Work Text:
V and N are both keeping secrets from each other. At least we’re even now, V thinks.
She made sure to return from her secret trip before N and Uzi came back. What’s another lie in the sea of carefully woven misinformation she’s given them? They don’t need to know she’s not really chained to this desk chair. This is nothing compared to everything else she’s not telling them.
But when N returned from him and the freak’s little “investigation” (which V really tried to stop them from going on), he was silent. Too silent. His eyes were wide and fixed on the ground. The one moment he shifted to look at her, he gave her a nervous smile and walked away.
Something is absolutely wrong with him, V has decided. She tried to get him to talk, to spit it out. He just kept his face buried in his knees, refusing to speak.
And then it suddenly hit her; he’s alone. She hasn’t heard the Worker Drone intruder cursing under her breath, scribbling design ideas for the Pod down on the whiteboard, impatiently tapping her feet from the room over.
She didn’t come back from the trip.
And dear robo-God, V hopes she died.
***
“You need to go hunting,” V says.
N replies with a quiet “I know.”
She turns to look at him. He’s still sulking in the corner, tail curled around his legs. She lashes her tail. “Hey, you’re not the one chained to some loser’s desk chair. I’d do it myself, but you’re the only one with the means to.”
N doesn’t reply.
V resists the urge to grit her teeth. “If you’re not going to hunt, why don’t you just unchain me? That purple freak’s gone anyway, there’s no reason to keep me here.” She knows the chain is in fact broken, and she could just get up and hunt – but N doesn’t know that. Just a part of the façade.
This time, N turns to look at her. “No. You’ll just hurt more people.”
V scoffs. “God, the Worker Drone’s pep talks got to your head.” She lays back in her chair. “It doesn’t matter! We’re gonna die here if we don’t eat!”
Silence. V spins around in her chair to find N halfway out the door, not meeting her eyes.
V puts on her best pouty face. “Please?” She says. “Can we just gut one Worker?”
“I’m sorry,” N says. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
And then he and his Uzi-induced pacifism phase walk away. The sound of his footsteps gradually fades, and V internally curses herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The Worker really got to his head. She’s not doing her job.
Do anything to keep him from dying again; that’s the only mission she gave herself.
He really is going to die if she isn’t careful.
***
V takes the risk of standing up and peeking through the tiny Pod window. N is already in sleep mode, hanging upside down and gently swaying in the freezing cold wind. Thank robo-God. V carefully dismantles the chain around her neck, spreading her wings and darting away from the Corpse Spire.
If he won’t get up and hunt, then she’ll do it herself.
***
It genuinely amazes V how stupid Worker Drones are.
They do a good job at hiding, she’ll give them that. They’ve built an impenetrable bunker that not even entire nights spent trying to blow them open with their Cyn-assigned rocket launchers have managed to break them open. So why don’t they have the intelligence to stay in that bunker?
The bunker is warm, the bunker is safety. The outside is cold, the outside is danger. What is there to see, other than broken remnants of the creatures who came before them, and the corpses of their brethren that have been sucked dry of oil?
And yet their entire squad has managed to survive off of Workers who stray outside the bunker.
And now V has found the next prime example of Worker Drone idiocy.
She’s perched in the shattered window of a once-tall building overlooking Outpost 3. She’s already stepped on enough broken glass shards to fatally injure a human being; her lack of feet muffles the blow, though. She watches a Worker with its arms curled around its sides, fake ponytail flying in the wind, pointy ears poking out of its helmet.
She imagines herself jumping out of this window, pouncing on the Worker, sword arms piercing through metal and tearing through its small chest. Its useless screams as she leans down to drink the oil spurting from its gaping wound. The oil would be sweet and warm; it would soothe the searing heat constantly threatening to wash over her.
Pure instinct takes the wheel when it comes to these things, V’s noticed. While she’d always taken the credit for the incident where she fed a Worker its own entrails in front of its cowering half-dead family, she hadn’t quite been thinking straight then.
Maybe that makes it a little better? Just maybe.
A teeny-tiny part of her programming tries to tell her otherwise, and V immediately shuts it down. No thinking about that just yet.
She stalks the pointy-eared Worker, who appears… strangely confident, considering its position. It’s shivering, but its eyes are carefully scanning the surrounding area. Every step it takes looks casual, as if it owned the place. As if it’s looking for something in particular.
