Chapter Text
“Okay, here's an easy one,” Aranea says. She's pointing to a heavy sheet of metal, green with white lettering on it, held up by thick poles, a street sign. “Read that.”
N H-01987 0006-0204 looks up at the street sign. It is easy. It starts with hammer, which he knows from helping the workers do repair work on the pods. It ends with head, which he knows from weapons training. There are a few numbers and letters beneath that that he recognizes individually, but together have no obvious meaning.
Aranea is watching him expectantly. N H-01987 0006-0204's throat tightens. He's taking too long.
“Hammer head,” he says. “Fifteen my.”
Aranea looks at him. She looks at the sign. “Pretty close,” she says, which N H-01987 0006-0204 has learned means incorrect. His chest tightens, but she only says “The 'mi' stands for miles. Do you remember miles?”
“A unit of distance,” N H-01987 0006-0204 says quickly.
“There you go,” Aranea says, which N H-01987 0006-0204 tentatively thinks is a form of praise. She hits his shoulder, a gentle hit that doesn't hurt, despite the fact that she could crack his shoulder blade if she wanted too. N H-01987 0006-0204 has learned that this is also a form of praise.
He feels warm.
----
The man is odd.
He's smiling. His skin seems... slimy, like his clothes and his skin and red-brown hair are covered in a thin sheen of oil. The sunlight doesn't act right around him. It looks like he was cut out of the world and not put back quite right, like the edited pictures on Aranea's phone. Photoshopped.
“Dearest,” he says, looking at Aranea.
Dearest isn't one of Aranea's names, he thinks, but- there are so many things he doesn't know. N H-01987 0006-0204 isn't sure. He feels woozy, his heart heavy and the crown of his head floating above his shoulders. It's from being outside- he doesn't have clearance yet. He doesn't have the right modifications, the armor.
That isn't right, he thinks. His head was solid a minute ago. He was still outside then.
Aranea's hand is on his shoulder. It feels like his body is connected to the point, like an anchor, like her hand is keeping him from floating away. He feels dizzy. He hopes she keeps her hand there.
“What do you want,” she says. She says it like a statement. Her voice is flat and hard.
“So cold,” the man says, shrugging his shoulders, eyes crinkled in apparent sorrow. The smile doesn't leave. He's using sad eyes but an amused smile. N H-01987 0006-0204 can't parse what the man is feeling. “After all the charity and good feeling I've shown you! So ungrateful.”
Aranea's knuckles are white. She doesn't move.
“I've come to see you, my dear,” the man continues, waving a hand. “You've come so far. Well beyond Besthida's expectations.”
Aranea's face goes blanker still. This close, N H-01987 0006-0204 can see her neck out of the corner of his eye, how the muscles grow steadily taut.
“It's unfortunate,” the man continues, and he shakes his head, sighing through his nose. “You've stumbled too close to my nest.”
The hairs on Aranea's neck are rising. N H-01987 0006-0204 sees them out of the corner of his eye, thin almost to the point of invisibility, and the pebbled goosebumps along her skin. Her arm tenses. The man raises his hand.
Aranea shoves him. N H-01987 0006-0204 hits the ground, gravel biting into his back.
And Aranea-
Aranea-
She's curled in on herself. Her back is bubbling and smoking. Something thick and black and familiar is dribbling down her arms.
The man smiles.
---
“Aranea!”
Her skin is dissolving beneath his hands. She's bucking and twisting, impossible to hold on to, and he wants to help, he wants to help, how does he help-
“You don't want to do that,” the man says. He sounds cheerful.
N H-01987 0006-0204 does want to help Aranea- wants to put his hand on her shoulder, wrap his hand around hers, do the things that she does to help him. He's not sure what the man is talking about. Maybe the man is confused. Maybe N H-01987 0006-0204 is confused.
Aranea's writhing. Her limbs are completely black now, stretched in odd ways. Her arms are lengthening, growing thinner, and something soft is starting to grow from the back of her arms. His fingers catch at them, and he feels her arm change beneath his fingers.
He lets go, scared to hurt her.
Aranea screams. It is not a human sound.
He's backing away, away, and Aranea is spreading the long black limbs that are sprouting something, prickling. Her spine flexes once, twice, and then she beats the air with her limbs, close enough for him to see the-
the feathers-
the things birds have, on their body, the thin soft things that were sometimes on the ground.
She beats the air again, howls, turns a long snaking neck towards him. Her face is long, beaky, no longer recognizable. Her hair is gone.
She coughs, guttural and too deep for a human, and black blood spills into the dust.
“The sun's still out, deary,” the man says.
N H-01987 0006-0204 can't turn away from Aranea to look at him. Aranea wavers, body still shedding smoke and blood, feathers starting to stand on end. The man tilts his head.
Aranea bellows and her wings beat the air again, louder this time, stronger, and suddenly the dust is whipping up in a blinding circle-
Aranea is gone.
---
“You love her.”
N H-01987 0006-0204 looks up. His eyes are burning and crusted, at the corners.
The man is smiling his oily smile.
---
“One year without speaking. No shaking or nodding your head, no writing things down. Not a peep.” The man flicks his finger at peep, playful. “And you must finish something for me by then.”
