I have always had this somber enjoyment of the incredibly slow end of the world. I hope you enjoy it too. I hope this story hurts you, I hope it touches you, and I hope you feel the same way I do about the characters of Nier: Automata. I want to thank fanfiction writer The Extreme Piercing for introducing me to this concept with their incredible Dark Souls story, 'Old Soul'. You should read it if you like the concept behind this one. This story exists on the idea that after the end, the trio of protagonists are the only non-animal life left on the planet.
Enjoy, and please leave a comment/review if you'd be so kind.
Return to Ash
Chapter 1: 438
"If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." - Mark Twain
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"Ngh! Ngh! Ungh! Hngh!"
Rythmically, her fist collided with his crumpled face over and over. Like a piston, her shoulder cocked and then released hissing pressure with such force that the joint creaked beneath her flesh. She grunted manically with the effort each time, every instinct in her head screaming that this had to stop. These feelings he was feeling had to end. He coughed and sputtered as she pounded him relentlessly, hot tears streaming down her face. Though he could move, and act, and fight back, he no longer had the strength or the will to.
The ash whirled around them like a dust storm. That's all that remained: ash. It was just the two of them, some soot, and the crumbled remains of what few buildings stood above the layer of dark sand that buried the planet in its shallow grave.
2B threw a final punch that was so hard it caused her body to twist, follow the movement, and her elbow skidded into the dirt beside 9S' frail head. She tumbled, collapsing right on top of him and knocking what wind remained out of his body. As her weak being was wracked with sobs of fear, sobs of anger, sobs of pain, he held her.
"Please don't do this." She whimpered. "Please. Please."
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In the first days after awakening, the trio sat with heavy hearts. 9S, his arm still stiff after being reattached, looked dumbfounded and shocked. 2B was in disbelief but held him close, reassuring him as he recovered from his mental degradation. A2 just stared on.
Like a gaggle of sorry phoenixes, they'd risen from the crumpled ruins of YoRHa to begin their lives again. But what was life without anyone to share it with? There were no longer any androids, no machines, and of course no humans. Just themselves and the animal kingdom that now ruled the shell of the once great blue planet.
Initially A2 had no idea what to expect when she first saw 9S alive and well. She wondered if he would boil over with rage, try to kill her on sight even though 2B was already standing right next to him. If he would scream and cry and try to choke her to death, as if he ever could manage the necessary strength. He'd said he'd never forgive his grudge but what of it now? Now that it was all over? Obviously none of them had planned for this.
To her surprise, he was remarkably sane. She figured it was owed to 2B's continued presence more than anything, but she had to admit it was pleasant to be able to look at him without the point of a blade being pointed in her direction as well. The first thing he did was quietly apologize for his behavior, met with a non-chalant "It's whatever, kid". Of course, A2 did not remotely believe that, in fact she'd liked little more than to smack him on the head and ask what he was thinking, but it made him feel better and so she let it lie. Her urge to take her revenge on him did not pass for some time.
Naturally, they'd experienced a sense of bliss at finding one another alive and well, without corruption or broken parts or anything of the sort. It was like they'd just been pulled off of the assembly line and given consciousness for the first time. 9S and 2B held each other tightly for most of the initial couple weeks, just staring at each other. It unnerved A2, but she supposed that they deserved it after all they had been through. All they had ever wanted was their peace, and now they had it.
She herself was disgruntled. She'd thought that was it for them all. She had genuinely assumed she was coming home, to meet her maker, to see her brethren in the good old fashioned afterlife. What a joke. They had the privilege of being dead and buried under rubble and yet she remained a vagrant. As 2B and 9S coddled one another like children having their first crush, she drew into herself in solitude and wondered what was going to happen to them now.
If there really were no more androids on the planet, and they had been revived by the pods in a last ditch effort to give them their happiness, then what was going to happen when an eternity had passed? With no fighting to do and no reason to self-terminate, they could potentially live forever. To her, it sounded miserable.
But in a way, she was grateful. If she had to spend eternity with somebody, she'd rather it be these two giggling lovers than some shitty group of ragtag misfits.
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"We should search for other survivors," 2B said. She looked practically naked without a sword in her hand or on her back. So much more vulnerable with only her fists to defend herself from the world- not like there was anything left to defend themselves from. 9S, of course, immediately agreed with her without a second thought.
