52 Hours Ago
The pillar at the center of the network is more than white. Even from the bottom of the almost endless stairway, it shines a stark and brilliant light.
9S thinks carefully of nothing as he takes his first step. At the tenth, he wonders if V is gone or if he'll be waiting in the camp like nothing happened when 9S returns. At the fiftieth, he considers running, but can't force himself to move any faster. Around the two-hundredth, barely a tenth of the way, his chest constricts with the possibility that he may have read into No.2's interest in the pillar too much and that he will reach the top only for 2B to be nowhere in sight. Higher still, he is suffocated by the possibility that she will be there.
N2 appears when he's halfway there. She's sitting on one of the steps—he's gotten too distracted to and lost count by then. Her chin nests in the palms of her hands, elbows propped up on her knees. She's looking past him, rather than at him.
He doesn't stop for her.
They repeat this process half a dozen more times. She materializes with her legs thrown out over the abyssal drop, observing her territory. Or lays back across several steps. Or floats off to the side of them. She stands with her arms behind her back or on her hip. Never a different facial expression. Each time, it's the same blank-faced stare. Each time, he passes her by like she doesn't exist. She's already proven that she can take the path to the pillar away from him if she really wants to. As long as she doesn't, there's no reason to acknowledge her.
The end of the staircase is in sight when he passes her again and her voice chases after him.
"You'd even let a human go for 2B?"
9S narrows his eyes and keeps his focus on the top of the staircase. The two things have nothing to do with one another. Even if a part of him (which part—his protocol or himself?) does hope that V won't be gone, it doesn't change much. That particular human is the stubborn, willful kind who can't be kept, much less let go of. One of the very first things that had been impressed on 9S was that V wasn't going to be cloistered away in a skyscraper even if it was for his own safety. V is doing what he has to. 9S is doing what he needs to. N2 knows all of this. There is no way she doesn't, and it needles at him why she asks questions she doesn't need answers to.
"It fascinates me," she answers. "I expected an android would cling to more to the source of its purpose. But you rejected it and then let it walk away from you."
With that, the pretense that she doesn't know exactly what's going through his mind ends. Not that it makes him want to talk to someone whose only interest is in observing his suffering.
"That is what perplexes me most about you, YoRHa Unit 9S. Your suffering is unnecessary. You know that there is nothing to fight for, yet you insist on living in the very world that created you to be sacrificed."
The end of the stairway is close, and N2 is just noise on the edge of his aural processor. His black box signal races. His internal temperatures rise. He imagines 2B. Remembers her.
"Is this about 2B?" N2 calls. Her already deep voice takes on a different quality—throaty, slow, and deliberate. "Or is this about how much you want to '****' 2B?"
9S freezes with his foot on the next stair. To give N2 the satisfaction of turning away from his goal would be too much like letting her win, but it does not stop his teeth from baring themselves, or the red haze that spreads from his chest to his fingertips and threatens to claw its way out.
"Don't." The word is a harsh hiss through clenched teeth. "Don't you dare."
N2 appears on the next stair up. 9S counts it a small mercy that she hasn't altered her form, but that hasn't stopped her from snatching a facsimile of V's cane straight from his memory to go with his stolen voice.
"Is the kind of person you like one who lies to you?" Her rhythm is maddening. It's a cryptic poem spoken smugly; a replication so perfect he can practically hear V's cocky grin. "You don't trust him any more than you trusted 2B. And he's a much poorer liar, isn't he? You went through all the trouble of telling him you hate the effect his humanity has on you… but conveniently omitted that you know his humanity is a lie, just like all the rest you've been told."
She presses the handle of the cane under his chin. The movement is correct down to the way the curve of the handle conforms to his jaw but that does not change how fundamentally wrong it feels to 9S. "You've changed less than you want to think, YoRHa Unit 9S."
"…So what?"
Her face flickers. The expression she makes is close to her usual blank stare, but her eyes are wider. She is surprised. For her, it's probably unthinkable that 9S would concede to someone he hates as much as he hates her.
The fists forming at 9S' sides loosen. N2's reasons for goading him don't matter, but the words she spoke to him the first time he entered here run through his mind. There is no reason for him to fight her, and she has only ever told him the truth in service to one purpose.
"You're the one who wanted to evolve so badly," he says, without fire or frigidity. "I don't care about reaching some kind of enlightenment or advancing until I'm not bound by my purpose. I just don't want to be alone. I've always hated being alone." He hesitates, but it feels to him that if he wants control over himself, he cannot continue to pretend he isn't full of his own duplicities. "I'll take whatever I can. Even a lie."
"Then why do you not just stay on the ark?" There is something strained in N2's voice. "You have all of 2B's memories. You have your memories of V. You have other androids. If a lie is fine, why do you insist on the world that commanded you to fight and die over this one?"
