Summary: "Here we are again, with your lonely eyes and your rusty skin. You've been gone for a long time. I buried you so far away, where nothing grows and no one goes. But still… while I sleep, I dream of all we had."
Human
Crows encircled the garden, dark aerial bodies that reflected in 40.0 mm amber lenses hundreds of feet down below. Zooming in, he could see them chasing a songbird above the top of the trees, cawing. Overgrown with vines and shrubbery, the Garden had become a cold and desolate place. Fractured pillars embedded themselves crookedly in the ground; colorized shards of plastic and glass hung from string on mobiles; and all was obscured in the mist that consumed his vision and thought.
Digits twitched, and the hunk of metal lurched to life. Stumbling away from the cracked stone wall, the robot emerged like larvae from egg. His feet clanged against the ground with each unstable step, the cracks in the cobblestone infested with grass and insects.
As the metal boy hobbled forward, altering between muffled clangs and metal chipping against stone, eventually, he regained his balance. In a beam of sunlight amidst the broken pillars, his body came into full view: green metal calves sculpted into boots held him. His middle and nether regions were amored by the same dull green as his calves, with rusty orange stripes down the middle and across the bottom of his upper chest, though where his thighs, hands, and face were visibly sprayed a dark tan color, he was covered in soft but durable metallic panels of plasticine. Large bolts held each of his joints together, the edges of the plasticine, where his knee caps, elbows, and shoulders joined. Multicolored wires, mostly of red and blue, were apparent in the gaps in between, except his right arm was missing; only a thick metal rod hung from his shoulder among the open wires, a metal hand sans plasticine attached at the end of the rod. The arm was unable to be moved as nimbly as the other, which hissed at the shoulder with the rotation of its internal mechanism, the robot bringing his hand toward his head: the place where plasticine met the dark beige metal panels that assembled a thorny crown of hair.
The robot boy's facial features were flinty, unable to stretch and bend the same as a human child – but the robot was constructed with a sense of juvenile curiosity to the quirk of his slender brow. Powerful as they were, his optimized zoom lenses were made in the likeness of human eyes. A large, amber diaphragm surrounded the pupil-like aperture in the center. Tan-colored shutters acted as eyelids. A certain youth beheld the robot's face and body, too. As the boy bounded through the forest, there was a spring in his step, and the model number on his left upper arm flashed copper in the light filtering through the trees: 7.7.
What his name had ever been aside from that, he didn't know.
Hopping over train tracks int the forest, hardly recognizable underneath the increased foliage, the robot boy exited the Garden, passing a fallen airplane. Veiled in vines, only the shape of the nose and wings on either side gave away what it used to be. On the trees' edge, the metal boy halted, taking in the remnants of what was once human society.
Peppering the landscape were city and building complexes as far as the eye could see. He'd been alone here for many decades.
Venturing into the city in search for spare parts for his arm, the robot didn't come across a single soul. Lost in an accident some time ago, he hadn't come across any material that could match the malleable plasticine that covered the rest of his body.
Digging through boxes in an old, dusty warehouse, from among the wooden shavings in a box in the dull light, smooth, tan metal fingertips picked out a soft animal. The robot studied it for a moment, creating a mental sketch of it in his mind. Upon further investigation, he found out it wasn't alive – though, it was shaped like the creatures he thought he'd seen in the tops of the trees, with its beady eyes and furry complexion. He set it aside.
Later that day, the boy got caught on a turnstile in attempt to enter a train station, running into its partially-turning obstruction. The first time he'd encountered it long ago, he'd run into it multiple times, unable to understand what barred him from entrance. Profusely fascinated, he'd crouched down to listen to the inner workings of the clicking mechanism, his circuits firing as he used electromagnetic-scanning with his hand to construct a mental blueprint.
Presently, he leapt over the turnstile, and landed onto the train tracks. Soft from a blanket of moss, he looked both ways, then started down the track in the direction opposite of the underground tunnel. He wanted to travel farther than the city today.
Hours later, in a different part of the city – what was once a market street, it looked like – he passed many shops littered in shards of steel and glass. Collapsed neon signs were everywhere, long burnt out and corroding. He'd been through here before, and combed through the boxes holding human supplies, the boxes with one shattered side, through the chemicals spilling from containers labeled in strange runes – oodles of instruction, he presumed. None of it was useful. Another dead end.
His programming wasn't complex enough for him to wonder about the state of the world or the nature of his creator – but he hoped, someday, if he kept searching, he'd find something, some reason for his existence and the human loneliness that pervaded his sizzling circuits.
At the end of another day, the robot trudged back toward the forest from a suspension bridge. The orange sunset made tall shadows across the bridge, its vine-covered cables extending high into the sky. They ensconced much of his view of the golden horizon. The boy stopped, his human-like features gazing pedantically at the sun. Just how long… just how long would he dwell here, not knowing where he came from, or where he belonged? It was a question with no answer, one he had asked many times over the years.
The robot turned his jaggedly-haired metal head toward the ground without thinking of it anymore. He had no RAM left to spare. Also, the sun was setting, and he was running out of battery.
The Garden was exactly as he'd left it that morning: crumbling, but serene. It was the only place he could call home. Dark shadows hung in the air beneath the dense canopy of trees, the sounds of whooping animals echoing in the distance. One day, he just awoke here, all alone and without programmed instruction. His arm had been missing even back then.
His vision faded into lightness, shapes, and colors, and the gears in his head whirred between his sound sensor equipment. He wiggled his fingers, noticing his right hand did not respond. When he reached to touch it, he also realized he was trapped in a wall, held by some force in the center of his back. Pulling with all his effort, he'd finally fallen on his soft hand and metal knees, aware of something staining him. When he'd turned, tubes leaked from the alcove in the wall he'd found himself in, dripping radioactive, glowing blue liquid. The same liquid was on his back. He didn't have the olfactory senses to smell it, but he knew it to be a vile odor, and his life force.
