V told me a story today.
It was while I was patching one of my gloves with spare leather from my cloak. He wanted something that would meet his sleeves and fully cover his arm. Griffon was giving him a hard time, crowing in disbelief that V was actually going to use his head and make a plan for once. Maybe he had finally gotten tired of living by the seat of his pants? V just shrugged and said he was perfectly capable of forethought when the situation called for him to hedge his bets.
Griffon was skeptical. So was Pod 042. So was I, but I wasn't as vocal about it as either of them.
The story he told me was of where he came from and where he intended to go. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't need to know. But he told me it was important that I listen carefully, so I did.
He said he wasn't from this world. That where he came from humans were alive and thriving. There had never been machines or androids or aliens there, only demons who had their own world but regularly encroached on that of humans. He didn't say it plain, but implied demons were more or less predators, only humans were less a means of survival and more of power. Demons fed on blood to get stronger, and if they couldn't get it from other demons, humans made easier prey.
It sounded like a terrible place to me, but if humans were flourishing, how bad could it be? Maybe the humans there were strong, the way V was. Maybe they were a hardier kind of human that would take a lot more than aliens or machines to kill off.
To think, I'd been sitting in my shack imagining just one human when there was a whole world of them out there somewhere.
He told me he didn't need anything as specific as blood, which seemed… obvious to me. It wasn't like there was any human blood around but his. What he did require was magic. His body was only human as long as he had enough to keep it in that shape.
With my throat locking up, I clumsily asked if he was hiding another shape under the tattoos. I think I was trying to make a joke, but he didn't look particularly impressed by it and answered that he didn't have another shape. When he went without magic, or when his familiars used too much, he simply crumbled.
I stopped thinking about it and listened to him tell me about the gods.
He told me of their maso that had turned the humans of my world to salt and caused their extinction. How it fed into his body over the passing months; strengthened him but also poisoned him without his notice. He'd thought it harmless until he nearly burned the park down.
He didn't say he was a demon. Just that wasn't human enough to be fully turned to salt. Just that the gods could use his body as a conduit. Through him, they could reach the demon world, where they would be dangerously close to another world full of living humans that they could invade as they'd invaded this one. That was the world V wanted to return to, but he could not go back carrying the maso in his veins.
He needed to kill the gods. He needed power.
"Which you have helped me attain," he finished, flexing his hand experimentally inside the glove when I was done.
From him that was praise, but I found it hard to focus on. I don't know what I was thinking, only that I was afraid. He was telling me something important, telling me more than I thought he ever would, but my mind was stuck on everything his story implied.
"You'll always be human to me."
I thought they were kind words. I wanted to offer him comfort.
There was no way I would have predicted my attempt would earn such a cold, scathing glare. I didn't understand the pride he had in what he was—in whatever measure of human or demon made him V.
"If you would insist on remaining blind," he said disdainfully. "You might consider removing your eyes."
V told me a story today.
It was while he was standing high up on top of the parapets. The dragon's power moved and weaved around him. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it on the air, like a change in atmospheric pressure. After he was properly rested, he manipulated it like that almost constantly. Practicing, I guess. Not like he needed it. I wasn't an expert on dragon powers, but as far as I could tell, he handled them like they were as familiar as his cane.
He'd had a long talk with Pod 042 in private, so I was expecting the worst, but the story he told me was about 9S and about YoRHa.
I grew hot and fidgeted. Mumbled some excuse that I didn't need to know. But he told me this was also an important story, so I did my best to listen even as my mind clouded with images of androids I knew and didn't know.
The subject of the machine research report was not a surprise to me. YoRHa existed so androids could lie to themselves. Big deal. They were no different than the shadows I would watch on the walls of the shack, ghosts I made with my own hands so my own dreams would be a little more real. The only thing that made any difference was that I had never tried to make the shadows real. And I had never tried to convince anybody, including myself, that my dream was anything more than just that.
Even the dream of being with V was like that. This was the most he'd ever spoken to me, and I knew it meant our time was about to come to an end. Maybe that was why even though I didn't hate YoRHa, I couldn't feel any pity for them when he said there was still a protocol in place to erase them entirely.