N H-01987 0006-0204 says, “Finish what?”
“Hmm.” the man turns to the side, his eyes sliding over the desert landscape. They fall on N H-01987 0006-0204 again. N H-01987 0006-0204 realizes he can't meet the man's eyes.
“How about a dress?”
“Dress,” N H-01987 0006-0204 repeats dully. Aranea is not there to explain it to him. His throat feels sore and heavy, even though he hasn't been yelling.
“A dress.” the man says, and there's something smooth and dangerous in his voice. “A little too easy. How about a dress woven from this?”
N H-01987 0006-0204 looks up. The man is holding a piece of the barbed wire in his hand, he tugs, and the line of it falls from the fence, rusty and glimmering in the sun.
“A dress for your dear Aranea,” the man says. “One year from today, woven from old barbed wire, without speaking. Throw it over her on the last day.”
“And she'll be human again,” N H-01987 0006-0204 says.
The man smiles.
---
N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't know what a dress is.
This is the first problem, one that seems almost entirely insurmountable. Aranea is not there to explain it to him. The facility isn't there, and even if it was, he could not ask. The data is not available in his files, besides as a descriptor in dress code. The man used it like a noun, not an adjective, so N H-01987 0006-0204 deduces that dress code is unrelated.
That leaves one other option, he realizes, a research device like Aranea's phone.
N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't know how the phone works, exactly- it seems to store a vast amount of knowledge, or communicates to an outside device that stores a vast amount of knowledge.
He can try and find Aranea, but he doesn't know what happened to the phone when she transformed. It could have survived the change, but it might not have, and the desert is vast and full of hiding places. He calculates that the resources spent to find her would outweigh the chance of obtaining a phone.
His chest feels odd and tight. Finding Aranea would be wasting resources he doesn't have, but he's reluctant to turn from that plan. His chest hurts.
He must ensure success. In order to ensure success, he must find a different phone. Reluctantly he pries his thoughts from finding Aranea and turns to other plans.
He should take one from a human.
---
Hammerhead is two buildings, several refueling stations, and a thousand small things that N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't understand. The cars he recognizes, from seeing roads from a distance and a lifetime growing up surrounded by tanks and machinery. They're strange and sleek without the heavy armor he's so used to seeing, and the people, the brightly lit room with windows and rations stacked in dizzying variety, those are.. a lot. Almost too much.
When N H-01987 0006-0204 adjusts his vision, magnifies the bright room and adjusts for window glare, he can see a row of boxes labeled Pre-Paid Celluar Phone. Inside the plastic of each one is a boxy shape, not quite the perfect rectangle that Aranea had. That's fine. He can figure out how it works. If nothing else, he's good at that. Machines have always made sense. People were what was strange.
Aranea always made him stay behind when they needed something from people, but she's more person than MT, and N H-01987 0006-0204 is still getting used to being outside without vomiting.
He can't fake being a person, not like her. So he'll just.. find a phone, and take it.
Aranea's phone had a passcode, but breaking past one would be easy enough, just a matter of plugging into it and finding the lock. The jack just behind his ear was meant for a communicative device anyway, and N H-01987 0006-0204 is sure he can alter a phone to fit.
He waits for night.
---
He's used to daemons. They don't know what to make of him. After the sun falls and the sky turns dark, they come creeping out of the corners of the world. As he waits for the lights to go out in the bright room, for the glare of Hammerhead to recede in sleep, they come close around him, snuffling, quiet.
Maybe they smell their blood in his veins. Maybe they recognize him, even without the armor, as a creature infected with scourge, caught in the halfway stage between animal and daemon. They leave him be.
They have no way of knowing his transformation is pinned in place by machinery. They have no way of knowing that the only creatures like him are the Empire's soldiers, and even those would kill him if they found him. They have no way of knowing that, with his armor gone and Aranea transformed, he knows no one else in the world like him.
They can't know that his chest feels hollow, painful, and their quiet attention touches something starving in him.
They leave eventually. His chest hurts.
---
The light goes out. N H-01987 0006-0204 waits an hour, counted out on his internal clock, before moving.
It's easy to be quiet without his armor, easy to creep down the hill softly, like an animal. Slipping past the barrier that keeps daemons at bay hurts like it always does, electric prickles in his blood, but it fades after a minute.
He creeps to the bright room, finds the lock at the door. He doesn't know how to- unlock things without keys, the way Aranea can do with slim metal sticks and sometimes with bobby pins, but he knows how doors function, knows where they're structurally weak.
He kicks the lock out. He's never been as strong as he should be, but it only takes two kicks, done in quick succession.
Something starts beeping, too quiet to serve as an alarm. A timer?
He slips in. The tile is familiar underfoot, like facility floors, like cold training rooms. He grabs one of the boxes with a phone. Hesitates by the shelves of rations.
A sound blares, loud enough for him to jump, for him to swallow down the reflexive noise in his throat. There's shuffling, beneath the sound, and cursing.
He flees.
---
He doesn't stop until his lungs burn and his head feels dizzy from forcing his breath too quiet to be heard. He's well out of sight of Hammerhead, the only sign of it a distant blue glow.
