A/N: Just so we are all on the same page:

Yes, I've seen the preview of the final NieR raid in FFXIV and yes, I'm losing my entire mind after seeing Jack of Hearts in the Tower.

The last thing I remembered clearly was clutching V's crumbling hand. The way he slumped forward, heavy yet brittle in my arms. The disgusting familiarity of demonic ichor grasping (slurping) at my skin.

The pressure in the room had inverted. Turned itself inside out around a single point and cracked. Hot, gritty wind scoured the cold from my skin. I shouted at Jorinde and Jorindel, but it was already too late. The world pulsed red, faded to black that must have been unconsciousness but didn't seem that way, and surfaced again to a sunless sky as red as the light of the logic virus.

There was no sign of any way back to the night kingdom. There was no sign of anything but barren stones and a sound from no visible source that might have been laughter or might have been screams. A similarly sourceless stench curdled the air. It was the scent of something no longer living, turning to mold and sludge in the nauseating heat.

On a path that came from nowhere, I stood on feet I didn't remember climbing to. Trying to go backward carried me further along, and so did walking forward. No matter which way I turned, I kept catching glimpses of something. It was hard to say what—it faded every time I looked at it. The last thing I wanted was to stand still in that rotted atmosphere and find out.

Once the path was gone, I learned that I trusted the trees even less.

Gnarled branches barren as upturned roots twisted together in a pale forest. Their spindly fingers interlocked as I passed, cutting me off from what light the red haze provided. I told myself the faces and body parts I saw in the contorted, thorny trunks weren't actually there. Just my pattern recognition protocols overreacting.

Small creatures amalgamated from wings and tentacles and teeth lined the canopy. They screamed and chattered and watched me from enormous cyclopean eyes hidden within three-fold jaws. Though they crowded together like magpies sharing malicious secrets, they didn't attack me.

Those were demons. They had to be. So what were they waiting for?

"Carnelian…?"

My body stopped as if frozen in time.

"Carne—lian…!"

I knew that voice. I knew that name.

It emerged from between the nearly human trees: an android dressed in the same dirty resistance clothes as me. Stumbling lost and calling out in confusion. The head was empty. A scribbled blur of features I'd lost after so many botched escapes from my own identity. All that remained with me was the look on her face. The voice that choked on fluids flooding the internal system.

I was newer then. Inexperienced. The kill was messy and slow.

"Car…nel…"

It stumbled toward me, eyes appearing from entirely too many seams that opened in its hazy face, in search of answers I did not have now any more than I did then.

Without thinking, I stabbed it. Blood spilled from its mouth and from the ruptured reservoir in its abdomen, pouring like water from an upturned bottle. It slumped to the ground with a pitiful, pained cough. Hyperventilating wetly until it ran out of breath in the shadow of the trees.

The face it wore in death had all the betrayed grief I remembered. But the features were my own, already decaying into ruddy soil.

The branches closed, and I stood in the dark while the demons laughed.

My first name was Carnelian. I got it in a place where flowers didn't grow.

Two more faceless androids burst through the trees, identical except for small, useless wings that fluttered like paper over their shoulders. They didn't speak. They merely attacked with screams that sounded like flame crackling over tarp and pops of gunfire. Clawing at me. Each other. It didn't seem to matter.

My fists were ready, but I couldn't order my thoughts into any attacks. Sub-routines and background algorithms pushed and pulled my body without conscious or meaningful input while I struggled to understand what was happening.

Like the last one, I knew these androids.

They killed each other before I had the faculties to do more than defend. One tore out the throat of the other, while the other gouged her taloned hands through the other's core. Both staggered toward me. Numbly, I stepped backward until they fell to the ground and were still.

Only their wings still moved. The red and gray feathers of a robin and the brown, banded ones of a wren. Flapping like dry tinder until they caught fire and burned away.

Twice, I was named after birds in a lush place. No one ever figured out I was the one who set fire to it.

A slither sent a bolt through my self-preservation routines. I darted backward, but a root struggling away from the earth like a bound limb sent me tumbling to the ground.

Violet light traveled through the closed corridor of branches, my senses bursting with magic. Fleetingly I thought of V, but neither hope nor relief pierced the dark, solidifying certainty that had settled in my chest. My wrists became bound, and so did my neck. Snapped tight to dirt that reeked of organs I couldn't name left under a sun that didn't exist.