They had been made with the explicit purpose of dying to bring a fantasy to life. But so were the rest of us. We were all born to die for beings that had been dead thousands of years before most of us were even stepping off of assembly. There was never anything at the end. Not approval or disappointment or victory or defeat. Whether YoRHa had succeeded or not, whether android-kind won the war or lost it, we had all been made for nothing and nothing was all we would get.
It would have been a mercy to die for all but two of us lucky enough to be gifted something.
I got gratitude and I was happy for it. The sound of V's 'You've done well' spoken to me and only me in the dark tunnels underground would stay with me for the rest of my life. Didn't matter whether that was a very short or very long time. Those words were more than I'd ever hoped for and strangely helped me accept the idea that V was from another time and place. It was beyond a world like this one to offer that much of a miracle to anyone without outside influence, so it was natural he would come from a different one.
9S got… something else.
I don't think V knew how obvious it was. He framed his story as a matter of owing the kid something, but it only made the tightness in my chest worse. So 9S misdirected the investigation to keep the other androids off V's trail. So he told the army of humanity some lie about V being an old world weapon. So he told the resistance members who had seen V he wasn't YoRHa. So what. 9S kept his secret, but so had I. From a distance, for months and months and months without him ever knowing. I abandoned my post, fought demons with him, took care of him when he had almost died, carried him on my back through the desert, killed other androids. I had done everything 9S did and more.
"Theta was built to keep heritage," said V. "If she's already been told I'm a thing of the old world, I only have to make her believe it."
I nodded, but I'd heard very little of what he said. All I gathered was that V wanted 9S to walk free of both the camp and the need to hide V's existence. Even if he wanted to give me something like that, I was a criminal. I knew what my fate was already.
Suddenly I was very unsatisfied with it.
I hated 9S. I hated him in a way that had nothing to do with the sickly feeling I got when I was near him. If it was what V wanted, then of course I would do it, but I didn't want to be of use just for the sake of that spoiled boy who already had everything an android could want.
"Do you understand?"
V probably didn't remember the last time he stood in that spot with his tattoos swaying in the wind like they might become wings and he might fly away at any moment. They were settled against his skin now. He was just a man. But he felt further away from me than ever.
"…I understand."
A human's favor existed in this world, but there was nothing I could do to obtain it.
V told me a story today.
It was after we came down from the ramparts. He sat in the high, crumbled window of the throne room and gestured his cane to the empty space at his side.
He never invited me so close to him. Begrudgingly permitted it, yes, but never made a request of it. The sill wasn't cramped it was still a shared space and my motor control went a little floaty as I moved toward him. Somehow, I managed to sit without embarrassing myself. Beside me, his expression was neutral. There was no slight knit of his brow or impatient tilt at the corner of his mouth. Aside from a slight distance as he turned some subject over in his mind, he was completely at ease.
He didn't have to tell me that the story was important or to listen carefully. I was hyperaware of every single thing I could extract from that moment. I counted his eyelashes. Noted the exact shade of green his eyes appeared with his face in shadow. Memorized the cadence and pitch of his voice. The precise angle of the light, the position of the clouds, the number of stones around us, the distant hiss of the falls and the cooing of doves somewhere nearby. I logged all of those things from where he had finally invited me to sit beside him.
It was a really good last memory.
Or a really good first impression, since the story V told me was about me.
'Fern' didn't resist much. None of my false identities ever did. I was always a mess by the time I decided to erase my memories so every wipe was a sloppy job that left them vulnerable to the truth. Fern had been smart enough to get it in her head that she didn't want too much information. She probably would've lasted if she hadn't managed to stumble on a human of all the damned things. But there he was laying out the truth, and Fern fell away to the same place as Ivy before her and Ruby before her and on and on and on.
"That's enough."
V met my eyes and I didn't look away. His mouth twitched and I spotted a hint of approval that would've made Fern feel invincible. All I felt was a bit giddy, but then 'I' was meeting V for the first time.
