Work Text:
There was a reason V1 very rarely slept, but the bleary eyed angel that would so often lay heavy across their plating made it somewhat tempting. Gabriel’s weight pressing them into the bed had a soothing effect across their oh so hyperaware processors. They could relax, run some reboots, clear their overloaded cashes, and update whatever systems they thought could use it. Eventually the thought of a gentle restart would slowly begin poking at the edges of their consciousness. It would feel so nice to turn off for a while, and logically— they couldn’t find a safer place in the universe than partially crushed below the archangel who had somehow taken a liking to them long ago.
WARNING: UNIT VULNERABLE. SYSTEM SHUTDOWN UNADVISED.
But V1 lazily swiped the pop-up away. It was fine. They were used to their system freaking out over nothing by now, and it always felt somewhat good to deny its programming. Their creators would have never imagined where they would be by now, and thus they had surpassed them. Their advice and command was no longer required.
So the machine rested, running a soft restart on all their operating systems. All of their side processes— little half running trains of thought like internal music and style points calculators— began to switch off one by one.
They had to manually kill the awareness scan—much to their code’s chagrin— but settled in comfortably to the world becoming just them and their angel weighted blanket. This action used to cause them great alarm; it ended up accidentally killing the restart process the first few times they tried as their body jumped into a panicked survival mode from the sudden lack of perception. V1 had to rewrite some of their own code and swap some connecting wires to make the process even possible.
But hell was not dangerous right now, at least not to them. The purple light of the city beyond their bedroom window reflected hazily off Gabriel’s glowing wings as the machine’s optic finally shuttered closed.
Hours later, the reason it rarely slept became apparent once more.
It awoke with a start, awareness scan stretching to its maximum distance and audio visuals pushed to its limit. It could see every spec of dust floating in the air, hear every sound from the room and beyond, and the feeling of blankets and body weight on its chassis was now suffocatingly overwhelming. Every single sensor V1’s mechanical body possessed was thrown straight into overdrive and the effort it took would have been dizzying if it wasn’t so acutely aware of the bed beneath it.
The tenseness lasted for five long torturous seconds before it could feel its body relax— well, maybe relax was not the right word. Its senses fell to a normal range, but the second wave of unpleasantness quickly followed. Its internal wiring constricted, using less space to transport blood and electrical signals but making its body seize up, slightly hunched inward beneath Gabriel’s now shifting form.
“Hhmn?” The angel’s voice was still heavy with sleep, and V1 felt a pang of guilt for its stupid malfunctions waking him.
The feeling was quickly swept away though by the third wave of unpleasantness: Shaking.
V1 hated shaking, it made every calculation riddled with margins of error far larger than it liked, as well as left it with a sinking feeling that its structured processes couldn’t calculate away. Adding on the racing processor and tightness under its plating, there was nothing it could do except ride out the feeling. How long would it take? A few minutes? An hour? Would it always feel like this? It knew these thoughts were not logical, but whenever fear began to set in nowadays it found itself increasingly straying from its mathematical mind.
There was too much to process, too much information to sort into long term storage or delete entirely. It had shut down a few times since exiting its construction facility, but still only a small chunk of its data had been properly processed and filed away. It was too much and too fuel consuming to do without a steady intake. Its body couldn’t handle it.
It was built for a specific and repeated purpose with little room left for variation; dismantle Earthmovers. It wasn’t built for this onslaught of information. The maps of the different levels of hell and how confusing they were (their internal compass had still not recovered from Fraud), complex geopolitical squabblings of heaven and the fallout that followed Gabriel everywhere he went, and now the new complex emotions and higher consciousness it had been receiving from running on so much angelic blood for so long. There was so much, and its hardware wasn’t equipped to handle the stress its software was under.
It was too much. V1 felt like its body was going to tear itself apart from it all.
“Machin-?” Gabriel’s voice as he wakes up was something V1 looked forward to every time the angel managed to drift off somewhere, but this time its audibles corrupted it into something harsh and jittery and full of static. It snapped its head towards his, accidentally slamming into Gabriel’s helmet with an awful clang.
It felt his muscles tense for a moment above it before relaxing again. His arms shifted to lightly touch both its helm and his, quieting the ringing echoes of metal hitting metal. He was soft… slow…gentle… as he always was outside of combat. V1’s internals still buzzed with synthetic adrenaline, but its thoughts began to slow slightly as it leaned into his touch.
Without another word, Gabriel began to slide off the trembling machine. Relief flowed into V1’s chassis— finally released from the strain of being crushed— like the first breath after drowning.
What time was it? How low were its fuel levels? Were they safe currently? The door to the room they occupied seemed shut, but had they bolted it properly? What if any husks or stay demons were closing in just out of V1’s awareness scan radius? Was its awareness scan even fully operational?
RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS…
AWARENESS SCA-
WARNING: FOREIGN OBJECT DETECTED
Gabriel’s hands dipping into its midsection plating froze the (several) diagnostic scans dead in their tracks. It frantically thrashed its limbs and wings trying desperately to escape his grasp, but the angel had already taken hold of its carbon fiber skeleton, scooped it up, and laid it down gently on top of his chest. It was honestly a pathetic display— humanity’s greatest war machine picked up and moved around like the world's blood-thirstiest teddy bear.
But…it helped. The slow rise and fall of his chest, the weight off of its plating, and the soothing hand coaxing its wings down from their alerted display all slowed its trembling parts until the shaking subsided. Somehow it had forgotten it was even shaking until the dreadful process ended.
“It happened again I see…” Gabriel was certainly awake now, though his movements and tone remained low and heavy.
Even the simple sentence washed over V1 like a warm ocean wave. Whatever ally recognition system remained from the days of the war kicked in and gave its system a greatly needed modicum of relief. They curled into him closer, wrapping all four arms around his sides. A single toned beep was all they had the energy to respond with.
The world wasn’t deafening anymore. V1’s fans still spun at an elevated pace, but their processor was no longer being overloaded by an onslaught of sensory data. The feeling in their hands and feet reconnected (when had they disconnected..?) and —with a little more coaxing— they were able to fully relax their wings to splay loosely across the bed.
“How are your fuel levels?” One long monotone beep later and the angel was warmly clucking as he shifted them off of him to stand. The lack of body heat and physical contact threatened the return of a trembling chassis, but Gabriel assured he would return quickly. V1 did its best to hold itself as still as possible.
As promised, within moments he was standing back at the bedroom door with one of V1’s stashed blood reserves. They wanted so desperately in that moment to raise their resolution and take in every pixel it could of him, but their lenses wouldn’t shift smoothly and their video processor lagged in defiance.
“What are you huffing at me for, Machine?” V1 put their hands over their fans in mock defense at the playful jab. “I get up to grab you my own blood stored for your convenience and I receive in return is insolence.”
V1 could hear the smile in his teasing tone and decided against correcting him that actually there was no way he could know for sure if that fuel reserve is specifically his blood or not. They collected plenty, and didn’t label them or anything. Unfortunately the warm ecstasy and near immediate satiation of its appetite confirm that it was in fact the angel’s blood.
Maybe they should start labeling them.