Chapter 1

"It'll be okay." That's what he had said to the girl shivering with terror in the corner. The girl drenched with tears of her own, and the other's who no longer were able to shed them. The source of the voice smiled a plastic smile that concealed the terror that was strung through his mind as well, but even an artificial notion of comfort was enough for her. She struggled to rise up from her knees, but he extended his hand and helped her to her feet.

"A-are you…" She pointed to his neck, which was hidden away in the tangles of an oversized, wine-red muffler. He realized what the girl meant, and tugged the scarf off revealing the mark on his artificial skin.

Yaegerbot System 3R3N

She stepped away, and the reassurance that she had just received that she would survive was consumed by horror. "G-get away...get away from me!" She shrieked, the childish, high-pitched voice reverberating in the bloodstained walls of the apartment. Before even thinking she grabbed onto his throat and pressed her fingers down as hard as she could. Robots were built in imitation of humans. They're worthless. They're monsters. The endless thoughts swam through her mind.

The boy couldn't loosen her grip; kicking at her shins and trying to break free. Just as he found his strength fading away as the crimson scarf slipped out of his grasp, the door of the room slammed open interrupted the assault, and a man with bloodshot, fear-filled eyes and quivering hands broke in with an old-fashioned rifle in his hand. The girl immediately dropped her hands, and retreated to her corner. She felt hope begin to rise up in her chest. It was a human. She was saved.

The rifle was fired and the robot flew back with the attack.

"I-I-" She began to rush towards the man, longing for a human touch to be able to take her back to safety. To her parents. Back to her life before that eventful day.

Then the gun was pointed at her head.

"I-I…" She stuttered, her eyes widening. "I'm human…"

For a moment, a spark of realization flickered in the man's eyes. He realized what he was doing. What he was about to do. But before the spark could set something aflame, it dimmed and died. "N-no...there were no s-survivors…"

She braced herself, trying to stop the tears that were starting to stream down her face again.

"You...YOU FUCKING ROBOT!" He cried.

But his battle cry was cut short with a trickle of blood slipping out of his lips, something between a groan and a cough, and shortening breath before he collapsed to the ground. Behind him stood the robot with oil dripping from his shoulder blade and a bloodied knife gripped tightly in his opposite hand.

"Y-you...you killed a man! You're just like them! You...you…" The girl screamed, thrashing her jet-black hair from side to side. "You…" Her voice began to weaken, and was swallowed by uncontrollable blubbering of words she couldn't even make out anymore.

Her panic was stopped by the sudden warmth of cloth being wrapped around her neck. She looked up, and found her eyesight was covered by a sheet of red. "Here. It'll be okay." He said.

She tugged the scarf down so she could see, and the instant she set her eyes on the boy the dam keeping out her tears broke and she couldn't stop herself. "T-they...they're all dead...I don't have anyone anymore...even the human...nobody…" She whimpered between hiccups.

The boy took her hand, and she looked into his sea green eyes. Even though they were metallic, and even if the skin gave off no body heat, that hand was the warmest touch she had ever felt.

"It'll be okay." He said.

The office was cold. Why the fuck was the office so cold?

"Hanji," The man called as he slouched back on his office chair. "Why is the air conditioning on?"

A woman popped her head through the door with a sheepish smirk, her oily ponytail clumsily slouching on top of her head like an untamed bedhead, which would be true if she had gotten any sleep in the past few days. Her thick rimmed glasses and a couple pounds of caffeine tried to conceal the dark shadows under her eyes, but if you knew her you could tell that the closest contact she'd come to a bed in a while was the sofa in the staffroom every 24 hours or so.

"I was feeling warm," She replied.

"Maybe you could cool off with a shower," The man scooted his chair back, pretending to stay away from her.

"Soon, don't worry!" Hanji answered, "We just got new test subjects," She exclaimed excitedly. Then her expression darkened into almost a seductive grin, "Of course, if you were interested in collecting a robot on your next raid and perhaps, I don't know, bringing it to me, I could-"

"No."

"Gah!" She let out a childish whine. "Pretty please? I'll shower if you do!"

He paused, "No, we can't break laws even if we are officers."

"You hesitated!"

The man rolled his eyes, "Go take a shower, I can smell you from all the way over here."

"Soon!" She sang as she dashed off to do god knows what she spent all those hours doing. Just before the man could get a few moments of peace, the familiar obnoxious clanging of the bells reverberated throughout the station.