"Good morning, 8E." The sound of my designation was like a burst of unpleasant feedback in my head. "Have your memories returned?"
"Down to the last detail." I sank back against the stones. "So... You need help killing the gods right?"
"You cannot assist me with that."
"You sure? It's what I'm good at. Wait, let me guess." I saw my too-wide smile reflected in his eyes and drew my legs up to hide the way my hands were starting to shake. The pressure of my memories catching up with me wrung my nerves into frayed threads. "There's someone you want me to kill in the camp. Is it Theta? That'd be pretty exciting, I've never been ordered to kill a superior officer before."
"As of this moment, I don't need you to kill anyone."
"Well, that's a waste!" A pitching laugh spread a dozen cracks through my voice. "It's what I do! I get close to people and I kill them! If you didn't need me to do that, then why am I even here?!"
"How melodramatic," he said, staring darkly down his nose without a shred of sympathy. "I told you what I needed. Did you not understand? Or were you merely not listening?"
My chest burned. Fern was the one who hadn't been listening, but I was the one who had to deal with that exasperated look. "I listened! But it's all… fuzzy. Almost like I'm a little bit overwhelmed right now."
"Then I will say it simply. I have a goal that can only be accomplished by entering the android camp and you are my bargaining chip."
"That's pretty cold," I half-joked. "And risky. I could always just tell them about you."
He smirked, and though I'd seen the expression before, it felt new. The urge to slap him was definitely new. "If I believed you actually would, this conversation would be different."
I clenched my eyes, but all I saw in the dark was all the friends and lovers and allies I had put down like animals. Even escaping into being Fern had not freed me from them. I knew every single one, whether they had names or not. Now, not only was I their murderer; I was a monster who had been hiding the heart of a machine the whole time. And it was all for nothing. I killed them all for nothing, and because this world had the worst sense of humor ever, I was the one who got to live in spite of the YoRHa's expiration date having come and gone.
I was used to being volatile when I woke up, but usually that meant systemic damage that got me hauled back to the Bunker. This time I had awakened to a reality in which YoRHa didn't exist, had been designed to stop existing, and in its place was one pitiless human.
It was so absurd. It was so unfair. I wanted to die. I wanted to kill 9S. I wanted to kill everyone.
Except for V. Especially V.
"You do realize," I rumbled. "That I'm a total stranger to you, right?"
"That was the point of all this, yes." He leaned comfortably back, watching me with no sense of tension or urgency. "You would find out you were YoRHa in the camp. Why leave it to chance when I could deal with it ahead of time? You've received a wealth of knowledge, and now I will know beforehand what you choose to do with it."
Like Fern, I didn't really have any hard feelings about being turned in. The more I thought on it, the more I was relieved by the prospect. I hoped they took me apart piece by piece while I was still conscious, then I could at least die knowing the world had some kind of justice in it. V was allowing me the room to make a move that I didn't even need.
So it confused me that I filled up with that same glowing sense of peace that had always dazzled Fern. There was no mistaking it. It was like someone had flushed my filters with liquid sunlight. I flipped my legs out over the drop to the outer courtyard so I wouldn't have to look at him. The clouds were just feathers against the pale blue sky and early spring heat soaked into my face, warming me outside just as I had warmed inside.
"Now who's being melodramatic?" I muttered. "You never asked Fern what she wanted to do."
"Fern did not want anything half so much as she wanted to be of use to me." He cocked his head at me. "Are you so alike I should treat you the same?"
So he did recognize that I was the one who had all the memories of him while he didn't know anything about who I was as 8E. He just didn't let it get in the way of assuming he had me figured out. "And if I want something that inconveniences your plan?"
"You should know best." He folded his hands over the top of his cane. "I'll do what I must."
Again, I felt that wash of warmth. I could do whatever I wanted. He would do whatever he had to. A tingle crawled over my skin and my core temperature spiked as I considered he might even be willing to kill me.
I licked my lips and propped a leg up on the sill, half-turning back to him. "Let me ask you something, V. When did you know?"