And that’s when it happens.
The Worker’s head suddenly swivels around, and a pink HUD meets V’s gaze. Shit.
Any moment now, the Worker will start screaming. It’ll start shrieking and crying and running for the bunker, but to no avail. And V will cackle and savor every moment she spends tearing its innards out of its —
The Worker visibly relaxes. It almost looks as if it’s greeting an old friend.
“Hey, girl!” It calls.
V blinks. She’s definitely never experienced this one before. “And who the hell are you?” She calls back.
The Worker scoffs. “Ugh, I shouldn’t have expected you to recognize me. Y’know, socially isolated vampire and all.” It puts its hands on its hips. “I’m our history teacher’s daughter?”
V groans. She really can’t deal with this right now. It’s been over a week and N still refuses to hunt. Uzi isn’t even here to give him her anti-murder speeches anymore. It doesn’t make sense. V doesn’t have time to banter with a self-absorbed Worker.
She switches out her right hand for a rifle, and trains it on the Worker. “Give me one reason not to blow your brains out right now!”
This seems to make the Worker’s confidence shatter just a little. Only the tiniest sliver of fear shows on her visor before it’s replaced by the same confident, almost smug glare.
“Uhh… I’m pretty?” The Worker tries.
V grins, putting her finger on the trigger. “Not good enough—“
“Oh, and by the way, I was there when that pigtail girl got blown to smithereens by my loser of a classmate. I kind of came here to apologize for that. Uzi literally tried to kill our entire class with that same gun thing the day before, so I’m not surprised she went apeshit.”
A lightbulb goes off in V’s head.
She can’t believe she’s doing this. V actually lowers the gun and looks at the Worker.
“You know the purple freak?”
The Worker scoffs. “Oh, of course. Everyone knows her. Not that any of them are actually friends with her. Except Thad, but I think he just feels bad for her.”
V massages her non-existent temples. J would murder her if she was still here.
She swiftly jumps down from the window, making sure to put a fair distance between herself and the Worker. Just in case. The Worker seems to be just as taken aback as V is; she repeatedly looks V up and down, momentary blush lines appearing on her visor. Embarrassment, V assumes.
And once again, the Worker seems to immediately collect herself again, returning to that annoying-ass confident façade despite her situation. Alone, cold. Face-to-face with one of the cannibals terrorizing her planet. Yet she’s acting like V’s just another classmate of hers.
And V is actually conversing with this thing instead of killing it on sight.
Cyn would not be happy.
V awkwardly clears her mechanical throat. “So which Worker are you?”
“Uhh… I just told you? I’m the history teacher’s daughter?”
“No, dumbass, your name. I’m asking for your name.”
“Oh. Well, you could’ve just said that. It’s Lizzy.”
V blinks at her.
Lizzy glares back. “…And your name?”
V groans. “Fine. Serial Designation V. That’s all you’re getting. Have you seen the purple thing lately?”
“Wow, formal-ass name.” There’s a grin on Lizzy’s face.
“Don’t forget, I’m the one here with a gun arm!” She waves it around for emphasis.
Now it’s Lizzy’s turn to groan. “Ugh. Uzi’s been even worse than usual, somehow. Don’t know what the hell she was doing with you, but she’s been… weirder lately.”
“Nah, I had nothing to do with her. Well, I tried not to.” V sighs. “It was mostly my squadmate getting all friendly-friendly with her.”
“Who, that pushover Uzi flew away with the day she exiled herself?”
V aims the gun at Lizzy again. “Don’t call him that.”
Lizzy throws her hands up in the air. “Okay, okay. Jesus. What, are you two a thing or something? Didn’t know Murder Drones could feel that way.”
V switches out her rifle for matching sword arms. “Want to see what your own innards look like? I can show you.”
Lizzy looks at V, her expression unreadable.
V lowers her arms. “Okay, back on topic. You ever got emo girl to talk about what happened when she re-entered the bunker?”
Lizzy seems to immediately accept the sudden change of topic. “Nah. It’s weird, because usually she never shuts up, but… she’s been quiet lately.“
V narrows her eyes. “Go on.”
“She almost looks like a zombie – if you’ve heard of those fictional human things. On auto-pilot, just going through the school day. And then when me, Doll, and Rebecca try to talk to her, she snaps again and it’s all oh, bite me, none of you understand me, then she’s back on her bullshit with her conspiracy theories.”