He stops. Pants. The night air is cold and dry in his lungs.
There's a line of barbed wire to his right, a tangled old fence surrounding a shack. It's not a defensible position, and not one well hidden, but.. he needs the barbed wire.
He holes up in the rocks nearby, finds a hollow between boulders. Aranea usually carried their supplies, citing that he'd just faint if he had to carry anything. Now he only has his clothes, his shoes, the plastic box clutched in his hand.
He wedges himself between the boulders, curls in on himself. Tries to fight off the cold.
His hands are shaking too much to open the box, leftover fear and adrenaline and hunger making his muscles jump and twitch, not under his full control.
He worms closer to the ground between the boulders, closer to the meager protection from the wind they provide. He breathes. Tries to sleep.
He sees the oily man's smirk behind his closed eyes.
---
He doesn't get much sleep.
---
The next morning, N H-01987 0006-0204 chews fitfully on a handful of dry grass. Eating and swallowing is still new to him, but Aranea was insistent he learn, because there are no rations out here that connect to sustenance ports. He still has to go slow, eat little bits at a time, chewing and swallowing unfamiliar and clumsy, but he can do without help now.
Early on in the trip Aranea had to chew his food for him. Now he is capable. Functional.
He swallows a wet mess of grass that scratches his throat and pries open the plastic box. The phone inside is smooth plastic and metal on both sides, with only a tiny screen when he pulls it out.
It's not like Aranea's phone. It takes him a moment to realize it unfolds, and the inner sides have a bigger screen and a small keyboard, with buttons assigned to three or more letters each. He presses the buttons systematically until he finds the one that turns it on. It blinks to life.
There's a dozen or more options that he doesn't understand. He hopes when he connects it to his ear port that it will make more sense.
The box has a cable inside. He finds the end that connects to the phone, and then considers the other end. He should be able to strip the casing, and then it's just a matter of figuring how to connect the wires to his communications port.
He bites the end off. It takes some work. Then he nibbles around the casing, the wire poking far enough into his mouth to touch the inside of his cheek, and cuts just enough into the plastic to slide the casing off.
The wires glint at him in the sun. There are three of them. He turns them this way and that, considers. There are five connective parts in his ear port, and with nothing to guide the wires, that leaves a lot of guesswork.
It takes him a couple different tries, static loud in his head. He has to keep at least one hand touching the wires to his ear port, the other curled into his pants leg.
Eventually static bursts into lines of code. He's found the right combination.
The coding in his head picks apart the phone. There is no lock, which seems like an oversight, but N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't question it. There is an outflow, a connection to an outside source. Like the research part of Aranea's phone.
He changes the perimeters of the coding in his head. It finds the framing for the outflow, labeled internet, and it has an option to search, with a place to type in.
Search what? Aranea's phone had a map, sometimes. Could he search for Aranea?
He tries Aranea. The results are all information he didn't know, but all unrelated.
He tries MT. The results are confusing- there seems to be a lot of information, but arranged in paragraph form, warnings and sightings and the words coming closer and breach of treaty and a lot more information, most of it nonsensical or at least inaccurate. None of it shows Aranea.
He tries human behaving MT. None of the results indicate anything useful.
He tries other things; physical descriptions, mostly. He doesn't know Aranea's designation. She shut him down whenever he asked about it. He finds that the internet has an option to search for images rather than words, but they're slow to upload into his head, lines of code converting to color displayed across the back of his eyelids.
None of it is helpful.
Eventually he looks up dress. The first word results ask if he wishes to go shopping, and show a dozen outward links to where he can buy dresses, but don't tell him what one is. He looks up definition of dress, which provides him with three definitions. Two of them are nouns describing a type of clothing, which he wavers and eventually decides this must be what he's looking for.
The image search shows bright and colorful cloth things. A dress seems to be a shirt that extends down to the thigh or lower, sometimes with complicated sleeves, sometimes tight around the waist and flaring downwards. Sometimes they have multiple layers, sometimes they have separate parts woven together.
They are beautiful and bright, like the birds or the sunset, and N H-01987 0006-0204 likes looking at them. They are pleasing, somehow. Bright and cheerful.
None of them are made with wire.
---
Eventually he searches how to make a dress. This leads to searching how to make cloth and then weaving and then knitting. There are clear instructions, with pictures. They all work with cloth, and weaving with wire yields no results.
There is something else though, a thing called a wire dress form. It seems to exist to hold the dress the right shape while it is being made. N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't know if it counts, exactly, but he can make it as a base and just... weave more wire into it, until it's solid.
Yes. This will work.
---
He doesn't know if putting words into the search counts as talking. The man said not to write anything down, but did it count if he was typing it out in his head?
After looking up dresses, he avoids doing it if he can. The man didn't give clear instructions. He can't take risks.
---
The wire stabs at his fingers. It is hard to manipulate, not only because it requires force, but because it is rusted and pointed at regular intervals.
He feels dizzy. He chews more grass, thinks at some point that he's going to have to get food.
His fingers are bloody. His blood is more red than black at this point.
---
He stays in the shade of the shack. It was frightening, at first, because it is a structure built for people. Not the open wild, for animals and daemons, and not cold metal halls, for things like him. It is specifically a human place.