9S does not have an easy answer to that question—maybe that's why N2 has to ask and why she sounds so frustrated. When he searches himself and looks honestly at what he really wants, the answers he comes up with are simplistic but so blindingly close to his heart he can't imagine speaking them out loud.
But because he's thought them, N2 knows. About limonine and citrol and summer dandelions; and about poetry and laying others to rest and leaping into the new year. How they were all odd human things he didn't fully appreciate, but each one had made him feel something new and different and unspoiled. How he wants to share those things with 2B and see her smile—how he'd always wanted to see her laugh and never did.
Nothing he wants can be acquired in the Ark.
N2's face flickers, but several seconds pass without a new appearance replacing the last. She drops the cane. A half-second of noisy static, there and gone, and he's alone again.
9S half expects the stairs to come apart and steal the way to the top from right beneath his feet, but it doesn't. There are less than a hundred left and his breath is short and his mouth dry and his body is too small to contain the sickly hopes and giddy terror threatening to overload him.
The top of the stairway looks familiar, but he knows those are the echoes of A2's memories. The altar where she found his data, so close to being absorbed into the network like everyone else's, is still there. Still occupied. By a figure he can only guess is seated.
"2B…?"
The black cubes of corrupted data are hard to make visual sense of. Its actions are chaotic and watery—at once it seems to turn its body toward him and yet make no move at all.
The world slows as his processing speed increases. Long expanses of silence fill the space between the click of his shoes, which hangs in his aural readouts longer than it should. The light as Virtuous Contract forms in his hand read like a firework bursting in slow motion on his periphery. Its silver edge glints at the bottom of his visual field as he rounds the figure, standing between it and the light. He reaches to where its head should be. The black blocks shift around his touch and reveal her face. Her eyes.
Between the strands of her hair, they shine red.
Someone had said it, though his mind was too occupied to remember who: 'Even if you stop the virus, if it's gone too far it's not like the damage will be undone'.
Thoughts flit through 9S without much energy. It doesn't seem fair, and it isn't, but he's already lost her before. When he compares the moment of walking along the bridge to see the life draining from her, finding this remnant of her data corrupted is…easier. He doesn't even have to exhaust himself wondering what might have happened if A2 hadn't been there. N2 was never going to take 2B in. Whatever the nature of the meta-network's obsession with him is, it's obvious even to him that she doesn't want to share him, least of all with 2B.
There isn't enough of this 2B to call her dynamic. There may not be enough of her to even call her static. All he can know conclusively is that there is enough of her in there that the moment she gained a fraction of awareness, she left his side to do what she had been doing when she died: Finding an isolated place where she couldn't hurt anyone. Where she couldn't hurt him.
Yet this piece of her still made her way to a place that reminded her of him, or of the memories it had been disconnected from.
"Like memories of pure light…" he whispered, staring at the reflection of the pillar in her eyes.
Nine long months since she had sent him away with nothing but the hope that he would live, and they were finally face to face again.
He places Virtuous Contract across her blocky lap and finds the shape of her fingers to help them curl around it, and the black shapes recede. Data twinkles like motes of dust in muted sunlight around her fists. He squeezes her hands a little tighter until her gloves split and faint hiss parts her lips.
Memories expand into the white space as he steps back. He watches them stretch out and unravel from where they had been compacted and compressed to fit the sword's storage limitations. It's all data, flat and impersonal. But so much of what flickers around them in preserved strings of footage are images of him. A thousand reflections of the versions of himself he has been. Life after life that was his but not his and she had been the beginning and end of all of them.
He spies a memory where he is surprisingly subdued with her. The moment they are alone in a secluded area, he swings first and catches her by surprise. That one is probably the first time he ever used Cruel Oath. He sees himself fight like a frightened animal backed into a corner. He sees himself cry and reach out to her, confused and unable to understand, even as she stands over him with sword in hand. He sees himself through her eyes, always meeting the same end whether he fights back, strikes first, gives his life willingly, or dies quickly and painlessly without any confrontation.
She tries so often and so hard to stop him but it's a futile effort whether she is kind or cold. 9S is a high-end model. His intense curiosity is as inevitable as her orders.
And now he sees the aftermath of those orders. He can differentiate the older from the newer by how long it takes her to dismember the body and reset his memory. In early deaths, it's easy. It's business. But she slows down over time. Makes the task mechanical and detached. He can almost hear her telling herself that emotions are prohibited. The mask cracks several times. She cries. She screams. It's more honest emotion than he has ever seen her show and again he feels the hot and cold of finally knowing but hating that it had to be in this kind of way, under these circumstances.
He sees a fight. Them against machines in a castle. Her behavior is odd, and her memories run together. She's killed him in that place before. He says the same things he's said before. Even before it's clear she's contracted the logic virus, the weight of watching the patterns repeat has her in dangerously fragile condition. That version of him hacks in to save her, as he always does. But when he comes back, things are different. He's seen her mission.
