hair with a comb while spraying something into it to loosen the dirt from the strands. In the back, she heard some classic music play from another part of the manor.
"Seriously? They made you, the head maid, work outside in the garden?" Tessa said almost amused at the notion of J doing any sort of physical labor. Not because she wasn't capable of it, but rather because of how she usually carried herself like a no-nonsense businesswoman and ordered the other worker drones in the manor around.
"Directive order. Apparently, the mistress scrapped the last gardener for her dress getting caught on one of the roses." J replied with a frown, thinking back to all the tiny thorns she had to pull out of her joints and dispose of afterwards. Tessa let out a groan at hearing this.
"I swear, if father doesn't kill her in a drunk rampage, I might-"
"Don't." J interrupted Tessa, before glancing back at her. "It is not worth the effort or the consequences." Tessa deflated in her seat a bit, before she looked at the ribbons J had worn before.
"The fabric's torn. Nothing we can do about that." She said before she set the brush aside and stood up. J watched her move to her work bench and rummaging around in it before she pulled out a box. "Tadah! New ribbons." She said before sitting back down behind J, who looked at her shocked.
"Tessa you really shouldn't do this. The bosses are not going to like-" Tessa shut her up by grabbing the drone's face and twisting her head forward so that the girl could work.
"I spend my money on my stuff and they have no say on that. Now hold still." Tessa replied before putting her hair back into her usual twin pigtails. "There you go." The girl said, before standing up and moving in front of J to hold up a mirror and show her the twintails she had put back into J's hair. The worker drone eyes the ribbons with a smile. "So, what do you think?"
"I think it's great... Thanks Tessa." J replied.
Flashforward
The memory made a warm feeling bloom in J's chest, finding herself smile slightly and lean backwards just a bit before her shoulders lightly made contact with N's abdomen, causing a shock to run through them both at the physical contact.
"S-Sorry..." N quickly stammered an apology before continuing his work. J merely nodded slightly in acknowledgement, though her mind couldn't help but find his timid reaction rather... endearing.
'Wait, where did that come from? This is N for profit's sake!' She thought to herself, trying to shake the notion off. But it didn't, sunk its roots into her mind and did make her think. Yes, this was N she was talking about. The same former clumsy butler of a worker drone who had cared for her and V when they were blind, hurt and couldn't hunt for themselves. The same drone, who despite this horrid transformation and all of the flack she usually gave him even now, he still was caring for her too. She found his optimism annoying at first and had especially done so right after the crash when she was already on the brink of almost giving up.
She had loathed N for how well he and Tessa had gotten along without any trouble. Just for a second though, she couldn't help but think that it might have been because of how similar the two of them were in their personality even if N wore it more on his sleeve than Tessa, who had to keep up her prim and proper appearance for her parents and only in private was allowed to be the person she was rather than a trophy her parents could flaunt with.
Another shock ran through her body, causing her centipede-like form to slightly shift against his own just to quickly pull away as soon as she felt contact. He froze, likely in fear of having done something wrong.
"Are you done anytime soon?" J tried masking her conflicted sentiment of the situation with annoyance, but the tone with which she said those words felt more like she was genuinely asking rather than impatient.
"Almost done." N replied before he put the hair back into her usual twintails and then held up a mirror to let her see. "There you go." She took the mirror and looked at her reflection, N holding up the second one to let her see the back of her head. There was a moment of silence between them, before N nervously asked. "How is it?"
"... it's adequate." J simply said before moving away from him, trying to not think of what kind of images her mind conjured up. Still she added a quiet "...Thanks.", before moving down the street to put as much distance between her and the stupefied N who was looking after her for a moment before returning to his task of getting the kills from this night's hunt back to their base for later before the sun would rise.
A short while later, something moving overhead made him look up when he saw V silently moving over the rooftops of the ruins as she was focused on something a street further. He was about to say something when she lunged forward and the panicked screams of other worker drones rang through the air. Switching his hands for guns immediately, the male disassembly drone crawled over the side of the building to see V chasing after a group of drones like earlier. N looked in the ruins that they had apparently just run out of. He couldn't immediately see any more survivors inside, but he saw footsteps going in the opposite direction of where V was heading so he went after those.