But the sun is beating down overhead, and it still hurts sometimes, makes his skin red and cracked, makes him overheated, dizzy, thirsty. Sometimes spots appear at the edges of his vision. And the shelter under the roof is dark, not so hot. Sometimes a breeze even makes it pleasantly cool.
He chews the damp roots of wild flowers, the tiny bulbs at the end of the yellow dandelions. It's not enough. He needs water.
---
It's been two days since Hammerhead. They'll still be on the lookout for him. He's so thirsty though, dry and dizzy. He no longer produces enough body heat, and he finds himself shivering even in the dull heat of afternoon.
The cuts on his fingers from the barbed wire won't clot anymore. He wraps the edges of his sleeves around them, tamps down. They ooze red and rotten smelling tar.
The wooden floor has loose parts, boards that no longer fit quite right. He puts the phone and wire in the box and puts it under one, lets the board fall back into place. Drags a rickety shelf over the board.
He creeps back to Hammerhead. Waits for nightfall.
---
The second time he breaks down the door, the alarm starts immediately. He rushes in, his vision spotting from moving too fast, and grab- rations, the clear plastic water containers.
The blood on his fingers makes his hands slippery; he drops a bottle, goes scrambling after it.
“'Ey!”
He freezes up. A bright light plays over him and he thinks, awfully, that they've found him and now they're going to cut him to pieces.
“You're fucking dead!” a woman's voice bellows.
He's malfunctioning, crouched, shaking uncontrollably. He can't move.
He can't move, and they're going to cut him open and apart and root through him to find the malfunctioning parts, to learn where he was broken, why he went wrong. They're going to carve him open and they're not going to stop.
“You're-” the voice trails off, and then when it speaks again it's at a lower volume, closer to speaking. “You're bleedin' a lot.”
His fingers are still wet. His shirt sleeves are stained brown and orange, partly from rust, partly from blood. He's ruined their rations and tainted their water, and they're going to kill him. A whine is crawling up his throat, pure terror, and it's taking everything he has in him to keep it at bay.
“Hey,” the voice says again.
It's softer. Gentle. He doesn't understand.
Something touches his shoulder. He jerks, instinctive, and slips on his own blood. His chin hits the floor and he cries with mouth stubbornly shut, a muffled sound in his throat.
“Whoa, hey,” the voice says again. He can see, in the shadow from the light, a person crouched down close to him, close enough to kill him, to crack belts and fists across his back and the tender parts of his ribs, for stepping wrong in training, for being out of place, for taking extra sustenance packets, for malfunctioning-
He shies away, terrified. The person is speaking softly, gently, like they're speaking to a wounded animal, and he doesn't, doesn't- understand-
His vision is swimming. His head is full of static. His body is weak from hunger and thirst and terror.
He blacks out.
---
He's lying on the softest thing he's ever felt. It feels like how clouds look, like the giant fluffy birds Aranea has shown him on her phone. It feels like soft grass, but less scratchy, and warm.
There's something over him. A blanket. He's warm. He warmer than he's been in days.
He blinks. It is warm, and dark, but not night time dark. More like cavern dark, sheltered from the glare of the sun. There's a ceiling overhead, and a light nearby, warm and yellow. Something is making a scratching sound.
He doesn't know where he is.
Terror jerks him upright, and his vision swims immediately. There's an exclamation nearby, a human sound, and instantly he presses himself away from it, into the softness and the wall behind it, blanket tangling in his legs.
“Woah, hey!” it's the same voice as before. “Hey, it's okay, it's alright-”
The words don't make sense. He's panting, staring.
The human is a woman, with curly blonde hair and a bright yellow jacket. Her stomach is bare, like how Aranea sometimes dressed depending on what pieces of armor she put on that day. She's wearing a red hat with an edge that sticks out- baseball cap, Aranea taught him this.
Her hands are out, placatingly. They're empty, which means she can only hurt him if she moves fast.
“It's alright,” she says again. “It's okay, darlin'.”
He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand. He stares, doesn't move. This seems to appease the person.
“That's better,” she says. “Breathe, alright? Ya ain't in trouble. Alright?”
They're going to hurt him, they have to. He tainted their ration packets, their water. Nothing makes sense.
“It's okay,” the woman says. She extends her hand toward him, and he jerks back with his heart in his throat. She hesitates and pulls her hand back. “I'm Cindy. It's nice to meetcha.”
He doesn't understand. Can't understand.
“What's your name, darlin'?”
He doesn't have one.
---
Cindy doesn't hurt him. Cindy seems to want to help him. He comes to the conclusion that she thinks he's a person, because then her behavior makes sense: her forgiveness over what he stole, her concern over his health, asking for a name.
He shouldn't let her keep thinking that. He should show her his designation. But Aranea said never to show anyone his designation or his ports, and he can't- he can't talk. He isn't allowed to talk.
He's relieved. He shouldn't be, but he is, an overwhelming relief that leaves him feeling boneless, because there's no way for him to tell Cindy he's an MT, and so she'll keep treating him like a human, and it's. It's nice. So nice.