"Captain Levi!" One of his subordinates called from outside his office. Levi made a tsk sound before rising from his desk and slipping into his jacket. He swiftly paced out of the building and rounded up his squad in front of the station's vehicles and checking the message menu of his watch.

"It's a call from down in the orphan apartments. Threat level moderate to high. We've been given permission to paralyze suspects at will." He explained to his team, reading out the words displayed on his hologram.

They responded with unorderly "Yessirs!" while each entering the vans.

"Do you think there'd really be a bot in the orphan apartments?" The woman beside Levi asked; pushing aside her golden-brown side bangs with her paralyzer in her other hand.

"Beats me," Levi sighed, I hope not, he thought.

Being alone in a supply closet, knowing that his friends were probably getting interrogated or maybe beaten for information, and having only a few minutes left before the Robotic Defense officers would come to the third floor and discover him wasn't as terrifying as the robot had expected it to be. In the books Armin would read, they said that a human's heart would race, that their breath would shorten, and they might even grow nauseous with fear.

He pulled the hoodie up a bit, and untied his small ponytail, hoping that it would conceal the mark on his neck. His hair fell down to below his chin, and was a scraggly mess from lack of combing. Armin had read that before doing something like this, people would usually pray. Or hold their breath. Or do something superstitious.

He didn't have time to think through a prayer as he slid open the closet door and slipped out as swiftly as he could manage. For a brief moment, he thought that he'd made it. But then the door slapped back shut, and there was a loud crashing sound from a broom being knocked to the ground.

"Hey, Petra, you hear that?" A voice echoed from below the stairs.

The robot realized that fear was, and allowed it to power him away from the stairs and to the balcony of the outdoor hallway where the storage room had been located. Leaping over the railing, he locked his grip on some kind of vine-y root and regained his balance. The humming of his generator grew louder, and he feared that it would be heard.

Knowing that one late move could be his last, the robot started making his way down the wall. He was on the third floor, and he knew he didn't have much time left. The voices came closer, but got further as he slid downwards.

After what seemed like a millenia, his feet finally touched solid ground, and the plastic skin of his hands sent nerve reactions that ached like hell. He murmured a mix of a curse and a sigh of relief, and began to run through the artificial grass decorating the surrounding area of the apartments.

They can't be here for me, He thought to himself, I've never gone out.

But even so, the feeling of guilt began to boil within him. An emotion he was unaccustomed to, that occasionally paid its visits on nights when Mikasa couldn't keep her stoic face or Armin was too scared to visit.

"There it is!" A man's voice yelled, as if calling out to someone else. The bot's eyes widened. His generator was close to bursting.

Remembering that he had forgotten to pray, and perhaps that's why this happened to him, he took a long, slow stride and turned around to face his enemy. But there was nobody there.

"Are you sure?" Another voice replied, this one belonging to a woman.

"Shoot first, ask questions later. Moderate to severe, remember? Making a rash choice is better than making the wrong one." A deeper voice replied. His speaking didn't even break as a sound of a paralyzer gun went off.

The robot noticed the voices came from around the corner. He couldn't repress his curiosity, and snook over to peer over the side. It was a girl he'd seen every day. One that always reminded him of Mikasa, with a mysteriously false mask of seriousness. He'd always wondered what she'd been hiding behind it. Now, with her face being stepped on by an officer-one that appeared to be quite old with a sloppy, blond undercut and a cocky expression-sneering at her apparent discomfort, her ponytail undone and her blond hair matted, and her eyes desperately screaming for help while her body remained unmoving, he realized that she was not the monster being taken down by the heroic officers.

Annie, he said to himself, Annie Leonhart. That was her name.

He took it to memory.

Even in his anger, he knew her getting caught would play to his advantage. He dashed off, trying to get as far away from the apartment as possible, along with avoid major traffic areas.

He felt no weariness as he ran, and his sense of fear dimmed as the gap between he and the complex got further and further. Now, the problem was where to go.

He had only been outside to apartment twice. Once was when he was first made, and he had escaped in the mysterious fire. The second was when he met Armin. He knew the basic layout of the city, as he had been programmed to aid the police, but even so knowledge and experience were two different things, and though he wasn't lost he wasn't exactly confident on where the hell he was going to wind up either.