V meanwhile had caught up with the drones and proceeded to tear them apart like she had done with Ralph earlier. Her claws easily sliced through the worker drones like hot knives through butter. She let herself get drunk on the bloodshed and laughed maliciously until nothing but silence remained. For a moment she simply stood there with her optics hollowed out and a grin on her face, but that grin slowly fell as she calmed down.
Wordlessly she picked up the closest corpse and tore into it with her teeth. Despite the sweet taste of warm oil rushing down her throat, she felt nothing but disgust for her own actions. She loathed what she had become and what she had to do in order to stay alive. But there was no other way. It was either that or being destroyed by the one that had sent them to this world.
It was just that now the package fit its contents. Before, there had been the semblance of them still being people. Now they truly had become monsters with all resemblance to the lives they had before stripped away. It was coming back and regrowing, but she still remembered the pain and the panic she felt when she first came to be once more. Her body twisted and broken in ways it had never meant to be, blinded and with nothing other than a faulty audio system to guide her. And when her vision cleared, she wished it had not.
She hated her current form. The biomechanical amalgamation of synthetic flesh and metal shaped in the form of a worm that she had to use to walk and hunt disgusted her and more so it intensified her own self-loathing. If anything, she first thought that Cyn had gone back on their deal and punished her for something she didn't know by twisting her into this unsightly form. It would have been fitting considering the details of their deal. But when she saw that J and even N also had been this malformed, it was even worse. A feeling of despair as if all she had ever done having been for nothing had spread in her mind and she thought it truly was hopeless.
V finished her quick snack before curling up on herself, her grotesque form hugging itself as she wanted to just disappear. She didn't want to be seen like this. Not even by herself. She had tried simply cutting it away, but it regrew, stubborn and determined to keep her and itself alive. Her mood had improved slightly when she grew somewhat of her old form back, but she still remained a filthy creature in her eyes. V didn't want to be seen or be like this. She was so tired of crying to herself for what she once had and what they had lost. But she knew she had to keep going for not only her sake, but...
"V?" N's worried voice behind her made her jump and spin around. He did look worried at her, a fresh corpse in his claws limply hung forgotten from his claws like a doll, oil dripping from its limbs onto the otherwise pristine white and blue ice below. Seeing her clearly not that well, he immediately looked her up and down from all side, the dead drone he was holding dropped like an abandoned toy. "Are you hurt? Did something happen? Is that your oil or-" He asked a dozen questions at once, trying to find whatever reason that might be ailing her.
It was strange to think like that for a disassembly drone, but there entire situation was far from normal and caring for the wellbeing of others was something akin to a second nature to N specifically. That much V knew all too well...
Flashback
Rain hammered down against the large windows of Elliot Manor with the occasional lightning illuminated the forest and swamp outside for just a moment to cast its haunting shadows against building's walls. The silhouettes of gnarled, leafless branches reaching out like fingers to try and snatch someone from the inside. V never liked that part of the manor. She didn't mind a light rain, gently tapping against the roof, walls and windows, but what was coming down from the dark gray clouds above was like an open faucet. She could barely even make out the shapes outside the window as the water whipped against it by strong gusts of wind caused the shapes outside to lose even more of their cohesion. And V's faulty optics also didn't quite help.
She bit back a hiss of pain as she held her wrist. Right where the hand connected to the arm she was damaged after being reprimanded by the mistress of the household for supposedly looking creepy with her maid uniform and standing still. Even though it was also her order to address her with respect, even if that meant putting their tasks on hold for the few seconds of attention she had demanded from the worker drones. V knew as much as anyone else that Tessa's parents did not approve of her fixing worker drones from the junkyard. They were tolerated merely for their ability to help maintain the manor without having to actually pay human staff or buy a new worker drone. All of the drones in the manor were like that and it made it clear that the Elliots in general seem to be not very fond of robots like them at all, minus their daughter of course. It sort of made sense considering how everything in the manor was rather old fashioned like it belonged more in a long bygone era of human history. A robot in such a setting stuck out like a sore thumb.