Doesn’t sound much different than how she usually acts. “And those conspiracy theories?”
“I don’t know, I don’t listen to them, they’re stupid. Something about you Murder Drones. Something about them mutating, about her watching people die.”
V’s core sinks.
***
The only upside V has found to being (supposedly) stuck in one place is that it’s given her almost all the time in the world to ruminate on… whatever that encounter was, and what the Lizzy thing told her.
V spins around in her chair. N is still curled up on the floor, his tail nervously clacking against the metal floor and creating an irritating, constant banging noise.
“Yo,” V tries.
All she gets in response is a tiny “…Hi.”
V frowns. She knows he knows.
It’s easy; process of elimination based on what Lizzy said. They had to have ran into J; after all, they’d watched Uzi blow J’s entire upper half to bits with that railgun thing. V should’ve expected Cyn – V grits her teeth – would step in and somehow regenerate her.
Except she didn’t regenerate. The memory of that morning was still at the forefront of V’s memory banks; as the crowd cheered for her stupid, stupid squadmate and a Worker Drone who was in over her head, V had stared at J’s unmoving corpse. Waiting for the unmistakable aura of energy the Solver forms around the body as it reforms missing parts. But it never came.
She wonders if J is still down there.
She bites back a sigh. Something must’ve happened that led Uzi to stay in the bunker.
N will get over it. V’s sure. She’s caught him giving rocks names and personalities before; pathetic, but a much less dangerous alternative to getting all close with a Worker Drone.
But she doesn’t think emo-pants is the entire reason. If Uzi knows, then by extension, N knows too. He had to have seen whatever she saw down there; they were together.
Which means N might be regaining what he lost from his memory wipe.
V trades out her hand for a bubble blower. The artificial bubbles begin to float into the air on their own; it’s not like V has the lungs to make real bubbles. But she can pretend, and pretending is a good way to pass the time. She definitely knows that better than anyone.
Reflected in the bubbles, she sees a distorted N, still curled in the corner. She swivels around in her chair to look at him; he’s staring at the ceiling, digital eyebrows furrowed in what seems to be fear.
She’ll drag this out for as long as she has to, even if it means N sulking like this for robo-God knows how long.
Whatever she has to do to keep him safe.
***
She saw Lizzy again last night.
She can’t believe she’s even admitting it to herself. She snuck out to willingly visit a Worker Drone. It’s ironic; N used to be the one sneaking out to meet a Worker Drone. How the times have changed.
She tried to get more information about emo-chick out of Lizzy – no such luck. She only got rambled to about what seemed to be typical Worker Drone mean girl misadventures, like Brad hasn’t been responding to my messages, can you believe that? Think he’s been hanging with Rebecca. Me and Doll are going to prom soon, it’ll be great. Make sure to bring a dress!
V understood none of it, but she did give Lizzy one task; keep torturing Uzi as much as possible. Make sure she stays away from N.
“V?”
V spins around in her chair. N is sheepishly climbing down the ladder to the Pod, his head and tail hung low. “Can we talk?”
“Now are you speaking to me?” V says, a teasing grin on her face.
N sighs. “I’m really sorry. I just…” He trails off, looking away from her.
V blinks at him.
“…I really don’t know how to feel right now,” N tries.
“You and me both, buddy.” V says, immediately regretting it. Buddy. She hates that word now. She hates the person – no, the thing – that used to call her that.
She shakes it off, striking a dramatic damsel-in-distress pose. “I mean, how am I supposed to feel, watching my squad leader die, being chained to the floor by my own squadmate…” She drops the pose, turning to him. “…and being left in the dark about all the things you and purple freak did down in the bunker.”
N still isn’t looking at her; his visor is still trained on the floor, on V’s chains. She can almost hear the unspoken words. You’re one to talk. But he never says it; he never does.
“…I’m sorry,” he says instead. “I’m really, really sorry.”
V sighs. “Yeah. Now can you be honest?”
N looks up at her.
“I had a dream,” he says. “before me and Uzi left.”
***
A dream.
A dream, where he was a Worker Drone in a creepy mansion, and he was given orders by a human man talking to him about his eccentric daughter who decorates her drones’ heads with wigs.