But A2 shook her head. "There aren't any. Why would there be?"
2B ignored her question. "They must exist somewhere. Maybe they fled underground, to the tunnels."
"What part of, 'extinction of all YoRHa units' don't you get?" A2 frowned at her. "The resistance was a part of YoRHa. They're gone."
9S reached across their meager huddle, the trio of stumps they sat upon, and put his hand on A2's knee gingerly. She wanted to recoil in mock-disgust, but she held steady, meeting his gaze.
"We do have an infinite amount of time to look. We might as well, right?"
As much as she was annoyed by the idea, the vain hope of it all, she could not argue with that. The three's projected lifespan sans maintenance was not indefinite, but they all knew it was so long that it may as well have been.
And so their journey began. Starting with the city where the resistance once made their final stand against the machines, they scoured every building. Every forest. Every tunnel running spidery veins underneath the ruins of civilization. Of course, there was nothing to be found, not even the rising cinders of freshly vaporized bodies. It was almost eerie in a way; it was as if the androids had never lived on the planet at all.
Yet, the machines remained. Their dead husks littered nearly every nook and cranny they explored. They had wormed their way into any hiding spot, anything large enough for a machine to be there likely held one inside. Anything to try and escape the collapse of the network and their screaming demise. Of course, it was no use for them just like it was no use for the androids and the humans before them.
Without any other way to spend their time, they expanded their search, finally following up on the rumors from so long ago that the android race held factions across the planet's surface. They explored unfamiliar territory, crumbling ruins of larger and still larger cities. Towering skyscrapers still loomed like leaning monuments, shadowing their awed expressions. 9S and 2B held one another's hands as they viewed the spectacles of human ingenuity throughout... wherever they were. That data remained corrupted even now that nothing was left to corrupt it.
Weeks turned into a month. Then two. Every day a new location, every day 9S' voice ringing out as he sent out giant electric pulses like smoke signals to anyone who could be listening, android or otherwise. Their only reply came from birds fleeing the resonance.
Disappointment struck them when they finally hit the sea. In all directions, creating a strange oblong shape around them, the rolling sand and beaches dropped softly into a massive horizon-spanning white and blue. They had no way to cross it, no way to see the rest of the Earth. Had they flight units, they could be across the vast expanse in minutes. Had they teleportation chambers, they could be on the other side of the whole world in mere seconds. But now they felt like simple creatures stuck on an island.
9S suggested building a boat or another kind of water craft, but they solemnly realized then that they didn't know how. There was no robot life left on the planet- A2 remained sure of that much -but now there was a very real sense of nihilism that they could all feel equally. Sure, they could spend however long it would take learning how to make a fully functioning boat from the scattered machine parts lying around, but what would be the point if there was naught to be found on the other side of the ocean but more crumpled architecture?
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As if it had been freed from heavy shackles, the ball breaking free of its chain, the dead hunk of rock began to heal. Thousands of years of abuse and death and decay had crippled the planet, but now that it was finally returned to its neutral state, it could recover from the torture it'd endured. 9S alerted the others with a start that something strange was happening, something completely foreign to him. The others listened intently as he postulated a theory.
"I think the... Earth is coming back to life." He said. The evidence was all around them; plants stretched skyward with glistening bulbs, trees rising from the ground like gigantic sprawling towers. Animal life reclaiming the planet they once held domain over.
When asked for evidence, he brought up a screen before them to show his collected data. "Look," he said softly. "We're moving. The planet is rotating on its axis at about one tenth of a kilometer per hour." A far cry from the speed it used to spin at when humans once roamed its surface, but it was still something. A practically unreadable decimal place far down the line increasing steadily showed him that it was not yet done.
High above them, for the first time in over five thousand years, the sun began to depart from the top of the sky. Like the machines they waged such an intense war against, the three of them just sat in a clearing and watched it go. Their eyes were firmly trained on the bright yellow orb as it seemed to wave goodbye to them, ever so slowly disappearing over the treeline. The sky grew pink, then orange, then a deep red, and it was gone.
2B cried that night. For the first time since they had awoken, she curled into herself and sobbed. These emotions were still relatively new to her- or, relatively newly accessible, at least. She sat with 9S, who leaned on her shoulder as if he weighed a hundred thousand pounds, and wept. A2 kept her watch from a short distance, giving them at least some semblance of privacy. She cursed herself for being so much closer to human than they were, and yet still so far that she couldn't give herself the same emotional release. Then again, she considered, perhaps she didn't want it anyway.