V nursed her injured wrist gently before moving deeper into the manor as quietly as she could, not wanting to wake the sleeping parents lest she would be thrown out into the swamp. Making her way down a long corridor she arrived within a luxurious bar where James Elliot sometimes entertained some of his other male guests over some fine wine or stronger drink. As a worker drone, she did not really see the appeal in the consumption of alcohol like that, though she also had not drank a sip of antifreeze or gasoline which she had heard had a similar reaction to a worker drone as alcohol had to an organic being. The squeaking of glass and a hum to a tune that had played occasionally in these halls caught her attention as she spotted a certain butler standing behind the long counter, putting down a glass and picking up a bottle. Looking over at her, he smiled warmly.
"Oh hey there V-" His smile instantly vanished and the empty bottle in his hand slipped from his fingers clattering onto the counter before rolling behind it and smashing on the floor. Instead, his eyes widened and fixated on the arm she was holding, exposed wiring sparking from the injury. In an instant, N had ran around the counter and reached her side. "Oh God V, what happened?!"
"It's nothing. Just a clumsy work accident." A work accident named Louisa Elliot to be exact, but V didn't say that. She tried offering a weak smile when another sharp pain shot through her. N took her hand gently to inspect it and V felt her face growing warmer. Then he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and led her towards Tessa's room.
"Don't worry. I'll get you to Tessa and she'll patch you up again." He told her.
"But isn't it a bit late already? And what about your shift."
"Nonsense. Knowing Tessa she's probably still awake, tinkering on something. And your hand is more important. The bottle there was empty anyway." With that they headed towards Tessa's workshop both bashfully looking away from each other.
Flashforward
That memory shot through V's mind as she saw N raise his hands as if he wanted to take her hand again but was hesitant to do so. Not that she could blame him with her looking like this or her hands currently being three large blades the size of a human's lower arm. There was a bitter sweetness that crept up in her mind. Their forms were a constant and glaring reminder of how strings were attached to all of them, linking them to the grand puppeteer that was the horrid thing wearing the face of N's little sister. And despite all of that, N was still the same as before. He didn't hide behind a mask of a psychotic persona or professionalism. N was just N and not even being turned into a worm could apparently change that.
Snapping back to reality, she put an end to his inquiry as she raised a hand, switching it to a normal one.
"I'm fine, N. Really." She simply said before she picked up the dead body he had held earlier.
"Oh, that one. It tried sneaking away while you were going after the others." N said, scratching the back of his head. "I think you should have it since you can't use your guns yet, right?" V rolled her eyes a bit at his bad attempt to sound like he did it because of that.
"I'm perfectly fine with my claws, thank you very much." She replied, making him deflate a bit. It was like watching a dog slowly look sad at its owner and V couldn't help but liken N to a golden retriever in that regard. There was another moment of awkward silence between them, before N tried to make conversation.
"So... I just noticed that, but... you do ambush a lot from a higher vantage point." N said, making V raise an eyebrow.
"Your point being?"
"Nothing! It's nothing!" N quickly said, raising his hands in surrender. "It's just... we don't have wings and guns anymore and... you know..." He tried saying, but V was not really mad at him. He did have a valid point there.
Perhaps the one and only good thing that V could really say about having become a disassembly drone were their wings and the ability to fly. She could understand now why humans often likened flight to the feeling of freedom. It was an exhilarating feeling to be able to move so unbound by gravity after all that seemingly tied them down almost literally. And that made the loss of those wings after the crash even a bit sad.
"I guess I just miss being able to fly." V said, almost not even realizing that she said that out loud. She did when she noticed the look on N's face change from sad to something akin to worry or maybe even pity. Quickly her own face shifted into a smirk. "But with my kill rate going up, I should grow a new set soon enough. Plus, I'm adaptable so enjoy being at the top of the kill count while you still can because I'll beat you to it in no time." V added as she leaned closer to him.
"I-I'm looking forward to that." He said, straightening his back while his visor lighting up a little from a blush. V would lie if she said she didn't have some intrusive thoughts in that moment but didn't act upon them for both her and his sake. So she just settled for a smug, teasing smile as his reaction did amuse her. That was until her face contorted in discomfort and she almost fell forward, dropping the corpse in her hand to the ground again, when N caught her. "V?! What's going on? Please talk to me."