He's sitting on the soft thing- couch, Cindy calls it, I woulda put you in a bed but I wanted to keep you nearby for when you woke up. It's so soft, and warm, and it's hard not to fall asleep in it.
There's a desk, strewn with papers, and a writing board, and a computer, and thousands upon thousands of small things that he doesn't understand. The room is warm and soft-colored, yellow light filtered into long lines from windows covered by plastic. It is strange, and new, and he understands so little but it still feels good.
Cindy gets a glass of water and encourages him to drink it in little sips, and it takes everything he has not to down it in one swallow. The the thought of puking is what stops him. The thought of wasting the water or tainting Cindy's blanket and couch makes his stomach twist.
When she leaves the room for a minute he frantically hides his ports, finger-combing his hair so it covers the ones behind his ears, tugging on his shirt so the tubes in his chest and stomach don't make obvious lumps. The ones along his spine are thankfully well hidden by his shirt and hair.
Someone's bandaged his fingers. He hopes, desperately, that they hadn't pulled his sleeves up. The leather bracelets are still over his barcode and wrist ports, but if they had blood on them too, they might have moved them.
Cindy comes back with a pen and a yellow pad of paper, which she holds out for him to take. He reaches, cautiously, still afraid, and is fast when he takes it from her hand. She holds still for the whole thing.
He holds it awkwardly in his lap. He doesn't know what to do with it.
Cindy waits a moment, then says, “Can you write your name for me, darlin'?”
He's not allowed to write. He doesn't have a name. He's not even allowed to shake his head.
“Whoa, hey, it's alright,” Cindy is saying. She sounds distant, like he's hearing her voice over a long tunnel. His breath is coming too fast, he realizes. A moment later the pad and pen disappears from his fingers, and it takes him a moment to understand that Cindy took them. “It's alright. Sorry, darlin', didn't mean to upset you.”
He holds still. His hearing is buzzing, he realizes, not quite like static, more of a hum. Was he upset? Did his face change? He's so used to the armor face plate. Knowing others can see the way his face stretches or dips, like it's not supposed to, is frightening.
“You don't gotta write anythin' if you don't want to,” Cindy says. “You don't gotta say anything either. But you can if you want to, alright? I'll talk with Paw-Paw and we'll figure something out. Alright?”
He swallows. Blinks.
He's not allowed to nod.
---
Paw-Paw is a man. He's stranger than the men N H-01987 0006-0204 is used to seeing. His skin is leathery and seems to fit too loosely on his frame, pulled down into wrinkles at the edges. His chin is silvery with stubble and gray hair.
His eyes are sharp. His voice is sharper. N H-01987 0006-0204 thinks that if anyone's going to hurt him here, it will be Paw-Paw.
“You don't write, boy?” he says, flat and unimpressed. N H-01987 0006-0204 has to fight not to fidget. “What, you illiterate?”
“Paw-Paw,” Cindy says, her tone disapproving. Does she disapprove? N H-01987 0006-0204 tainted the water, will they hurt him for that? Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe they realized. “Look see, you're spookin' him.”
Paw-Paw grumbles without words and settles more firmly into his chair. He doesn't get up to hurt N H-01987 0006-0204. At least, not yet.
They're seated around a rickety table, with glasses of water and thin, plastic circles in front of them. There are metal instruments at each place that he vaguely recognizes as something the guards at the facility used to use when they ate, but he doesn't know their name and he doesn't have the data on how to use them.
The air smells- really good. Really, amazingly good. It smells like when Aranea roasts meat over the campfire, but better, somehow. More nuanced. N H-01987 0006-0204's mouth is over producing saliva, and he has to swallow constantly.
Cindy is bringing out plates of something. It looks like food. He hopes it's food. The hopeful thought, that he might get some, that there might enough left over for him, feels like a knife wound in his belly.
Paw-Paw grumbles, “I thought Reggie was doin' something about education beyond the Wall.”
“S'not the kid's fault if he don't write or talk. Do you want potatoes?” The last question is aimed at him. She's handling something that looks like chopped up edible roots. Looking at them makes the knife-feeling in his stomach twists. He swallows.
“I'll take that as a yes,” she says, and puts some onto the plastic circle in front of him.
He has to swallow saliva again. Were they- were they testing him? To make sure he functioned correctly? MT's didn't get sustenance packets until humans were fed.
But they think he is human.
He swallows. Looks up at them again, tries to gauge what they want.
“Oh for Six's sake,” Paw-Paw says. He looks pained. Cindy is also watching him, her brows coming together and a frown on her face. “Just eat, boy.”
Oh.
N H-01987 0006-0204 watches to make sure- doesn't know if they'll suddenly change their mind. It's that thought that spurs him, that they might decide not to feed him, and he scoops up some of the-potatoes- in his fingers and swallows them and oh.
It's good. It's so indescribably good. They're hot to the touch and they burn his mouth and throat and fingers and it doesn't even matter, because they're- they taste like root vegetables but better, nuanced and a little spicy and warm and more-ish, somehow, and. And.
His eyes are wet. He hardly notices, he's picking up more of the- the potatoes and putting them in his mouth and he's chewing and swallowing faster than he's used to, fast enough that his jaw and throat feel sore, and every bit is so overwhelmingly good.