"I don't understand," 2B sniffled, "why this is happening."
9S shrugged, still leaning into her to offer the best comfort he could. "If I had to guess, I'd say the change in scenery probably brought it on. You've been looking at daylight for decades, y'know?"
"Yes," she whimpered. "That must be it."
But she knew inside that it wasn't.
Somewhere far away in the night sky, tiny shadows blocked out the stars in dotted locations across the horizon. The bunker may have been destroyed, but the other space stations remained. It was tragic, in a way. They would float there, presumably full of empty hallways and fluorescent gray lights, until eventually their orbit decayed and they fell to Earth like meteors. None of them knew how long it would take for this to happen; 9S did some number crunching and came up with a suspicion that the stations would continue to drift completely uninhibited for millennia. Even after all three of them had long since died, however long that might take, the last remnants of YoRHa would still sit just out of their reach. At least they could be relatively sure nobody was up there looking down and suffering the same insignificance they felt while staring up.
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Frequently, they thought of their pods. The sacrificial blood in the ritual that brought them back to life. 042 and 153 had given every last ounce of strength, every last little bit of juice they had, to fight against their programming and revive the androids. They could not have known when the group would regain consciousness, only that they would. Like statues they must have slumbered, watched over day in and day out by the little robots. Not that they even needed anything.
If the pods were still present, 2B and 9S could have asked what happened to the rest of the androids.
If the pods were still present, 2B and 9S could have asked for plans in how to build a boat and sail to the rest of the world.
If the pods were still present, 2B and 9S would not have felt so alone.
"Y'know," 9S said one day, "I kind of miss them. They weren't very friendly, but they still were our friends in a way."
2B nodded. "It was noble of them to sacrifice themselves like they did."
"Yeah."
When they'd awoken, 042 and 153 were at their feet. The gentle hum of the fans that allowed them to hover ran silent, their blinking red indicator lights no longer doing so. The box-shaped machines were completely lifeless, and they seemed to be almost cradling each other. A lifetime ago, the androids would have assumed they were incapable of such a gesture but given the circumstances, now they couldn't be sure of much of anything.
But they knew right away what had happened. YoRHa had been terminated, all of its life completely exhausted. Everybody they knew, and everyone they did not know, was gone. They checked their internal clocks to find out how long they had been dead to the world, but the data was corrupted and un-salvagable. Immediately, they missed the little robots. They'd have known. They'd have been able to explain so much. But they had drained the rest of their tiny battery supply to start the trio's achingly slow boot sequences... and by the time they'd all come to, it was simply too late.
The first thing they'd done upon regaining awareness of where they were, who they were, was to pick the robots up and take them to anybody who could help. YoRHa may have been gone, but their technology had to remain. Immediately they rushed to the resistance camp, cradling the suddenly so seemingly fragile machines in their arms, and found it completely empty. It looked like a battleground, wreckage and discarded machine parts strewn everywhere. Large black craters, dents in the hull of the Earth, dotted the campsite. A thin layer of black ash covered most of its surfaces. Whatever had happened here, it'd happened long ago, and 2B and 9S were struck with fear.
"They're all dead," A2 had said, mostly to herself. "All of them."
"What... could have happened here?" 9S asked, frantically scanning the environment for any survivors.
But A2 walked past him, her bare toes tinged black as she stepped through a pile of ash absent-mindedly. "It must have been YoRHa. The deletion of the androids must have affected everyone else who was conscious too."
"How is that possible?" 2B asked. Her hands were balled into shaking fists.
"It's probably not," A2 said, running a finger down one of the cold metal walls. She examined the ash in her hand, the remnants of some poor unsuspecting android, and rubbed it away with her thumb and forefinger. "It's just a guess."
Whether she was correct or not, she maintained this theory ever since, having made up her mind and refused to change it for fear of the truth being something even more horrifying.
2B recalled, then, the pitiful little funeral they'd had. There was no way to revive their pods, not without someone to fix them, and so the poor creatures became martyrs for their fellow androids. They were buried in shallow graves at the resistance site, lunar tears laid on top of the dirt mounds they now sat under. The three androids stood around the graves- almost the size of that of children -and stared down, hands clasped, thinking of them. It was stupid. A2 scowled the whole time.