She throws down her sword, exhausted, and asks to die by his hand instead. She frames it as giving back a mere fraction of what she has taken from him.
That version of him denies her request. While her eyes are closed and she waits for it to finally be over, he kills himself instead. 2B has to watch him bleed out where he has taken Virtuous Contract into his own hands. And with his dying breath, he utters the cruelest thing 9S has ever heard.
Don't hesitate to kill me next time, because I…want to see you again…
In full knowledge of her mission and her feelings, he'd made her keep going when she was already on the edge of breaking. That 9S isn't him, but they are enough alike that he understands. It's just as much an honest wish as it is a punishment.
He wonders if that's why she slipped and called him Nines in the castle.
A spark of curiosity draws him away from that thought. Hacking 2B to eliminate infection is simple and surface level, but in however many lives he's tried to defend himself or even kill her first, he must have known he couldn't win if he kept to physical attacks only.
It was possible that he carried pieces of her the same way he'd carried Adam and Eve and A2. The theory boils over inside of him no sooner than he thinks it. He has no idea if synaptic alignment could survive an execution process as rigorous as his, but he can look. He can try.
2B is still seated, staring at the sword with a dazed, blank expression. There isn't enough of her there for him to work with—most of what he's seeing is the reaction from Virtuous Contract. He rounds the altar and cups her face in his hands, hacking into himself instead. Anything he has done before, he is willing to do now if it gets him a little closer, even if it means exposing her to the core of his being.
The ground shifts beneath them both. The slab slips away and 2B is forced clumsily to her feet only to end up tumbling back onto a shape made of pure white walls. 9S lets her go and peeks down through a hole in the roof. The structure is still fractured and broken in places, but he recognizes his own personality core despite it being the closest to whole he's seen in nearly a year. He also recognizes the shape it has repaired into. It's the same smooth, angular, and empty structure he could find anywhere in the city—but this one he knows is the one he spent so much time with V in.
He glances back at 2B and hops down. The inside is empty, but he enters anyway. He isn't sure what he's looking for, only that he'll recognize it if it's there.
'Goodbye, 2B.'
There's a hole in the corner. A crack that hasn't repaired. Light seeps through it, and over and over, he hears that voice. His own. It's lodged in deep beyond in his reach. If it's in a place like this, it has to be more than just memory, but there's no deeper he can go. There's nothing left to hack into and he can't attack his own personality core.
But he thinks he knows a different way.
He climbs back out and she's right where he left her, with memories still playing kaleidoscopically around her.
"2B," he calls uncertainly. "It's me. It's 9S..."
Her lashes flutter over eyes still bright red, and he feels his heart jump. Her personality is in there, even if it's only the smallest bit. Even if she can't bridge the gap through the corruption, even if she can't integrate all of what's happening, she isn't beyond the sound of his voice. He helps her to her feet, overwhelmed by how many things he suddenly needs to say.
"It's over out there. The war. YoRHa. There's no Commander to give you orders. There's no reason for you to kill me anymore. Even though you did so many times, I still want to meet you again, 2B. I want to spend time with you again, just resting in a camp or by a stream, doing nothing, saying nothing. I want to find a t-shirt for you, like we promised."
"But I want everything I was, too. I need everything that led me to this moment. Everything you took from me." It's hard to keep his voice modulated. An ache is spreading at the back of his throat, and his vision blurs as the writhing, loathsome feelings he's been harboring toward her creep toward the surface. "I understand how much it cost you. I know you had no choice. I want to forgive you so badly, but I can't, and I can't help these feelings. This… hate. Because the one who asked you to kill him wasn't me."
Her eyes slowly twitch up to his. It's hard to say if there is any recognition, but there is regret and that is just as good.
"If this is the last life I get, and I'm going to put it toward repairing you… I can't go on just pretending it isn't there; I've tried. Letting you kill me didn't work. It didn't do anything good for either of us. And I don't want to just…" The memory of the Soul Box scorches through him. Laughing and crying and lashing out at something in her shape. No virus to blame, only that frenetic impulse to protect his memory from anyone and anything by any means necessary even if it shattered him in the process. "I don't want to just do the same things as before."
Is this about 2B? Or is this about how much you want to '****' 2B?
He's caused himself more than enough grief trying to pretend it's ever been just one or the other of those things. Hating her and wanting nothing else than to be with her. Wanting to destroy her and wanting to be destroyed by her. Even her desire for him to live, while being duty-bound to be the one to kill him—she must be full of her own contradictions as well.
Cruel Oath materializes in his hand, and he holds his other out to her. He can repair 2B without this fleeting scrap of her, or the pieces of her lodged too deep in his data for him to get to. But he doesn't want to. Even if it's agony for both of them, their memories are all they have. The closest they can get to souls. It isn't something that should be let go of so easily.