His plate is empty in half a minute. He looks at the empty plate, his stomach gurgling softly, and he feels warmer. Heavier. The pained feeling in his stomach has lessened, no longer pressing at the forefront of his mind. He swallows, tries to keep the taste in his mouth.
“Six,” Paw-Paw mutters.
N H-01987 0006-0204 looks up. Cindy's only just put food in front of Paw-Paw and is paused putting food in front of herself, watching him. He swallows. He did something wrong. They're staring at him, and he did something wrong.
“Do you know how to use a fork?” Paw-Paw says suddenly. Without waiting for an answer he sorts through the food on the table and pushes a container of green things toward him. “Take some of this.”
They- are they offering him more food?
He looks up, disbelieving. Cindy hurriedly puts food down in front of herself and then reaches for the greens, taking a long metal instrument and using it transfer some of the greens to N H-01987 0006-0204's plastic circle.
“Pick up your fork,” Paw-Paw says. He picks up one of his metal tools. “The one with prongs.”
It's a command, easily recognizable. N H-01987 0006-0204 glances down, finds the tool like the one Paw-Paw's holding. He picks it up.
“Now,” Paw-Paw says, “You can hold it however you fuckin' like, but me, I like holdin' like a pencil. Like this.”
He holds it with the metal prongs pointed downward, the handle between his index and middle fingers and held in place with his thumb.
N H-01987 0006-0204 tries to copy him. It's awkward, because his hands are covered in bandages, making them thick and clumsy.
“Like this,” Cindy says, and suddenly her hands on his hands, manipulating his digits.
He freezes. But it doesn't hurt, and after a moment they're gone, and his hand is holding the fork like Paw-Paw.
“Yeah,” Paw-Paw says. “And then you just stab your food. Like this.”
He pokes something on his plate, spearing it on the metal prongs, and puts it in his mouth. N H-01987 0006-0204 watches. Understands. The instructions are very clear.
He pokes his food with the fork. Stabs one of the greens- they're a little slippery, but he gets one after a few tries. He puts the food in his mouth. Bites down.
His teeth scrape the metal prongs. It hurts.
“Oh, no,” Cindy says. “Darlin', you don't bite. Just- slip it off. Pull the food off.”
Okay. The verbal instructions are difficult, but not impossible. He stabs one of the greens again, the other green still in his cheek, and puts the food in his mouth. Tries to sort of.. slide it off.
“There ya go,” Cindy says.
“What kinda little mermaid shit,” Paw-Paw mutters.
“Ignore him, he's just a grouch,” Cindy says, and then she's putting some more of the potatoes and a few strips of meat on the plastic circle in front of N H-01987 0006-0204.
He stares. It's so much food. It's so much.
His eyes are wet and leaking, his nose is clogged and running. They eat. Neither Cindy nor Paw-Paw take the food away from him. They don't comment on his malfunctions.
---
He needs to go back, needs to work on the wire dress. Needs to fetch the phone. Needs to find a steady source of food, of water. He can't depend on them. They might decide to stop feeding him, to stop sheltering him. They might see his ports. His designation.
Cindy puts a soft square on the couch, and two blankets. She folds another one and leaves it on the armrest. She pats the cushions, says ya can sleep here for now.
He trembles. Sits slowly, carefully, on the couch. Looks at Cindy.
Her eyes are sad, but she gives him a smile. He swallows. Lays down, pulls the blankets over him. The square soft thing cradles his head, and it smells good, a faintly flowery, clean smell. The blankets are warm. It feels so good, so improbably good.
He needs to leave. He needs to go back, find a water source. Start weaving the wire dress.
He closes his eyes, just for a minute.
---
He dreams:
They're in Gralea, caught in a storm, barely two weeks since the facility. N H-01987 0006-0204 still vomits black sludge in the sunlight, but the tall MT with silver hair- Aranea- is insistent that he exposes himself to it in small amounts. Now he is weak from lack of food, from being sunsick, from the cold and confusion.
“You need to give yourself a name,” Aranea says.
N H-01987 0006-0204 jerks his head up to look at her. They're crouched under an overhang of rock, protected from the rain but not the wind, which seems to cut right through his jacket. His fingers are numb with cold and his arms are stiff from how long he's kept them tucked against his chest. Aranea is curled up too, a couple of inches between them. He is grateful they're not touching, because human contact is still new and frightening, but also torn, because it's cold, and he feels like his bones are going to shiver right out of his body.
“I h-have a designation,” N H-01987 0006-0204 chatters. His teeth are clicking together uncontrollably, a defect. He hopes this is another harmless one, and that Aranea won't notice.
“A name, not a designation,” Aranea says. If she notices she doesn't say. “There's a big difference, robo boy.”
MT units don't get names. But Aranea says he needs to give himself one. It's another conflict that make his chest feel tight. He doesn't know why, or how he would do that, and he shouldn't have a name. Names were for people.
He's not people.
---
He wakes up with a start.
Burning bright sunlight is coming in the window. The room is empty except for him and the cluttered desk. There's a fly buzzing faintly around the ceiling.
He fell asleep. He fell asleep.