But it was the least they could do.
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The idea of love was still pretty foreign to A2. She supposed she felt affection for 2B and 9S- and not just because they were all that was left -but because they reminded her of herself in a way. Constantly attempting to deny their programming, their base instincts, to do whatever they wanted. And now, with no directives left to obey, they must have felt like she did when she first wandered alone:
Lost.
But they obviously loved each other, at least. There was no reason for them to deny it anymore, and it was frankly disgusting how shameless they were about it. Not disgusting in the offensive way, A2 noted to herself, but in a way she couldn't quite place.
She confronted them about it. "Tell me something," she asked one day. "Do you two know what being in love actually is?"
They recalled revelations from Jackass, about how it was just a chemical released into their core in response to stimuli, to encourage them to continue whatever behavior elicited the reaction.
"It's when our mind is telling us we're making the right decision." 2B said flatly, scientifically.
"Yeah," 9S agreed, "it's just that before now we didn't know what the 'right decision' really was."
A2 let them take solace in that. It was a simple, childlike definition, but they seemed content to leave it like that. She did not necessarily agree that it was so simple, but all saying so would accomplish would be messing with their poor fragile heads. So, for their sake, she kept her mouth shut.
"Whatever you say," she said. "Do me a favor, though. Show your love when I'm not looking. Have some damn decency, will you?"
To this they both looked shocked. As if they hadn't even noticed her presence when they caressed one another, when their lips met, when they embraced and just sat in the same position with their brains interfacing for hours. 2B's sudden embarrassed expression told A2 that in more than one case, she almost certainly literally hadn't.
"S-Sorry," 9S bowed his head to her. "We'll try to be more private."
But how private could they really be? The three of them had an entire planet- or at least, an entire continent -to themselves, yet they were afraid to leave each others' side for more than a couple paces at once. Even A2, the lone wolf, the wandering desperado, had grown so attached that there was unease snaking through her when she was without them however temporarily.
"Just go have sex or whatever it is you're doing on your own time, alright?" She tried to be ginger but it really had been bothering her. "I get it, but I really don't wanna have to look at it."
2B frowned. "We're not having..." But then she looked to 9S, wondering if that actually was, in some form, what they did when he interfaced with her. He stared back, confused as well. Pleasure was pleasure, but sex remained a completely foreign concept to them. They had no data on it because androids could not do it as humans could. They knew the process, but lacked the necessary tools, so to speak.
A2 just rolled her eyes.
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2B straddled 9S' lap as he sat upright against a tree stump. The shade felt cool on their flesh, a nice reprieve from the warm afternoon sun. The air imparted tingling sensations on their naked skin, clothes folded and deposited in neat piles beside them with surgical precision. A2 was nowhere to be seen, having felt the requested need for privacy in her head. 'Nowhere to be seen', of course, did not mean she wasn't nearby.
Her knees placed on either side of his rear, she was bucking gently against his body, their groins sliding against one another with the soft sound of flesh rustling. 2B's mouth was open and slack-jawed, tongue hanging out just a bit as she moaned deep, throaty moans into his face.
Both of their hands were cupped over each others' cheeks, their foreheads gingerly touching as they rocked against one another's light thrusts. It was merely for the massively increased sensation of touch, of course; they had no genitalia. 2B had a mound but there was nothing inside, it was only to complete her humanlike shape. 9S may as well have been a posing mannequin in a shop window.
But their brains were alive, connected like a plug to a socket, sparking and rattling and frying. He'd used his hacking to crank their emotional pleasure receptors as high as he could make them go without getting dangerous, and now here they were just vibrating with euphoria. Fireworks exploded in 2B's mind as her nose touched his very briefly. Every caress felt like bliss, every little light feathery touch eliciting deep groans from her. 9S too was whimpering, overwhelmed by the sensation. His eyes were tightly closed, his thighs squeezing together and toes curling back.
2B wrapped her arms around 9S' back and bit into his shoulder. His hands wormed their way around her hips, gripping them so tight that his already white knuckles seemed to go whiter. At this sensation she shivered, the muscles in her thighs and hips and ass clenching while she mashed her blank slate pelvis into his. Faster and faster she moved, grinding against his smaller frame like nothing else mattered. And, as her vision went a bit blurry and he responded with a few arrhythmic jerking thrusts of his own, to them, nothing else did matter.