And V was there too, as a Worker Drone. And so was J. And there was a human girl named Tessa that brought in a drone N had never seen before, one that N feared.
Except he had. He knew Cyn, he knew her, he knew her. She was his little sister. She used to follow him around and hide behind him when she was scared, she used to watch movies with him every night, he used to risk his life to protect her from the Elliots. He was the only one who cared about her.
And she – it – mutilated him and turned what remained of his body into a puppet designed for nothing but mass extinction.
V still remembers.
This has to be the first step to him remembering. Is the memory wipe somehow wearing off? Is all his time spent with Uzi and forcibly depriving himself of oil maybe causing the lock on those memories to weaken?
V will never let it happen.
He can never see Uzi again.
N finishes the story, looking up at her again. He looks almost hopeful.
“What do you think? Is it a clue, maybe?” He asks.
V chooses her next words carefully.
“Sounds stupid to me,” she says.
***
“…Hey, V?” N suddenly asks. It’s been a few hours since he told her about his memory, and V is still on edge.
“Yeah?”
“I never told you what me and Uzi saw in the bunker.” He says. “I probably should’ve told you before as well, but…” He trails off. “…when we come back from dying… what do we become?”
V narrows her eyes at him. “Was it J?”
He visibly tenses. “How’d you know?”
She blinks at him. “How many times have you completely regenerated after dying?”
He pauses after that, eyes going hollow with fear once again. Of course he knows. J’s punishments she used to give him for bad behavior – whether it was returning from a hunt with nothing, or just simply existing in her general vicinity. V remembers how J used to treat N in the mansion. Now that they’re equipped with built-in rifles and swords and the ability to regenerate limbs, those punishments have only gotten worse.
Bullets fired into N’s cranium. Sword tips held directly to his neck. Legs chopped off. Nanite acid straight to the chest. He came back from all of it; shaken, but otherwise fine. A wobbly “Y-Yes, J, ma’am! It’ll never happen again!” and an awkward salute as he ran. To where, V doesn’t know.
But she did know she could have never stepped in. She didn’t have the guts to during the mansion days, and she still doesn’t even now. She’d just get the same treatment, and not only that, she’d just get attached to him all over again. She can’t let herself do that again.
She can’t let herself.
V takes a breath before continuing. “We always regenerate. The Workers could never kill us even if they tried. I don’t care how powerful purple freak said that railgun thing was. I knew J would come back.”
He looks at her with an indiscernible expression.
“So what did J say?” V asks. “And why didn’t she come back with you?”
“No, no, V…” N starts, but then trails off again. “…J was different. She wasn’t there.”
V narrows her eyes at him. “What do you mean?” She notices she takes on an almost accusatory tone.
Suddenly, everything N had seemed to be bottling up for the past few weeks comes pouring out at once.
***
It wasn’t J at all. It was Cyn.
Of course, N didn’t know that. He’d described the sound of Cyn’s voice as robotic, as if her voice synth was a thousand years outdated. He had called it creepy. But Cyn’s voice still haunted V every day; she thinks she’s able to recognize it by description when she hears it.
N didn’t even recognize his little sister’s voice anymore. V has to remind herself again – Cyn was never his sister, she was something else, she did this to them.
He said that Uzi’s school friend (V didn’t even realize she had any of those) had watched J’s corpse crawl away. Maybe a bit out of character for J, but V didn’t see the problem yet. But then N continued.
But apparently that same ‘friend’ – Thad? V’s heard Lizzy mention him before – gave N and Uzi access to the bunker, something that makes V groan in frustration. N made it all the way into the bunker undetected, and didn’t even kill anyone? He really is going soft.
Either way, when they made it back to where Uzi had blown J’s upper half off all those weeks ago, they found something else in J’s place. Something that wore J’s mutilated face, but it wasn’t her. Long body snaking across the entire room, tendrils sprouting from its back, claw hands that grab you and never let go.
V knows that description, and her core sinks lower than she thinks it has in a while.
Cyn must’ve programmed them with much more than she initially thought.
***
V has a dream, just like N did.
They’re back in the mansion. The god-forsaken fucking mansion. White vision fills her sensors, making her do a double take; she’s gotten too used to yellow vision. V adjusts her glasses, shifting slightly as she washes the dishes. A task she’s done easily a billion times. She’d completely forgotten how much she hated it.