He jerks upright, paws at the window, peers through. It's day. The sky is clear and vast. There are people walking around, clattering sounds of machinery, yelling and talking and buzzing around. Cars are settled around the refueling stations, and as he watches, another one pulls into the driveway.
He has to, has to leave. Has to get out. He's checks his log, frantically, found he lost consciousness in the ration room at 1:33, woke at 15:00, ate food with Cindy and Paw-Paw, and fell asleep again at 22:00 hours, and woke up now, at 10:26. He's spent over 24 hours here. He's spent a full day.
He need to leave.
He scrambles to his feet. His boots are placed by the couch, and he shoves them on, ties the laces.
He walks, soft footed, trying fearfully to be quiet, until he finds a door that faces outward, away from the parking lot. It opens to a straight shot into the wilds, the barrier only about twenty feet away.
He bolts.
---
He gets to the shack. For once, he isn't dizzy.
He leans against the wood. Breathes. He'll start freeing the lines of barbed wire, practice the knitting knots to make sure the instructions are correctly interpreted. He'll head out in the evening and find running water. He'll circle outward, looking for more sources of wire.
He can still taste the food, so faintly he's not sure if it's a malfunction of his sensors.
---
He finds running water. He has a filter, but only for nutrients processed through his stomach port. Aranea used pills that dissolved in water and made it clean or boiled it in a little pot over a fire. He has neither pills nor a pot, and doesn't have the right modifications to produce fire.
He runs the risk calculation. Drinks the water. For the first three days, he is uncomfortably ill, gastrointestinal system functioning poorly, but then it starts to adjust, and drinking becomes less uncomfortable.
He eats the roots of grass and dandelions, eats the thicker, white roots he knows are edible. Chews fitfully on bark, when he can find it.
Inevitably, the knife-feeling in his stomach comes creeping back.
---
On the fifth day, someone comes tramping over the rise.
N H-01987 0006-0204 is leaning against the shed in the shade, prying the wire into shape. The first circles for the waist have brought up another issue- how he'll get the dress over Aranea's new daemon shape. He's settled on leaving an opening in the front and putting a sash that he can tie shut over Aranea's belly. There are some dresses like that, although the opening is in the back. N H-01987 0006-0204 hopes that it still counts.
He's so preoccupied with the wire that he doesn't notice Cindy until she shouts.
“Hey!” she yells.
He jerks, head snapping upwards. Cindy is coming over the rise, immediately identifiable in the midmorning light, bright red hat and yellow curls. She's got a backpack slung over her shoulders.
He scrambles to his feet, knuckles white around the wire, heart in his throat. But it is Cindy, and the memory of potatoes and the greens still lingers in his head. He should move, he doesn't want to move, so he stands still, shaking with nervous energy.
“Hey,” Cindy says, gentler this time. She stops several feet away from him, too far to hurt or feed him. Both her hands are out in front of her again, up and open and empty, easily seen.
N H-01987 0006-0204 isn't allowed to talk. He stares at her.
“We were wonderin' what happened to ya,” she says easily. “Can I come over?”
He stares at her, flicks his eyes back over his camping spot. He's set up leaning against the side of the shack, in the meager shade it provides, because the open air is somehow more.. right then the inside of the shack. He's still holding the wire white-knuckled in his hands. There's a new cut on his palm, dribbling blood onto the ground, and it's all dirty over here and humans.. A lot of humans didn't like blood or dirt. The facility guards hadn't.
But Cindy is asking to come over, and he can't deny a human, so he shuffles awkwardly to the side, tries to shove some of the wire out of the way with his foot.
“Thanks, darlin',” Cindy says, and then she treks over uncomfortably close and slings her backpack onto the ground. N H-01987 0006-0204 shifts to the side, watching her as she crouches down and shuffles through her backpack.
“See, Paw-Paw and I got a bit worried,” Cindy says, “Young man bein' on your own an' all. Not that you're not capable,” she adds, shooting him a smile, “But outside the Wall's dangerous, y'know? Daemons at night.”
Cindy knows that he's not fully capable, N H-01987 0006-0204 thinks, heart sinking. She knows about his malfunctions, or thinks he has the- the human equivalent of malfunctions. His fingers twitch around the wire, eyes flitting side to side.
Cindy pulls out a bottle of water, holds it out him. N H-01987 0006-0204 looks at it. She doesn't want him to take it, does she? It's water. He has access to water. It's an unnecessary resource. He shouldn't take what he doesn't require.
His mouth feels dry and he wants to take it, but he can easily trek the half-mile to his other water source and drink when he requires it. This water is a- an unnecessary expenditure- what the guards would call a luxury.
“Not thirsty?” Cindy asks gently, and he realizes he's been staring at the water bottle for a few minutes. He flits his eyes to her; her face is kind and open. She puts the water bottle down on the ground, reaches into her backpack, pulls out- food rations.
“How about hungry?” she asks, and N H-01987 0006-0204's stomach gurgles. She laughs, an earthy, rumbling sound that makes him feel odd and light, and she gives him a food bar.
N H-01987 0006-0204 hesitates. He runs the risk calculation, but there are too many unknown factors for a conclusive course of action.
Cindy did give him food before. This food smells different, a sweet smell that he recognizes from fruit, and a more mellow smell he doesn't recognize. He wants to eat it.