In the coming months they would ask A2 to give them that same privacy while many times. Sometimes multiple times per week. They could not have sex as humans could, but emulating it felt just as pleasurable, and passionate.
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Months stretched on. The trio's daily routine remained mostly the same. They had no need to eat, so they didn't bother looking for food or hunting animal life. They had no need to rest, so they only entered a sleep state when there was nothing more to talk about. They had no need to wander, for there was nothing more to see on their little plateau of rock.
One day 2B and 9S hearkened back to Jean-Paul, the robot they once knew who rambled on for ages about philosophy. At the time they paid it no attention, disregarded its raving as just the rants of another machine. It was only just too late for Pascal's friendly village before they realized it probably had a point. For now they were in the same position, relatively speaking: Cast out by the world and left to live out the same existence they could not help but question.
They sat in a circle around a campfire that had long since turned to embers and thin, wavy smoke. Like a council of elders, weaving arcane machinations. Coupled with the dim light of the evening, the moon far overhead and shining down, their faces were aglow.
A2 snapped to attention in the middle of a conversation as she often did. These days her mind couldn't help but wander whenever the other two went over their usual rhetoric.
"I do still wonder how close we really are to being human, though," 9S said. His body was folded on itself in a seated position, arms balanced on his knees and his chin balanced on his arms. He stared into the fire, watching the remains of the cinders burn away.
"I imagine it's closer than we could know." 2B replied. "After all, we are androids, not robots." Even so, her face held no expression. Perhaps she had lost her admiration for humankind after finding out about their deception. 9S surely hadn't gotten over it, at the very least.
"Are we really androids?" His voice carried an underlying intensity. "We have no human parts. Isn't an android supposed to be at least partially human?"
"Maybe our emotions are the human element."
9S nodded. "Maybe, yeah. I guess it would make sense from an economical point of view."
"It does make me wonder what they would think if they saw us." 2B's tone was almost wistful.
"Us as in the android race, or us as in the three of us specifically?"
"The latter."
"Oh." He felt conflicted all of a sudden. "Well... we are pretty expressly defying our programming right now, so I doubt they'd be happy about that."
2B said nothing. She had no response.
He suspected her silence was out of disappointment in his reply. "But then again," he continued, "they might be proud to see us carving our own path. We protected them, even after we had the choice not to do so."
"Humans were ugly creatures," A2 muttered. "I'm glad they're gone."
2B pursed her lips. She too was staring at the embers now. "They gave us our lives."
"Fat lot of good we got out of that, huh." A2 responded, running a hand through her matted hair.
9S addressed her with a stern look. "That's not fair. If it weren't for their existence, we wouldn't exist either. Whether they were cruel or not, it all goes back to them."
"Just because they're our origin, doesn't mean we're indebted to them, y'know."
"Do you really believe that?" 9S asked, obviously disagreeing.
"We don't owe them anything." She said flatly, and now she also was watching the last of the flames wither and die, staring down the point of her nose at the other two and the campfire and attempting to feel nothing.
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A year had passed them now. The Earth was in full swing once more, singing a beautiful song each morning and a lullaby each night. It was as if, were it not for the remaining rubble and everlasting inhabitable structures, human kind had never existed.
"I need you to tell me."
"I won't." She replied, her bangs falling around her face. "I can't hurt you like that."
9S was reassuring. "You won't hurt me. Don't you think I deserve to know?"
"I do, but..." She hesitated, wanting to just repeat her desire not to harm him. She knew it wouldn't get her anywhere, though. He still had such persistence about him.
"Just tell him." A2's expression was grave.
"I..." 2B couldn't force out the words so easily as expected, but found it easier when she hung her head in what might've been called shame. "Okay."
She reached over to him, bridged the gap between their bodies. He just watched her as she gingerly clasped one of his hands in both of hers. For a short while she stared at it, wordlessly, her thumb rubbing little circles on his upturned palm. She watched his fingers flex as she applied a little pressure, her head tilting as horrible memories ran through her by the dozen. He put his other hand on top of hers, and they simply sat entwined.
Her voice was tiny when she spoke again. "Four hundred and thirty eight times." She murmured.
His eyes widened. "That many, huh..." He said, a ghastly paleness coming over his features all of a sudden. He felt nauseous.