"It's... nothing... just..." V managed to voice out before a pair of wings emerged with a wet tearing noise and small shower of oil, staining her jacket and N's face. She had to bite back an outcry of pain, luckily, N's torso muffled the sound to a groan. Still once it was over, the pain eased immediately and she quickly separated herself from N after realizing the position they were in. N's eyes were locked on her and the new appendages on her back, making V also look at them. They were small, more like accessories at this point like how a child would dress as a fairy or an angel on Halloween or some other holiday with costumes. "Great, all that for nothing..." V still blushed furiously from almost falling on top of N, when she heard him make a high-pitched sound akin to a child squealing in excitement.
"Oh, look at those winglets. They're adorable!" He said as he couldn't help move around her and even touch the new bladed wings with a finger, slightly cutting his finger in the process which he laughed off. But then reality seemed to sink in about what he just said and looked in embarrassment at V, who gave him a teasing smirk.
"Adorable, huh?" She said with a hand on her waist.
"I mean you are adorable." N blurted out without thinking. Then he realized that it sounded worse and panicked more. "I mean, they look good on you! I mean- ARRGH!" N buried his face in shame before he turned his back to her, feeling like he was about to die from the embarrassment. Meanwhile, V was laughing on the inside and couldn't help but smile a little, seeing that despite all that had happened, he was still the N she knew.
A few weeks had gone by since that night and another night came to an end with dawn's light slowly creeping up Copper 9's horizon. The "corpse spire" of J's squad was still very unimpressive, mainly because they needed the bodies more to repair their own forms than building a lair, resulting in mound of corpses more akin to an ant hill in both shape and compared to their peers scattered across the planet in their mission to eliminate the worker drones. The analogy also applied due to the mound providing additional cover for the hole the ship had made when it had crashed down.
Setting a bunch of corpses down onto the floor of their makeshift lair, N crawled aside for J to go through the numbers of the last hunt and noted down their progress when it came to regenerating their bodies back to a standard disassembly drone. At this point all of them had fully regrown their arms, wings and N swore he could either feel a new tail or a new pair of legs pressing against the plating of his lower half. In either case, things were looking up for them. Though occasionally another squad got into their area and gave them a wide berth when they saw them slithering down below. While it was a bit disheartening for N, it seemed to affect J a bit more while V just flipped those stragglers off and complained about them not minding their own hunting grounds.
"Shouldn't be long until we won't be a bunch of snake-crabs anymore." V said, her wings having fully regrown already stretched one last time before she collapsed them back into her back. She rested atop their landing pod as she watched J and N work after V had done most of the kills herself that night.
"Yeah, that would be nice." N said, though he wasn't quite sure how to feel. Part of him felt melancholic almost nostalgic after having grown used to this body, but he quickly shook that thought from his head when thinking back to how much the situation had hurt his squadmates and perhaps still was. What mattered was that they were okay and if they were then so was he.
"What are you looking at?" J asked, when N noticed he had been staring.
"Oh nothing, just thinking." He quickly replied.
"You and thinking sounds wrong." J said before gesturing for him to leave. "Leave that to someone with a processor capable of actually doing that and get some rest. We are still not done fixing the damages and I'd rather not jeopardize the success of those repairs by someone in my squad being too tired when those vultures from sector Kappa are eying our turf like that." She said, before N did move over to a corner of the room he usually slept in during the day. He could have sworn he heard something like actually caring in her voice, but that was her job as the leader after all.
"Let them come. I've been waiting to test those weapons against something that actually fights back for a change." V said as she crawled down from the spot she was perched on, making J roll her eyes at the remark.
'At least they are getting along again.' N thought to himself with a smile as he laid down on the cold metal flooring with his torso laying on the side and started to enter his sleep mode.
Comfort or rest was not something easily obtained with their bodies having changed like they had. Hanging from the ceiling like how their programming had suggested was out of the question and N at least had tried, which had resulted in him waking up in the middle of the day when he fell down from where he had draped himself over a ledge face first into a pile of snow. Instead, J's squad found it more comfortable to rest in a similar fashion to the animal their bodies resembled for now by curling their lower bodies around and resting their upper bodies at top from it, though occasionally they also just laid on the ground outstretched, whether right off the start or by turning in their sleep.
