Chapter Text
The scene N returns to once he resurfaces in his own head is the same as he’d left it: Uzi pinned under him, mouth foaming and teeth bared, her hand clutched tightly in his. N’s heart aches. Just because a scrap of her ego remains doesn’t make her state any less difficult to witness, and it doesn’t mean he can waste any time. Luckily, he’s excellent at not hesitating when it comes to sacrificing himself for others, though this exact instance might require a touch of forethought put toward method.
If he just sits back and lets Uzi up, she won’t think twice (or at all) about mauling him to death. If the damage she is about to do to him is going to be mitigated at all, he has to direct her snapping jaws, and he’ll have to get her to where he can hold her in place. Under different circumstances, N would be immobilized by bashfulness at the thought of just how close he has to get to her, but in order to do this for her in a semi-smart way, he needs to not be flustered, so he won’t be. Business Mode N.
Maybe he’ll be flustered about it later, if she can come back from the brink.
Releasing his grasp on Uzi’s hand, in one swift movement N takes his weight off the knee on her chest and slips his hand under her waist, sitting back and bringing her small body along with him, pulling her into his criss-cross-applesauced lap. With three out of four limbs mobile again, she doesn’t hesitate to cling to and entangle him like he were flighty prey, locking her legs around him and curling her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. Wincing, he clutches her tighter to him and nervously releases his hold on her disassembly drone wrist.
Uzi accepts the tacit invitation to strike, winding her arm under his and digging her claws into his back, the hooked ends anchoring into the plates covering the compartments where his wings are folded away. N hisses in a breath, but he’d been expecting her to tear at him and shred the titanium on his back to ribbons, so if she’s feeling like trapping him over mutilating him, that works for him.
His other hand finds its way to the back of her head and he pushes her mouth forward into the crook of his neck, pulling her chest flush against his in a tight (intimate) embrace she can’t wiggle out of, which means if she wants to eat, she has one spot she can reach. This seems fine by her. N feels the silicone connective tissue joining his neck and shoulder tear under Uzi’s teeth and the pain that shoots through him is deserved. He squeezes his eyes shut and clutches her tighter, feeling oil run down his chest and seep into his coat.
Uzi is gasping in between gulps, so consumed by the singular need to drink that she’s forgetting to breathe. The image of her stuffing fistfuls of her own guts into her mouth in between choking breaths surfaces, and N wills away the instinct to try and escape this source of bodily trauma, even as his oil is siphoned away and his internal temperature slowly ticks upward, even when he feels her lock her jaws and tear a chunk of his cabling out and he loses feeling in the fingers pressed to the back of her head. Uzi will stop when her regeneration is complete and starvation mode disengages. He can endure until then. Chin hooked over her shoulder and swallowing down every sound of pain that knocks into the back of his teeth, N watches the deep cuts in the metal of Uzi’s back through increasingly blurred vision, willing them to begin closing over.
Uzi snaps her teeth around his exposed metal collarbone and makes a sound of utter frustration and loathing when her bite won’t pierce through. She’s settling for tearing out the cluster of oil lines that run from his throat to the socket joint in his shoulder when his ears perk at a sudden chorus of clicks and scrapes from inside her chassis, and a wave of relief washes over him as he realizes that her internal components he couldn’t repair have begun to regenerate. They’re nearly at the finish line, she’s nearly back with him; they can make it.
He feels her frame address his imperfect fix and creak back into proper shape in his arms, and the blackened hair at her crown, visible in his periphery, begins to list more purple again. Is the oil being…drawn back into the injury? He chances turning his head slightly (mistake, turning hurts, turning hurts) and indeed, the crunched metal hidden in her hair is reabsorbing the spilled oil, wavering like a haloed mirage as it heals completely and…and then continues to shift. N’s eyes widen as her hair parts, metal scalp warping and making way for what could only be a sensor array to bloom, two yellow twin bulbs, offset slightly from each other and perched above her bangs, like goggles pushed up and out of the way.
…Well, that’s unexpected.