Atomat, a small district inhabited by freaks of nature and people that can't afford to escape. The robot figured that was the best place to go. The cyborg population there was immense, so he would be able to blend in as long as he kept his mark hidden. And perhaps a good underground cyborg artist would be able to apply some fake skin and remove the mark.

His shoes began to burn at his feet, and it was apparent that the rubber was beginning to peel, as he got closer to the district. When he began, the streets were clean, plastic, and perfect. The good part of the city. Almost like a decaying flower, though, as he made his way more and more towards Atomat, the world grew grimier and darker. The bot swore the sky got hazier as well, but that was obviously just an illusion.

To his relief, though, despite the unsettling atmosphere and backdrop, nobody paid any attention to him when he arrived at Atomat. To them, he was just a cyborg, or perhaps even a normal human. He wasn't sure how people could tell, but he knew that they could.

Along the street, he catched a glimpse of another tattoo on someone's neck. And then a second. Then the realization dimmed on him that there were more bots down here than he thought. Caged in his apartment with only television and his friends to tell him about the outside world made it seem like robots were a rare species hunted down and destroyed. And yet they just wander around, just like people, where nobody bothers to see them.

He wasn't sure if he was relieved or just confused. But, as the sky began to grow darker, the one thing he did know was that he needed to find somewhere to stay. Fast.

Despite not knowing a single thing about street life, he had enough common sense to realize that the darker it gets the more and more freaks come out. If he stayed up too late, he knew something bad was prone to happen. But where to go? He didn't have a penny on him, and his only warmth was an oversized hoodie over a tank top and jeans.

He thought about breaking into someone's house, but realized that it being their house would mean that they'd be in there too. It was only six o'clock, but the sky was already orange and hurriedly being dyed dark blue.

Examining his surroundings, he noticed what seemed to be a small apartment, but unlike the other's had no strange decorations among the windows or fearsome individuals looming around it. The robot slipped through the crowd and looked in the window of the building. The inside was spotless, and the furniture seemed so clean it was almost obviously only there for decoration. Maybe it was up for sale, or maybe nobody had lived there for a while.

The thoughts all came at once, and he didn't sort them out by the time he kneeled over the lock of the door. Kicking it open would provide too much attention, and picking it required time. He looked around, but nobody was paying any attention to him. Slowly, he pulled the sleeve of his jacket up and tapped his skin twice; and the section of fake flesh faded away and revealed a miniature laser. He leaned over the lock, and angled his wrist so it smelted the metal that kept the door from opening.

Taking another look around to make sure nobody saw him break in, he opened the door hesitantly and invited himself inside.

The house smelled of cleaning products and those strange scented machines that release mist whenever you walk past it. The bot was a bit uncomfortable with that neat of surroundings, but figured that it was better than sleeping in an alleyway on a sheet of cardboard.

He didn't want to turn on the lights, as if it would disturb the cleanliness and silence of the home. It was difficult to navigate through in the dark, either. The bedroom was big enough for a desk, a double sized bed, and a mirror. The bathroom was polished, the living room's pillows all arranged in order by both size and color, and the dining room completely untouched.

As he was discovering the walk-in closet, and all the business suits inside, the robot heard a click at the door. He froze, and looked around for somewhere to hide.

"You."

The voice was familiar, but the robot couldn't pinpoint exactly where he'd heard it from. He turned around, and a man stood before him. He had beady, pale eyes, maybe a shade of blue, but the bot couldn't tell in this lighting, and short, razored undercut black hair. He was shorter than the robot by a few inches, but his physique showed that he could obviously take him down. Machine or not.

"You have five seconds to get the fuck out and leave whatever the fuck you took." The man said, his voice calm but hinting violence.

"L-listen...I didn't know-"

Before the robot could even begin with an explanation, a fist was thrown directly at his cheek. It was a warning punch, and it didn't knock him unconscious. Before he could regain his composure, he heard the man speak.

"Fucking hell, you're…"

"Listen, I know how this may seem but I'm not steal-" As he raised his head up again, the robot found himself face to face with the mouth of an old fashioned pistol, the kind that uses physical bullets, pointed right at his forehead.

"Listen right now, you are either gonna get the fuck out of my house or I am going to blow your fucking head into smithereens. You hear me, you mech?"

A/N:

Well then. First chapter done. Sorry I'm adding the Author's Note now.

Mech is an offensive slang for Robot, since it's sorta referencing TV show mechas and stuff which is sorta derogatory to actual robots.

I promise it get's better.

Not really sure what to write right now.

Review por favor~