He didn't reconnect to it in the coming days. He was sluggish, hardly able to function, and somehow, eventually crawled back to it, all the way across the city. Docking, he immediately felt a surge of recharging energy the moment the tube snapped into place.
He'd been lucky enough not to collapse permanently in his many years here, though he'd ventured far and wide away from the city in search of others – as far as he could, anyway. All he found was empty countryside.
It was dark now in the Garden, save for the tube that had a few drops of blue liquid glowing inside it. First, the robot boy placed the stuffed animal he had found in the warehouse on the pile of stuff beside his docking station: thimbles, keychains, spiffy and old-fashioned furniture, a fishing line, and other pieces of artwork gathered there. Then, walking back around the wall, for his docking station was a cocoon-like alcove one side, the boy gingerly backed into the place where his body fit. Feeling the suction of the tube dock in the center of his back, his metal body relaxed. He felt himself becoming filled with energy again, and powered off.
= начало =
The next morning, his plasticine shutter eyelids slid open to reveal heaviness in the air.
It wasn't that he could feel heaviness as a weight, possessing no sensors to pressure himself – it was a weight he couldn't explain, something more…
Separating himself from the charging station, the boy staggered forward, found the air all around him was misty, thicker than the day before. It was still rather dark, too. Not a bird, insect, nor forest creature broke the silence. The plants, too, were silent; not one leaf swayed in the wind.
When he arrived in the city, there was not even the airy sound of zephyrs wafting between the buildings or stirring dust on the streets. Wandering listlessly, once again the boy found himself at the turnstile in the train station. This time, he looked the direction opposite from that which he'd taken the day before, to the market street. Now masked by certain dark haze, the circular tunnel entrance loomed before him, vacant and devouring. He proceeded with caution, not having recalled going this direction before in all his years here, now that he thought about it. His thorough mapping process led him to believe he'd seen every nook and cranny of this city by now, but here, in the center of the city, was a place, however minute, that his map was empty.
Robots cannot feel fear or pride – but staring inside, the robot boy felt a lurch in his throat: where the central connection between his power cell and his motherboard resided. He hesitated to continue forward, his metal feet lightly echoing on the mossy train tracks. At the tunnel's entrance, the vegetation abruptly ended. Inside was pitch-black, and though the air outside was stale, scarcely an iota of wind or sound could be heard or felt within.
He walked for hours. Only the sound of his boots hitting the wooden planks between the tracks accompanied him. Creatures shifted in the dark, putting him on edge. He didn't know how far he would go, or how far he had already gone. All he knew was that he needed to get to the end, even if he had to drag himself all the way back to his charging station when his power was up in the end.
And then it stopped. There was no more train track beneath him. His feet hit solid ground, concrete, by the sound of it. He ambled forward in complete and utter darkness. Until he heard himself surrounded by the faint whirs and clicks of hardware. He could see small red and white lights flashing patterned in the walls, a great computer that processed information. Tracing a hand alongside it, he felt the familiar hum of a mechanical energy. This working computer wasn't as advanced as he was, what with his artificial intelligence and spatial mobility, but it was capable of some amazing things. He could tell just by peering into it with the electromagnetic measuring properties of his functional hand.
Retracting it, he looked around. The robot had no idea where he was or what this other powerful computer was doing here, until he spotted a giant metal pod. Having been in a corridor leading to this main room, the pod was the size of what he'd assumed the average human once was, larger than himself.
With his right hand swinging helplessly at his side, he approached the pod, which had a window on the upper half of it, though all he could see was smoke inside. Pressing his plasticine hand against the glass, he squinted as he scanned the inside for anything, and gasped when he sensed something inside. The steam cleared, and his circuit board clicked continuously with an input and output of data.
Th… there…!
He could hardly believe his visual processing system, never being confronted with another being in all his years. Inside was the most beautiful boy he had ever seen: Loose-hanging, metallic silver hair hung over the other robot's snowy white skin, his face peaceful, and hauntingly attractive. The robot boy could tell he wasn't organic by the faint seams around his jawline, inner arms, and shoulders, and felt himself magnetized toward the robot in the pod, who looked even more advanced than himself.
Would this boy… give him a clue as to why they were here?
7.7 clenched his fist against the glass in front of the pale robot boy's face as he tried to figure out how to break open the pod. He took a moment to search the sides, but when he looked back, the pale boy's eyes had shot open, celeste blue. 7.7 would have been relieved, if not for the danger he sensed there.
Before he could debate whether to jump back, the glass on the pod was broken, and 7.7 found himself knocked back, held against the floor. Disoriented, 7.7 felt the other boy secure a grip on his missing, broken shoulder, the sharp fingertips of his other directed at the central coil in his throat, a slash that would disable him instantaneously. Though, when he looked closer, to 7.7's astonishment the other robot's eyes were the same piercing blue as the radioactive liquid in the Garden.
"Don't move," the other boy said, his voice a chilling threat. Those eyes were ice cold.
And there it is! It feels weird not to use Gon and Killua's names, haha. I'm planning to stretch this story across 3-5 short chapters, as I want it to be gradually impactful. Hopefully that'll make more sense later on. ;)
This fic is primarily inspired by Wall•E (2008), 9 (2009), and an album I discovered when I first moved to college. Cataclasm (2016) by Crywolf helped me through many sleepless nights while I was a freshman in college. I thought I wouldn't ever get around to writing this story, but listening to this album, I still feel a sense of what I did back then. I hope you enjoy this AU.
I've never written something like this before, and I really want to know what worked – or didn't. Please leave your thoughts below! I highly appreciate any feedback.