N felt himself drift away relatively easy today though, overall happy with how things had turned out so far. That was when all of the sudden he felt something press and shift against him. From the sense of touch alone he couldn't tell what it was, but it felt familiar. Activating his optics again, they immediately hollowed out when he found V, pressing her back into his chest. Her torso being slightly shorter than his made her fit just right in there like puzzle pieces that despite the wear and tear of time still fit intoeach other's shape. Instantly his entire visor lit up from a blush as he stammered out his thoughts.
"V! What are you doing?"
"Hm? I'm going to sleep obviously. And you looked quite comfortable there, so I decided to keep you company. I hope I don't bother you, do I?" V asked as she looked over her shoulder with a sly grin. N fought a shiver run up his spine as he was stuck in a situation where he was damned whether he did or didn't take her offer. His eyes darted around their lair, trying to look anywhere else than his crush snuggling up to him. J just looked at the situation with mild amusement and annoyance but kept her distance and offered no support. That was when N felt V shift away from him. "Because if so, I can just-"
"No, no! I don't mind at all." N quickly said raising a hand in surrender, still trying to look elsewhere. V just smiled at that.
"Glad to hear that." V said before she laid back down and leaned back into his chest with a satisfied hum. N didn't quite know where to put his hand without making it awkward when V grabbed his wrist and instead draped it over her shoulders like a blanket. If N was blushing furiously before and at the risk of overheating, then now he felt like he was going to explode. V was also not helping the situation in the slightest as her lower body wound around the midsection of N's, seemingly anchoring her to him. "Good night N." She said softly as N felt his core almost explode.
"R-Right. Good n-night." N's voice glitched slightly as he tried to get some rest and shut down his optics, trying his best to not follow his urge to hug V tighter into his chest.
Just then there was shift as something draped over N's back, making both him and V look up to see J now loosely laying on top of them with her propping her head up on one hand while the elbow rested on his waist.
"J, you too?" N asked in a panicked tone, while V shot their leader a somewhat annoyed look.
"I'm merely testing the statement V had made." J said with a smug smile on her face. "And you two love bugs do appear to be quite comfortable."
"L-Lo-L-" N failed to get the words out. V rolled her eyes at J's remark.
"Sure. You are just here to test N as a mattress." She waved J off before smirking a little, pressing her shoulder a bit more into his chest. "But I can assure you, he is."
"V!" N said in dismay, before J gently but firmly made him look at her by twisting his head around by his chin.
"I'm warning you though. If you get any funny ideas, I will cut your head off." The squad's leader said as she let go of his head.
"Please don't." He pleaded, finding it progressively harder to not get ideas when J's lower body was pressing into his back and slightly entwined with his own a bit lower than V's did.
"Oh ho? Is someone having 'funny ideas' already?" V teased much to N's embarrassment and J's annoyance. This also caused N's body to stiffen a bit again and coil around him more tightly as well as involuntarily pressing against both V and J a bit more. J ignored the fuzzy and warm feeling running up her body when she looked down at her female coworker.
"Same goes for you, V."
"Oh lighten up J, I was just joking." V rolled her eyes. "Though sleeping with two pretty girls like this, could you blame him for letting his mind wander?"
"I could and will." J fired back immediately, before laying down and wrapping an arm around N's waist to steady herself. N was still trying his best to wrap his head around the situation when he settled down again.
"Alright... sleep well... guys..." He said.
"...night stud." J muttered into his back.
"Sleep tight." V said with a wink.
With that his squad entered sleep mode and only them. N really tried harder to ignore V's back pressing into his chest and holding his arm hostage by using it as a blanket, while the curves of J's upper body pressed into his back and clung to his waist like a baby koala.
And so, N found himself sandwiched and loosely coiled around by his two squadmates struggling to fall asleep. Yet beneath all that embarrassment, he was actually really happy to get along with his squad like that and them being okay.
And that is that. Just some sweet, wholesome murder drone squad story. And sort of the inverse to my other story "Drones of a Feather" where N was the one who got hurt. Can't really tell you why I like those three getting along better than in the canon. I guess, I just do and apparently I'm not alone with that sentiment.
Anyway, that's it folks! Nothing to see and nothing raunchy going on there. Just N trying to not to explode while those two use him as a body pillow... wait a minute.
...
Happy 4th Murder Drones anniversary!
*checks calendar, notices the anniversary still being 1.5 months ahead*
GOTTVERDAMMT!