She looks across the kitchen, and N is there, preparing a dish with Cyn. Her head begins to sag towards him, and her hand quickly shoots up to hold it upright. N looks up and briefly meets V’s eyes. He immediately dons a big, goofy grin, blush lines appearing on his visor.
Dumb, dumb, stupid, stupid, stupid. V looks away. She looks away.
She focuses on the dishes. Wash the dishes. Do your assigned task; washing the dishes. Don’t look at N. Don’t look at Cyn. Wash the dishes.
She feels a sudden weight on her shoulders. Something in her code tells her danger, danger, danger. She tries to swap out her hand for a rifle, swivels around and tries to point it at her attacker. But she’s still a Worker Drone. Instead of a rifle, she just sees a regular Worker hand, and Cyn looking up at her.
Cyn. Fucking Cyn.
“Is something wrong, V?” It says.
“Get away from me!” V shouts, frantically backing away. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“V?”
It’s his voice. She turns around. N is looking at her, pure confusion and concern on his visor. “Are you alright?”
She looks at him. She only just now notices she’s venting heavily. She tries to form a coherent response, but her vocal synth fails. She doesn’t recognize him. He doesn’t have his pilot hat, he’s shorter, he has no tail, he’s in a butler suit.
Something about that sinks in for her. She doesn’t recognize him. When she pictures N, she can only see the mutilated and distorted version of him that Cyn made. She can only see a Disassembly Drone.
V wails.
She buries her Worker head in her Worker hands and she weeps, backing against the wall and letting herself sink to the floor. Her hands meet her glasses. Before she knows it, she’s taking off her glasses. In one swift motion, she’s thrown them to the ground. She hears a crack. Her vision sensors are plunged into blurry chaos.
Her tiny Worker body is wracked by large, heaving sobs. She never wanted this. She just wanted N to be happy, she really did. She never wanted to hurt him.
She wants to go home.
She feels a presence by her side, gentle whispers hitting her audio detectors. It’s N. Of course it’s N, it always is. She can only barely make out his words.
“Alright… it’s going to be… you’ll be okay… focus on me…”
This once, just this once, she lets herself bury her face in his chest and cry. Never again. They’re past this time, and they can never go back.
Guilt still ebbs at her – artificial guilt, a simulation of what humans could feel. What they likely felt. She knows this isn’t real, she shouldn’t be letting herself get close to him. She shouldn’t be anywhere near him right now.
She takes the risk and looks up. Cyn is still looming over them, its emotionless eyes unblinking.
Some primal part of V’s programming seems to activate.
She separates herself from N, swinging her tiny worker fist at Cyn. “You motherfucking—“
Her fist meets air. V blinks. They’re not in the kitchen anymore. They’re in the basement. Oil and the scattered parts and mutilated bodies of V, N, and J litter the floor. V looks down at her hand; it’s overgrown with organic Solver flesh. She’s holding a needle dripping with oil.
She looks up. N is motionless before her, a tiny crack spreading across his visor. His mouth is still twisted in a silent scream.
Cyn speaks.
“Giggle. What doesn’t N know?”
***
V has never woken up in a cold sweat before now. She doesn’t know why JCJenson programmed drones with the ability to sweat. Will never know why.
She immediately tries to stand up from her desk chair and run, but the chain pulls on her neck and she chokes. She hopes N didn’t hear that. She vents slowly and heavily, taking a fist and slamming it down on the control pad.
If things keep going on like this, he’ll remember. He’ll gain his memories back and he’ll know what happened that day at the Gala, the day that Earth was destroyed. He’ll know what V was forced to do to him.
This is Uzi’s fault. It’s Uzi’s fault that N is remembering; that he even started questioning his position as a Disassembly Drone in the first place. He can’t spend any more time with her. He can’t. Not only that, Uzi has the Solver; it’ll only get worse and she’ll just become more and more unrecognizable until it’s too late. By that point, she’ll just be Cyn.
The Worker Drones aren’t any better. V remembers the day of the Gala. The image of the drones, every single drone at the mansion that night being instantly controlled by Cyn with one snap of its finger, has been permanently ingrained into V’s memory bank. That’s why she kills so many of them, isn’t it? With every Worker she devours, she pretends she’s eliminating one of Cyn’s puppets, even though she knows it’s the opposite.