"There was a period where I had to kill you almost every day for a year." 2B said, her heavy-lidded eyes staring at a speck of dirt on the ground. "I wanted to die. I wanted nothing more than to die but YoRHa wouldn't let me."
"Orders are orders," A2 grumbled, her voice dripping with venom toward their once-holy masters.
"It hurt me so much to see you killed time and time again, 9S." Her grip on him got a little tighter. "I'm so sorry."
"It's over now." He said, breathing still heavy from the revelation. He knew it wouldn't offer her much solace because he didn't get any from saying it either. Four hundred and thirty eight times. He wondered how many times he was stabbed, how many times he'd been choked out. How many times his head had simply been disconnected from his shoulders with one swing of her blade. It made him shudder.
"That doesn't make it right." 2B finally replied.
9S was still trying to remain calm. "It... wasn't your fault. You just said you didn't want to do it."
"I know." She was shivering now. "And seeing you resurrected every time as if I hadn't... murdered you... I felt so guilty."
He sighed. "You have no reason to feel that way anymore. It's just not logical."
"I don't care about logic anymore." She said bitterly. "Logic was my own killer in the end."
A2 felt a massive pang of guilt of her own surge through her body. Like lightning had struck her it traveled from her furrowed brow to her tensed toes, curled tightly in the sand beneath her feet. 2B sounded so frustrated, so distressed. Her entire world had fallen apart in such a short time. Everything she thought she knew had been destroyed, crushed right in front of her like a tin can. A2's hands clenched into tight fists and she shook, hoping the others would not notice.
Thankfully, they didn't seem to.
His voice was completely, perfectly, genuinely clear. "I love you, 2B. I always have, I know I have."
"And I will love you forever, 9S." She replied with melancholy.
A2 could stand it no longer. Her voice was rattling with a million different emotions as she spoke. "I need to be alone. Got some thinking to do." She said solemnly, departing before they could offer any words to try and stop her.
As soon as she was out of sight, she was sprinting. To where, she couldn't say. She needed to get away from the hurt, away from the feeling creeping its way into her heart. For so long now she'd tried to avoid thinking of 2B and 9S' affection for each other and how much she wanted something like that. How desperate she was even after all this time alone. Her breathing was shallow and pained as she ran so quickly a cloud of dust trailed near behind. Dirt and gravel and stone flew as she pushed her body faster and faster, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth.
Why could she never find her peace? Why did the easy way out never come? So many years she'd lived now without companionship, and now that she had it she felt she didn't deserve it. Here at the end of the world, the end of all life, she felt like the endless void of time was STILL her only true friend.
As she pushed and pushed harder, so desperate to just run and run until she was going so fast she left Earth's orbit and flew into space, her body began protesting. She ignored it, hot tears starting to bubble up in her eyes for the first time in what felt like centuries. All this time, she'd never cried. She'd thought her emotions dead. Now she wished they were.
She felt such deep sorrow as she bounded across the wasteland, so fast what little dermal plating she had left was rattling in the wind. She found herself in the desert, squinting against sand and stone and sensory deprivation. She was screaming into the howling, furious wind, wordlessly screaming as every fiber of her being hurt and hurt and hurt.
She hit a particularly tall dune and lost her balance then, skipping off of the sand and tumbling head over heels down the slope. Her body rolled for several seconds, neck making an uncomfortable noise as it collided with a stone, and she came to a stop half-buried in sand at the bottom.
For the longest time, she didn't even bother moving, letting the swirling sand nearly swallow her up. A fine layer of dust covered her as she grabbed handfuls of the grains in her fists and let it blow through her fingers. The first real emotions she'd felt in years and they had completely demolished her. She felt so broken, so utterly destroyed in mind alone that her body almost refused to go on. She let sand cover her like a thick blanket for just a while longer before slowly pushing to her bruised feet.
Trudging back to the top of the same dune that had just defeated her, she sat on the mountain and stared at the flurry of particles around her. It clouded her features, blocking out her senses. She became still as a statue, breathing in deep as it fell occasionally in the cracks in her flesh. As much as it hurt, as deeply as it pained her, this was what she needed. This solitude eased her mind. She wanted to be alone, to think and act for herself. To do everything, or maybe nothing, by her lonesome, as she always had.