The smile on his face is weak but overflows with warmth. "Let's go together this time, okay?"
Her lips part. Motion takes her a long time and an intense concentration of her disjointed will, but she puts one hand around Virtuous Contract's hilt and lays the other in his waiting hand.
He's thought many times in his bitterest moods that this is how it should have been that day at the bridge. He's wondered if 2B didn't trust him to kill her because of the difference in their models, or if she just didn't want him to have to do that because she knew what it was like. She really was always so stiff. For him, it was so much simpler than any of that.
The one to kill her should have been someone who would bother to cry for her. The way she had for him.
They press close until they're chest to chest. He rests his head against her shoulder and there is neither warmth nor cold, but she's solid. Present. She might only be a corrupted snatch of consciousness resonating with the memories left behind inside Virtuous Contract and inside him, but that is enough for him. The person he's been longing for all this time is still there in the way leans her cheek against his hair. In her quiet sigh that seems relieved as Cruel Oath slides at her back.
Her hand rests, strong and steady, at the bottom of his back, and he finds his pulse rate increasing as he does the same.
As both an apology and an expression of what he finds so hard to translate into words, he doesn't rely on her. She's done this so many times, just once she shouldn't have to. It's difficult. The weapon obeys the laws of form in a memory space this articulated, and he can feel the resistance of her internal plates. Wires splitting. Metal scraping. Then there is a half-second of give that brings the point through her and he flinches instinctively at the unexpected pain as it pierces his abdomen. His protocols cause him to hesitate. He's harmed himself and sought death in dozens of ways, but this is direct and physical.
2B pushes Virtuous Contract through him with terrifying ease. Their abilities and limitations, even now, are worlds apart. Alerts fill his vision. His hacking connection runs frantic auto-disconnect routines, but he overrides them and clings on. Through gritted teeth, he finishes pushing his own blade through his body. Until the gold edge pushes out through his back, and the black hilt presses to her skin. Memories flood through him. Through them. His grip tightens as they both sink to their knees and he tries to enforce order on the crashing waves of information and memory. Extracting the uncorrupted parts of 2B's data and disentangling the memories he needs from Virtuous Contract with care to only take what's his even if it's all seen through her eyes. His deaths. His choices. His times with her.
Her head droops. Her body slackens, weighing down onto him. The taste of oil fills his mouth, but still he holds on.
They're connected. Not by orders or fate or by the cruelty of the cycle trapping them, but by their own volition. By memory, and by the red oil that mingles at the core of their embrace and stains the pure white space as they kneel in one last, shared prayer.
It's all just data, but that's all they ever were. It's real to 9S. It will be until he breaks down.
Over 2B's shoulder, a white blade and a black and gold hilt protrude from the delicate curve of her back. She breaks down into white light, the fragment of her vanishing safely into the confines of Virtuous Contract.
No aural disturbance registers, but her voice passes through his mind like a fading light.
..Ni…nes…
He jerked awake into the too-real world. A cool early spring breeze and warming sunlight paralyzed him, blocking his retreat from a rising deluge of sensory information. 4S was nearby. In his face. Asking something. Shouting something.
Pain was all that made any sense to 9S. 4S' voice, the black of his uniform, the blue of his eyes, the scent of grass and unbloomed flowers, the bitter slickness of oil lingering like a phantom in his clean mouth, endless alerts, alerts, alerts making excruciating static of his whole body. The clarity of it only made it sharper against the blurred mess of his other senses.
Something pricked his arm. The pain receded and he was left alone to huddle in on himself like a dying insect on the cold, white carbon. A vast jumble of memories filled his mind. They weren't organized yet, but they were all his own.
He flinched as a hand reached into his crumpled, fetal shape. It grabbed his own and squeezed. Just enough to create a single, constant sensory input.
4S' dripped over him like heavy sap. From deep amid information overload, it felt like entire days passed before 9S grasped what was being said. 4S was trying to get him to relax his body so the nanomachine stimulant could circulate properly and aid his recovery. Hacking damage wasn't 1:1, but that didn't make the repercussions less severe.
Stretching himself back out was an effort of enormous will but eventually, he managed to lie flat, staring so blindly at the ceiling he didn't even register Iota's mark on the ceiling.
4S' voice inched across the space between them. "Did you find her…?"
9S closed his eyes. Asking 2B wasn't much of an option, but a basic query through all the new data would do. The one answer that he'd been chasing ever since he first entered the ark... Not how many times he'd died. That wasn't what mattered. Not really. What mattered to him was how many times he'd met 2B for the 'first' time, and the query quietly returned him that answer in crisp, black, impersonal font:
48
He managed a laugh that was almost light-hearted and burst into tears.