"Before we ever spoke." The cane flicked up and pointed just below my throat. "You give off a black box signal."
"No, I mean did you know I was an E the whole time?"
"Pod informed me during your first maintenance."
"And you didn't…" I made a sour face at the sparse grass below. The words felt pathetic because Fern couldn't be blamed for how much weight was resting on the answer. "You didn't despise me?"
"If I had that much time and energy to waste, I would never have needed you to begin with."
I sighed. What had I even been expecting? "So you just make it a habit to treat people like you treated Fern? Congrats, that actually makes me feel a little bad for the scanner."
"He's not foolish enough to worship me as Fern did."
There was a lightness to those words made me look his way. He was smiling. Only by a few centimeters, but he'd never smiled like that at Fern even once so the subtlety of it didn't do a damned thing to hide it.
Honestly, I was jealous, but 9S had been with V for at least half a year and it was natural that he'd be warmer with him. That wasn't what left my fingers crunching into the stones. It was how proud he sounded. V always said he had no interest in being god, and I had to give him credit for matching his actions to his words at every turn, but the thing was: it didn't matter what he said. In this world, he was the designated deity whether he wanted to be or not, because that was how we had all been built. For him to be so pleased with the one who wasn't operating as intended—that was like having a knife twisted into my back.
"That's what you were so hung up on?" I laughed, but it was a sound as dull and ugly as the rusted corpses of the machines. "What a shock. You're so prissy I'd have thought you loved the service."
"There was also the matter that Fern was just the latest personification of your cowardice."
"You think I had a choice?"
"Enough to cling to escapism so strongly that even your façade chose to live within fantasies."
"You don't know shit about androids," I spat, turning my glare back down to the courtyard. "Or about YoRHa."
We were puppets. There was no choice for any of us, much less an executioner. Natural progression meant going slowly and quietly insane. We snatched what little reprieve or relief we could get away with to stave it off like rats gnawing on dry bone to stave off starvation, but we knew the whole time it would eventually catch up with us. It always did.
In our programming, self-termination was a condemnation to hell in the same way the touch of humanity was an invitation to heaven. To give up and die was a sin so great that no amount of suffering could ever pile high enough to justify it. I killed myself a dozen little ways instead. Erasing my own memories, taking on enemies I couldn't possibly expect to defeat. A few times, in the beginning, I tried to rip out the components that generated emotion. None of it mattered. No matter what I chose, eventually I was made to do exactly as I had before.
To Fern, V was something divine and if he bothered to take note of her existence at all, it was a miracle. Understandably, I wasn't quite as enamored. The bottom line was that he intended to use me. I didn't care since I deserved the punishment, but the trouble was in him leaving the next move in my hands. The element of chance. I had the opportunity to make things go the way I wanted them to.
A hint of faded green glinted in my periphery as the light found his eyes. He was watching me.
"What?" I grouched.
"I am waiting."
I shook my head and laughed through my nose. For a guy who didn't care about being god, he sure acted like he was king of the fucking castle.
Maybe because we looked so much like humans, he just took it for granted that we must be like humans. He had no idea what a novel situation he had created. In his eyes, he had no actual authority over me at all so the solution to just ask me what I intended to do and deal with it probably seemed reasonable to him. So, he just sat there waiting.
For my decision.
"Whatever you need."
"I see." Sure he did. "Perhaps you're not so different from your other self."
I spun myself back around into the throne room and laughed at his expense. "And perhaps you got a little too accustomed to having someone around whose only goal was to kiss your bony ass. Your plans are already going my way, V. As long as I end up in the camp, I'll do whatever you need."
He gauged me with fresh annoyance, and I let him without any sense of shame. What he had done wasn't a conscious kindness and it didn't mean anything to him. But that didn't make it less of a gift, especially to someone like me.
Not that I'd tell him that. The cluelessness was growing on me.
He twisted the cane around in his fingers. "…Fine. Shall we make sure you know your part?"
"Fern wasn't listening," I admitted easily. "Just tell me that whole story again. This time I'll point out the parts that'll definitely get us killed."