Cindy rips open the packaging for her bar and takes a bite out of it. He watches her for a moment, and then makes a decision. The facility would whip him for taking risky resources, but the facility isn't here, so he unwraps the food bar.
It tastes.. different, soft and sweet and melting in his mouth. He takes the rest in two bites, then stares mournfully at his empty hands when he realizes that it's gone.
“Wow, you're starvin', huh?” Cindy says. She fishes around in her backpack again. “Lucky for us I got some more.”
Cindy gives him more food, two more food bars and then a packet of dried meat- jerky. It's like last time, where the food seemed endless, but Paw-Paw isn't there. It reminds him, more painfully, of Aranea carrying him, weak from lack of substance packets, and putting strange mush in his mouth, teaching him to swallow.
They eat for a while in silence. N H-01987 0006-0204 wonders what Cindy wants, or if this is a normal thing humans do, if they find and feed each other. It seems wasteful.
“So me and Paw-Paw got to thinkin',” Cindy says out of nowhere. N H-01987 0006-0204 looks at her while she chews thoughtfully on jerky. “That you might not have a place to stay.”
N H-01987 0006-0204 does have a place to stay. The shack has wire, and water nearby. He can scavenge food. He glances around his camping spot, wonders what she thinks is missing. He looks back at her, confused.
Cindy hums, watching him, then says, “Is this where you sleep?”
N H-01987 0006-0204 hasn't quite worked up the nerve to sleep in the shack. He glances at the indent in the ground where he's been resting at night, the shallow hollow that protects him from the worst of the wind.
Cindy follows his gaze, and something in her face twists.
“Oh, honey,” she says softly. N H-01987 0006-0204 looks at her, afraid he's done something wrong, but the expression is wiped from her face before he can parse what it means.
“How would you like to come stay with me an' Paw-Paw?” Cindy says, and her face is back to being kind and cheerful. “Just for a little while, til we can figure something out?”
N H-01987 0006-0204 blinks at her. Tries to process what she's asking. He can't, he can't- they don't know what he is, he can't risk that, he needs the wire, he needs to get Aranea back.
He wants to. His chest aches and his eyes burn and he wants to but, but he can't take the risk, not without risking Aranea.
“Darlin',” Cindy says softly, “Oh, don't cry. Hey now.”
Something touches his shoulder. He jumps, instinctive, but it's just Cindy, and Cindy feeds him, so he watches with blurry eyesight as she gently places a hand on his shoulder.
It's warm, and something more than that; it touches the- the hollow feeling in him, the starving and beaten down thing in his chest, and his eyes burn and start to leak, his chest hiccuping and shaking, the sounds trapped behind his stubbornly shut mouth.
“Hey,” Cindy says gently, softly, “How about you think about it? And we can go back tonight so you have a warm place to sleep, and we can think about it more in the morning?”
N H-01987 0006-0204 shouldn't risk it. Not for Aranea, Aranea.
But he leans into Cindy's touch anyway, and later, when she stands up and picks up her backpack, he stands too, helpless to the blooming thing in his chest. He gathers up the barbed wire in huge armfuls, disregarding how it stabs and cuts into his arms and sides, and trails after her.
She frowns at the barbed wire. “You.. you sure you need that? It's cuttin' you up.”
N H-01987 0006-0204 holds it tighter, suddenly inexplicably terrified that she's going to take it from him. She looks at his face, must see the terror there, because her eyebrows pinch together and she hesitates before giving him a drawn smile.
“You're breaking my heart, darlin',” she says. Then she sighs. “Okay, we're bringing the wire. But after this we're getting you some work gloves or something, 'kay?”
Is she not going to take the wire? N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't understand. But then she's walking back down the hill, towards Hammerhead, and he- he-
He follows.
---
Paw-Paw is there when they arrive. He ruffles N H-01987 0006-0204's hair, tells him to get in the house, says he'll make some calls. N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't know what that means, but the feeling of calloused fingers against his hair sinks into his skin with bone-deep satisfaction, and he spends the next few minutes hovering by Paw-Paw and hoping he'll do it again.
Paw-Paw doesn't. He does use a phone, talks to several different people. He seems to get more and more frustrated. The guards used to get angry like that, and the memory is still deep in N H-01987 0006-0204's head, so he leaves Paw-Paw be.
Cindy is busy doing something. N H-01987 0006-0204 is left alone, but a different sort of alone than before. Now he can hear Paw-Paw shuffling around inside the building, and further away he can hear strangers, humans he doesn't know, moving and talking and breathing and doing human things.
It's soothing. It also aggravating, because there are thousands of things happening that N H-01987 0006-0204 doesn't understand. He tries to balance the feelings out in his head so he can concentrate- he still needs to make the dress.
He sits on the concrete outside, behind the building, out of sight of the humans. He's brought the wire here, an armful of it, enough to get started. He's not sure how to find more, if Cindy and Paw-Paw will let him go out to fetch some, but for right now, this will do.
He closes his eyes. Listens to the sound of Cindy and Paw-Paw inside, shuffling around, doing human things. Feels the prickling wire beneath his fingers.
Gets to work.