N’s attention shifts as, with a scraping groan, the grisly open wounds on her back begin to smooth out, though they don’t seal over. Instead, the ripped edges of metal fold in neatly, creating openings that are purposeful, integrated into her design. He realizes what’s happening and immediately sobers, watching in awe as new hardware forms, clicking, shining, singing, filling the open spaces in Uzi’s chassis, tucked in and compact and ready to deploy in a burst of metal, wound tight like a spring, and winding tighter as the reconstitution and construction densely packs more components into the compartments.
Without warning, Uzi gasps and yanks her mouth away from N’s mangled shoulder. An arc of saliva and oil connects her teeth to his open wounds for a half second as she throws her head back with a cry of shock, face skyward. Simultaneously, wings—metallic, bladed, beautiful—unfurl to their fullest extent from her back, the air around her ringing out like the most skillfully crafted knives sharpening against each other. It takes N’s breath away.
Face still toward the ceiling, Uzi’s breaths are ragged and labored, laced with tiny wheezing little whimpers, from fear or exhaustion or pain, N can’t tell. She shudders and wobbles and falls forward against N’s chin.
“Hey, buddy,” N ventures cautiously. “You good?”
Uzi seems to waver on the edge of consciousness, but she manages to sit back in N’s lap and meet his gaze. The dead pixels across her display are blinking back to life, line by line toward the initial damage in her visor, and then the crack itself seals over in a little puff of smoke. The violet X blinks away into tired, heavily-lidded, hollowed out ovals. N could cry in relief.
“There you are. Welcome back.” He grins, a little dizzy, a little overheated, a little more than a little hurt, but stable enough.
Uzi’s exhausted gaze falls to the carnage of N’s shoulder.
“N…?” She brings a hand forward like she’s in a trance, touching the edge of the open wound, then meeting his gaze, she repeats: “N…?”
“Easy, buddy. I’m alright. We connected, do you remember? We had a little talk. You were pretty far gone but we agreed to try and heal you up to bring you out of starvation mode. I was the best source of raw material.” He shrugs (with one shoulder) and grins bashfully. “Honestly I thought you’d do a lot more damage.”
A little loading gif flickers in the corner of Uzi’s visor, so quick that N nearly doesn’t catch it. Uzi’s reply is labored and stilted.
“Y-Yeah, I remember…I guess it…worked?”
Maybe a little too well, N thinks, eyes flicking over her shoulder.
“We, uh, did heal you up, and you’re certainly not a mindless feral killing machine at the moment, but, there’s also…” She hasn’t said anything about her freshly manifested disassembly drone parts. Does she realize they’re there? She seems pretty out of it. He settles on, “…I like the new hardware. I’m not sure why this would be the case, but I think maybe the injuries you got crawling out of the hole in the landing pod reconstituted like they would on a disassembly drone. Don’t get me wrong, I think they totally suit you, but you know,” He gives her a lopsided, well-meaning grin. “It’s not like I locked you in the landing pod. You could have used the door.”
Uzi stares numbly at him, and this time he’s sure he sees it: a tiny loading gif over her tired, distant expression, turning in the corner of her display before resolving into a check mark and disappearing.
“Oh, right. I broke your ship. Sorry. I was really mad.” A little recognition comes back into her eyes, followed by a crease between her brows. “I was…I was really mad…” She stiffens, tears suddenly threatening to well up on her display, and N’s woozy giddiness just from seeing her awake and (more or less) alert dissipates into worry. Her wings droop and rest on the floor behind her, metal scraping on tile, and N realizes she doesn’t know how to retract them. “I was really mad at you,” She says, then she says it again, and again, and a shocked and furious anguish overtakes her expression. She pulls her hand back and weakly pounds a fist into N’s chest, choking on sobs she’s trying to swallow down. “I’m so mad at you!” She crumples forward in his lap, shaking, still uselessly hitting him. N just lets her and listens. “I’m so mad at you, I’m so mad at you!” A little punch thumps through him every time she says “mad,” her face hidden away under his chin.
“You can be mad at me,” He says gently, biting back his own tears of sympathy and guilt. “You can be mad at me for as long as you need. But I’m not going anywhere. We’re going to figure out what to do next together, remember?”
She’s stopped hitting him, but the shudders of the sobs she’s angrily holding back are wracking her little body, and that hurts him a hundred times more than her striking him.