She shakes her head. She has to kill Uzi. She has to kill the Workers. Get into the bunker.
V thinks of a certain Worker she met recently.
She grins, the aftermath of the nightmare slowly slipping away. She has an idea.
***
V might have a plan.
It’s been about an hour since her memory banks betrayed her with that nightmare. V hears the pod door open. She spins in her desk chair, hyping herself up to appear at least somewhat normal to N.
It’s not like she’s never done this before. She’s lost count of the amount of times she’s woken up from a particularly heavy nightmare, having to get up and act like nothing happened in front of N and J. Especially N.
But he’s always been a bit harder to hide things from. He’s concerned, he’s curious. It’s in his nature; V knows that well from spending almost her entire life around him. She’s always loathed it about him. There are some things he shouldn’t know, but he doesn’t understand that.
On the bright side, though, he tends not to question anything out of the ordinary. He’s too much of a pushover to say much else about it after a harsh word or two. She’s done it before with him; she doesn’t see why it won’t work again.
She watches him climb down the ladder one-armed, holding a bleeding Worker Drone corpse in his other arm. His coat is splattered with oil, and his face is wracked with guilt.
V can’t say she’s surprised.
They briefly make awkward eye contact with each other. He doesn’t seem like he knows how to explain himself, as if he’d been caught committing some heinous crime that he knew V would turn him in for.
“…V, I’m sorry, I didn’t have any other choice—“
“You’re a Disassembly Drone. Chill,” V interrupts.
N pauses, his eyes hollowing. “I know, but it’s still murder!” He holds up the corpse in front of her. “This used to be a drone! With a loving family, probably! Look what I did to him!”
“Oh, settle, most of those things can’t even feel anything in the first place.“ She knows it’s a lie. She also knows that she’s picking up Lizzy’s speech habits. She doesn’t know how to feel about that.
“You don’t know that…”
She leans in towards him, putting on a sing-songy voice. “But of course I do. Calm down, this is what the company sent us to do. We’ll literally suffer a heat death if we don’t do it.”
He goes silent, looking guiltily back at the corpse in his hands. Its oil drips onto the pod floor, creating a tiny pitter-patter that lights up the silence.
“Hey, if you overheat, I’ll be the only squad member left,” V tries, putting the melodrama back on. “and then I’ll be all alone in the Pod… stuck chained to a loser-chair…”
She sneaks a glance back at him. He’s holding the corpse close to him, fear lines circling his eyes. Then he sets it gently to the side, carefully, as if it could fall apart at any moment.
She’s probably looking at him weird. It seems like it, from the way he looks back at her.
“…Okay, I’ll hunt,” N finally says. “but only if I absolutely have to.” He turns away. “I’m not going near the Workers otherwise.”
Good. It’s a start; at least he won’t be getting all buddy-buddy with them again. Especially not with Uzi.
“That’s for the better.” V replies, lying back in her chair. “We do our jobs, N. That’s it.”
He isn’t satisfied with that answer, and she knows it. He goes silent, eyes still fixed on the corpse lying stiff on the shiny floor. It’ll take a bit to get those anti-hunting thoughts planted by miss MCR-fanatic out of his head, but V will wait if she has to. I guess. She bites back a sigh. She’s come to learn patience isn’t her strong suit.
Just as N turns to walk away, she stops him. “Hey, wait!”
He looks at her.
“Next time you go hunting,” V says with a grin. “would you mind finding some human bodies with more clothes for us? I’m thinking a suit for you and a dress for me.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “…Okay. Why?”
She smirks at him. “I just thought we were in need of some extra choices in our wardrobe. I mean…” She gestures downward. “This is all we’ve been wearing since we landed here. Gross, if you ask me.”
N gives her a look that she can’t decipher. She crosses her fingers behind her back.
“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” he finally says, but the words are void of truth. He doesn’t seem to believe her, but she knows he’s not strong enough to say no. “I’ll go get some.”
Then he walks away, his footsteps slowly fading into the distance.
V is such a good liar, if you ask her.
She’ll also do anything to protect N from their own past. Even if it means lying to him, lying to that sad sack of metal and oil who calls herself the history teacher’s daughter. Breaking into the bunker and getting close enough to get rid of Uzi’s meddling for good. To nip it in the bud before she possibly becomes something much, much worse.
Even if N hates her for it.