She didn't return to 9S and 2B for several weeks. When she finally decided to come back, she knew they were going to be angry with what she would say. She didn't have to go far; she spotted them in a clearing of dead trees at the entrance to the desert. They'd been looking for her. She bit her lower lip, and began toward them.
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"You can't go." 9S said, his voice practically shaking. "You can't leave us."
A2 sat with her head in her hands, hiding her face from the judging stares of the others. She already felt awful about what she was going to do to them, and they couldn't even tell they were just making it worse.
Or maybe they could tell. "If it's what you need to do, then you should go." 2B said, her tone much more balanced by comparison. There was a hint of sorrow in her words, but her stare remained blank.
9S turned to her, aghast. "You support this?"
"No," she shook her head, "but you must see that she's not happy staying with us anymore."
A2 hung her head.
9S' gaze snapped back in her direction. "Do you really think you'll be happier on your own? How could you want that?"
She did not respond.
"Please, help me understand." He murmured. "I don't want to lose you."
After a long silence passed, A2 sighed. She pulled her knees almost to her chest and balanced her elbows on them, looking up at the pair with a frown. "Thank you," she said, "but I made up my mind a long goddamn time ago."
He looked like he'd been slapped. "Why didn't you tell us you felt this way? We could have helped you!"
"Helped me what?" She snapped back. "What help could you have given, huh? You ask me if I think I'll be happier alone? I could ask you the same."
"You could have at least tried."
She pounded the dirt with one fist. "You're not listening to me! This is what I want, okay? I'm just asking you not to try and come find me, otherwise I wouldn't have even bothered."
Now it was 2B's turn to react with disappointment. "You were going to leave without saying goodbye?"
A2 squeezed her eyes shut at the frailty of 2B's voice. "Of course I was. I wanted to avoid something like this happening." But after taking a deep breath, she chuckled dryly. "Guess I screwed that up, huh."
"You did." 2B smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
"Please, reconsider." 9S begged again. "We can help you work this out. We can..."
He didn't finish, but she knew what he was going to say anyway. "Fix me?" She completed his thought.
After that, none of them were sure what to say. They sat in awkward silence, just staring at the scenery or the ground or the sky, but not each other. 9S tried so hard to catch A2's glance, to show her that he cared about her and he needed her company and he was so sorry for everything he'd ever done to hurt her. But she didn't even look at him.
Eventually, she stood. She wanted to throw her arms around both of them, to tell them how much they meant to her and how much she was going to miss them. How she was happy to spend so much time with them though she acted like a bitter hurtful piece of trash, even now, even to the bitter end. Or maybe it was self-loathing that told her as much, but wouldn't let her say it. She knew 9S would probably never recover from her departure.
She broke the silence. "I'm going," she said simply.
2B watched her as she approached 9S, who was now staring intently directly at her face. With a gentle, ever so gentle movement, A2 leaned down and placed a single silent kiss on his forehead. When she turned from him, tears filled his eyes and he bit his lower lip to keep them from spilling over.
"Thank you for everything. I mean it." She said to 2B, planting her hands on the taller woman's shoulders. Without the heels, A2 stood short, submissive, for possibly the first time in her drawn-out life.
Drawing in a deep breath, 2B found she could not speak. She wanted to say 'you're welcome', or 'good luck', or any number of platitudes. 'I care about you', or even 'I love you'. She was positive that if she tried, she could coerce A2 into staying. 9S could not, he wasn't commanding enough, he didn't understand her strange desire to be alone. To him, companionship was the most important thing in life. But 2B very much understood her position, her thoughts and feelings, despite never saying so. And as they shared one last gaze... 2B thought that perhaps A2 was aware of this.
She about-faced and began to slowly stride toward the trees lining the forest clearing. They were so thick now, so tall and towering and old, that she could hide amongst their shadows and never be found. With a heavy heart, she knew that was exactly what she wanted.
One last time, 9S tried to stop her. He had to try. It was engraved in his programming.
"You're going to be all alone out there," he whimpered.
There was deep sadness, but also a seemingly hopeful resignation lining her features.
"I'm used to being alone," she said quietly, her voice just a tiny meek thing on the howling wind. She picked up her pace slightly, squinting her eyes into narrow slits to brace against the swirling dust. She did not look back as she vanished into the treeline, and 2B and 9S never saw her again.
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