“What…d-do I even do with these? How do I st-stop looking at you?” She pulls her claws from N’s back and switches them out, using both hands to cover up the two sensor array bulbs on her crown. “I don’t wanna look at you right now.”
It stings, but N understands. He unhooks his arm from around her waist and reaches into his pocket for her beanie, bringing it up and slipping it over her hair.
“There are some menus I can walk you through, but this should help for right now.”
Uzi’s hands curl into the beanie and pull it over her sensors, and she stays just like that for a moment, thumbs slid under the edge of her hat, eyes downcast, doing no more than shaking and sniffling occasionally. He wants to offer her comfort of any kind, words or touches, but does he deserve to do that for her? So he just waits. Finally Uzi tilts her head back to meet N’s gaze. She’s blushing angrily and tears won’t stop spilling down her display.
“You had the nerve to be so nice to me after what you did!” She disentangles herself from him and pushes backward off his lap, but her new wings drag and stilt against the tile floor and hamper her movement, almost pinning her in place, and their knees are still touching when she gives up the ghost, resigning to sit on the floor directly in front of him. “You were the kindest anyone has ever been to me, but you didn’t like me for me, you just didn’t realize I was a worker drone and you were supposed to kill me. You had the nerve to…to tease me with feeling like you could…be a f-friend!”
For the tenth time today, N feels his heart break in half.
“I’m so sorry I made you hurt like that, Uzi, though…what you said is only partially true.” She angrily, tearfully blinks up at him from under her bangs. “I did like you for you. I do like you for you. You would not believe the battle I’ve been having with myself specifically because I like you for you.” He grins shyly. “And even if it was true at the time that if I knew you were a worker drone, I wouldn’t have gone to the lengths I did, it’s not true now.” He gestures softly to the blackened mess of his shoulder. “Now, I want to be your friend knowing what you are.”
“But what even is that, anymore?” Uzi lifts a wing and lets it fall heavily back to the floor, making a sound like dropped chimes. “What even am I?”
“You’re clever. You’re resourceful,” N doesn’t hesitate. “You’re stubborn and self-sufficient. You’re funny, though I get the feeling you’re actually way funnier than I’ve seen so far.” Uzi is hugging her elbows, eyes hollowed and staring in flustered disbelief at N as he calmly speaks. “You’re a force of personality to be reckoned with. You’re fearless. You’re resilient. You’re full of surprises.” You’re the best meal I’ve ever had. He shakes that thought away, but he knows deep down that it’ll resurface. For now, though, he continues, “You’re an accomplished gunsmith. You’re the first worker drone to kill a disassembly drone.”
Again, a little loading gif appears on the corner of her display, turning in circles above her searching expression before changing to a check mark and disappearing as her eyes light up with recognition. N tilts his head. Three times is a pattern. But indicating what? He’ll have to come back to it later.
“…Didn’t stick, though.” Uzi says through a begrudging little smile. N chuckles.
“No, but I still got the YOU’RE DEAD pop up, so it counts.”
Uzi buries her face in her hands and brings her knees up to her chin.
“All the nice stuff you’re saying just kind of pisses me off, and I know that’s the wrong response to have but it’s the one I’m having. And you’re saying it all so confidently! You haven’t even known me for a whole day!”
“I—well. I think we did a friendship speedrun, connecting like we did. I learned a lot about you really quickly, but if you’d rather I, y’know. Don’t spit mad facts about you that normally would take several months to learn.”
Uzi chokes out a little chuckle.
“Mad facts. Sure.”
“It’s true!”
“It’s subjective at best.”
“I dunno.” N nudges her wrists, asking for her to look at him. “Nothing I felt when connected to you could have been anything less than purely accurate. It’s your code, it’s just you. You’re a lot more than what anyone can pick up on at first glance, and I, um,” N brushes his bangs from his eyes. “I’m lucky I got to find that out. I…wouldn’t have known what I was missing.”
N’s eyes search the tile at his knees. Are all worker drones as exceptional as Uzi? If so, then he’s extinguished countless points of light from the surface of Copper-9. He hadn’t been counting on his food having particularly deep sentience, and starvation mode is an ever-present threat. How is he going to stave off hunger going forward? How will the other two members of his squad react to the revelation?
N’s reverie is interrupted when Uzi actually snorts and brings her hands away from her face.
