Work Text:
Just an average sunset. Or was it?
"I'm going out hunting, losers," V called out, getting ready to exit the pod.
The sound of metal quickly hitting the floor followed and N rounded the doorway. "Wait wait!"
V slowly turned and gave N that judgmental look she always gave to him. "What?"
"I-I just... Maybe I could go instead? Since you're always out hunting for us and stuff...?"
The more aggressive of the two narrowed her eyes at him. She knew this was just another one of his dumb attempts to try and get her and Uzi to become "besties," as N put it.
"Why so suddenly, N?" V said, annoyed at the golden retriever's antics.
"I... lost track of time...?"
"Fine. Whatever, about time you do something for us."
"That's a bit rude..." The boy murmurs, but he goes to exit the pod anyways.
Uzi peaks around the door frame, seemingly disturbed by the noise in the usually quiet pod. "What now?"
"Your boyfriend is being useful."
"Bye V, bye Uzi!" He salutes with that goofy grin he always wore when he had one of his plans in mind and flew off.
V watched as Uzi immediately dropped to the floor, grabbing a wrench and aggressively pretending to tighten a bolt on a piece of scrap metal she had already fixed three times.
She knew Uzi could feel V’s optics burning into the back of her neck. Recently there was a weird, unsaid weight in the air between them. A lingering feeling that had been building ever since the world didn't end. Neither of them wanted to say it.
Neither of them wanted to hurt N.
"He's an idiot," Uzi mumbled, her voice cracking slightly as she kept her eyes glued to her work.
"He is," V agreed, her tone surprisingly quiet as she sat down on a crate nearby, her tail idly twitching. "But you chose him."
Uzi's hand froze on the wrench that she was using to tighten the poor bolt that was in reality perfectly fine.
She did choose N.
Why did she choose N, though?
Why.
Uzi's eyes narrowed and immediately snapped onto V, not letting her system question her relationship with N.
"Shut up, you know what you're doing.”
“Oh? Did I hit a wire?”
The purple one opened her mouth to answer but abruptly got cut off by her left optic glitching into yellow.
“Ugh, seriously?” Uzi smacked the size of her head, reloading her visor to normal.
V just let out an amused scoff at this.
After so time of just watching Uzi handle the entity inside her she lets out a quiet sigh, sliding off the crate to sit on the metal floor a few feet away from Uzi. She idly traced a claw along the floorboards, her lethal demeanor melting away into something raw and unusually quiet.
"Look, I'm not trying to mess with you," V murmured, her optics training downward, completely missing the way Uzi's right hand suddenly began to twitch violently against the wrench.
"It's just... things have been weird lately. Ever since everything went back to normal. You and N... and whatever this is between us. I don't want to keep pretending we don't feel it."
She swallowed hard, staring at her own claws, completely unaware that beside her, Uzi's breathing had stalled.
V shifted uncomfortably at her unanswered subtle confession. “I just… I don't want to hurt N.”
She swallows thickly, yellow optics staying on her sharp claws. “But… I think I might be feeling something.”
The silence stretched for another few uncomfortable seconds before V finally looked up, expecting to see a pitiful expression or just straight disinterest.
Instead she saw something else.
Across the worker drone's visor, lines of purple code were rapidly being overwritten by a violent, suffocating sea of yellow text.
The yellow icon on Uzi's visor flickered, but the thing looking out from behind it wasn't Uzi anymore. It was the thing that had destroyed her first chance at romance. Now it would be the thing that destroys her second.
V's body reacted immediately, extending the gun from her arm and loading it, but her mind was still stuck.
The twisting of the smaller drones body was jagged and rough, followed by one of the organic wings tearing out from her shoulder blade and through her jacket.
Oil everywhere. Dripping down Uzi's staggering body, splattered across the floor.
V's visor displayed hollowed out circles and the arm that had retracted her gun suddenly gone stiff.
The Disassembly Drone was frozen in place while watching as the person who she had saved the world with, the person who she had started gaining a liking to, the person she thought she could start letting her guard down by... was now succumbing to the thing they worked together so hard to control.
For a slowed second, the struggling drone's visor glitched back to hollowed out purple ovals. "Please, V..."
That second didn't last long before it abruptly shifted into yellow, eyes hollowed out but not with the hopes of pleading.
A painfully familiar glitchy voice cut through the thick oil filled air, "didn't you say you trusted me, V?"
Before the fear frozen V could even react, a claw attached to the oil covered organic wing striked straight for the taller drone's core, leaving her no choice but to defend and knock Uzi back with the side of her gun extension.
Uzi—no, the thing inside of her—stumbled back, her metal boots skidding through the fresh oil on the floor.
The yellow eyes on her visor re-focused, a sickening, wide grin stretching across her face as she prepared to lunge again.
A sharp sound of V's tail cut through the air as the wire extended and the nanite acid pierced through the wing.
“Giggle. You are so strong, big sister V,” the voice glitched, adopting that horrifying, child-like monotone. “But you cannot save this one either.”
A pause.
"Just like how you couldn't save N either..."
The large space suddenly felt like a small bubble of V's life collapsing around herself. The glitchy manic laughing coming from the wrong drone. The drone she never had a chance with, and now she had to make a choice.
A choice to keep unrequited love or to destroy the monster that had been haunting her since day one.
The gun shook violently as she aimed and fired uncontrollably, multiple shots aimed directly at Uzi's body.
Oil splattered more, it was dripping down the walls of the landing pod, down Uzi's malfunctioning visor, down V's legs.
The deafening sounds from the gun finally stopped, leaving nothing but the heavy smell of burnt metal and the clink of empty shell casings hitting the oil-slicked floor.
Uzi's broken chassis slumped forward, the yellow Solver icon shattered and gone dark. V’s systems were screaming with error messages, her vision glitching wildly as she stared at the lifeless body of the girl she was supposed to have a second chance with.
Desperate to just destroy the sight, to burn the imagery away so she wouldn't have to look at what she had done, V forced her arm to shift one last time, deploying her laser cannon. She pulled the trigger to vaporize the remains.
But no blast came.
Instead, her corrupted, grief-stricken programming malfunctioned. A quiet, pathetic hum vibrated through her arm as a cluster of small, digital pink hearts flickered harmlessly into the empty air, floating down to dissolve over Uzi’s cold metal corpse.