“You’d be the first to say you feel lucky spending time with me.”
“Everybody else’s loss.” N shrugs (again with one shoulder), and it draws Uzi’s gaze back to the carnage she’d caused, brows peaking.
“Are you…going to be okay?”
“Of course! I’ve got a w—” A worker drone arm in his coat that he can eat. Maybe now isn’t the time to hang a lampshade on his diet, seeing as Uzi probably at least had seen in passing whatever worker drone this arm had belonged to, and she’ll likely have to come to terms with having similar tastes now. “…wwwway of dealing with this, after all. Perks of having self-reconstituting materials.”
Uzi’s eyes find the floor.
“…Am I going to be okay?”
N shifts and leans forward to crouch in front of her, good arm resting on his knees.
“We’ll figure out how to get you there, one step at a time. Right now, let’s start with getting you back on your feet, yeah?” He holds his hand out to her, and when she flicks her gaze up to match his, N realizes he’d unintentionally put their faces only a few inches apart.
Now is the time to be flustered about how close she is to him, and he quickly stands before there can be any blush on his visor to add to any…anxious vibes. Uzi unfolds her legs shakily and takes the hand N offers her.
“I…don’t know where I’m going to stay.” Uzi murmurs. N chews his lip.
“I admit, that’s a tough one. For now though, let’s—”
The weak sunlight that rarely graces Copper-9 makes itself known, filtering in through the shattered window and falling across the pair of drones as dawn breaks. N hisses in a sharp breath and reflexively pulls away from Uzi before the prickling in his casing can turn to sizzling, retreating away from the window and into the shadows of the office space. He’d lost track of time. He’s stuck here until sundown or until the cloud cover returns, and that means that Uzi—
Uzi remains, standing in the same place, dull orange light glinting off the curve of her visor and edges of her wings. She glows.
“Huh,” N lets out a relieved chuckle to cover up the reverent gasp making his throat tight. “Daywalker, look at you.”
Uzi looks apprehensively between the sun cresting over the horizon, the orange light casting across her hands, and N, deep in the shadows.
“What…does this mean?”
“I don’t know, really.” N summons a reassuring smile. “I guess it means you’re less disassembly drone than we thought. Maybe you’re still worker drone enough that you could go back to your colony.”
Again, though it’s hard to catch at this distance, the loading symbol flickers across her display.
“I…don’t know if that’s a real possibility. I wasn’t exactly popular when I was zero percent disassembly drone.”
N can’t help the downturn of his mouth. When she’d been yelling at him, she’d mentioned something about being tricked into thinking he could be her friend. Does she…really not have any friends in her outpost? Is her loneliness cut from such a deep vein? But she’s so cool!
“But you’re so cool!”
Oops.
Uzi snorts.
“No accounting for taste, but, thanks, weirdo.”
N grins broadly.
“If it means I can be your friend, then I’m fine being a weirdo.”
A begrudging smile slips across Uzi’s face, accompanied by a peak in her brow that betrays how much what he’d said to her really means. Despite being overjoyed that he could make Uzi feel so reassured and so seen, he makes an exerted effort not to make a big deal about it. He’s sure she’d hate that. She rubs a hand over her forehead, brushing her bangs out of the way.
“Well. Anyway. I think figuring out what to do next is a tomorrow problem. It’s not like I have anywhere else I need to be, so if you’re stuck here for the day, I’ll stick around, too. I saw some big poofy couches down in the lobby we could crash on.”
“Nowhere to hang from?”
Uzi cocks a brow at him.
“…Not sure. I wasn’t really looking for anything like that, ‘cuz, y’know,” She gestures behind her. “…no tail. Do disassembly drones really only sleep upside down?”
N shrugs.
“It feels right. I can rough it with sleeping on a couch, though.”
“…Will it feel right to me to sleep upside down?”
“We can put it on the list of things to investigate,” N softens. “Together?”
Uzi glances at her feet, rubbing her worker drone arm with her disassembly drone hand.
“I still don’t really get why you would waste your time on me, but…it…would maybe be nice to have someone to show me how to close these wings up, if nothing else.”
“I’ll do you one better,” N beams. “I’ll show you how to fly.”
It takes a moment, but Uzi matches his smile.