The android thing that stood over me this time held a sword, and though its face was as blurred as the rest, I could tell there was something wrong with the head. It sat at the wrong angle. The blade pressed against the side of my neck. What I had done rushed through me—what would happen to me if I didn't move—

The 4O fists vanished from my hands. I kicked up just as the sparks re-materialized around my feet, puncturing through the thing's back in two quick successions. It made an almost reptilian noise, more surprise than pain. The head snapped free of the neck as if it were only a precariously balanced marble, bouncing off my chest and rolling away.

The rest of the body collapsed onto me and began to decompose.

I bit back a cry of disgust and jerked uselessly, kicking and struggling against the bindings with quickening breaths. The demon birds cackling in the trees grew bold, swooping down to bite and scratch at what must have seemed like helpless prey. I yanked against the black and purple magic hard enough that a joint-stress warning cropped up, but it got me free enough to grab one of the birds and pulverize it eye against their nearest tree. The rest scattered and I rolled over and coughed into the dirt. The rot clung to my clothes, strangely cold no matter how I tried to scrub the sensation away.

A butterfly caught my attention. Faint violet and fluttering on the knot of a tree that resembled a painfully bent back, complete with the ridges of a spine.

I got up and ran.

Hell was not a night without stars. It was something so much worse, and whether it was the long list of my sins or the seedling of a soul carried in my body, it had seen fit to take me in as it would a human. Where I was going didn't matter. My impulse was simply that I had to get 'away' even though I already knew in my heart there was nowhere to go.

I was called Ivy by the cleanest kill I ever made.

The branches over my head parted, moaning as if it caused them pain to let me leave. I was getting somewhere, even if that somewhere was a sea of gray, flaking sands that smoked like charcoal and sizzled beneath my boots.

Three figures came this time. The blur of their was faces softer. Less indefinite. I could see their eyes, gleaming bright red from a distance as they materialized like mirages. Their mouths blared distorted laughter, and this time I was aware and ready to fight.

It was just as easy to cut them down this time as it had been during Normandy.

I hadn't found it strange that they named me so quickly. Even if humans did exist, they weren't the ones who stood on the shore while machines descended by the tens of thousands and razed everything in their path. Humans weren't the ones who stood on the ground and watched the most massive deployment of YoRHa models to date be shot out of the sky like helpless doves. How could I think badly of their doubts in the face of that? How could I call their anger treason when it was so clear to me that above all else, they were scared to die for nothing?

Cinnabar. Amaranth. Rakia. The androids who gave me those names must have been comforted to think they were dying for someone closer to them. Someone they cared enough to die for. But in the end, they were sacrificed to superstition all the same; red oil shed on the altar of a constructed mythology for other androids to believe in.

I'd wished for a long time after Normandy that I would have stayed dead with them.

Looking at their freshly destroyed forms mimic my own in death and rot away, I knew even that unfair end would have been kinder than whatever else awaited me here. I almost laughed. To think, everything I'd been looking for when I wanted to be torn apart was right here in hell.

Despite the burning sands under my feet, I couldn't stop shaking.

In Sector H, I received three names. One an ore; one a grain; and the last a kind of liquor that none of us knew the taste of.

Clouds overtook the sky. The kind I associated with missile strikes and volcanoes. Thick and black and almost solid, offering only fleeting glimpses of the terrain in sporadic flashes of lightning and long-tailed streaks of flame that rained down at the unhurried pace of cinders floating on the wind.

I lost track of how long I was out there.

I couldn't even count the bodies to get a sense for how long I'd been fighting. They were not difficult kills. There was nothing to them. None of the weight of an android. A crunch of impact and blood gushed out of whatever hole I made like it was the only thing inside of them. They might as well have been paper.

But they just kept getting up. Whether I killed them. Whether I maimed them. Whether I stood my ground or ran, they kept coming. Overwhelming me with nothing the press of their bodies and their clawing hands. I was forced to rely on both my fists and my back up YoRHa standard sword just to keep up with the raw number of blurry faced imitations. Warnings pocked my UI, but I couldn't afford to stop and there was no opportunity to rest. They hounded me across the sands until I came to the edge of a river.

I'd assumed it ran black with the same tar-like substance V's tattoos were made of, but up close, I saw the stony banks were stained red. The flow bubbled with a vital, coppery, unmistakable scent that made me retch so violently I thought I would snap in half.

Human blood. Human blood. Human blood.

My eye fell on the squadron that refused to fall. They looked like androids, but I knew they were not. With the boiling river at my back, I brandished my fists. These things had reaped enough humans to have a river of their blood, and it did not matter that those humans lived in a world that had nothing to do with me. They didn't have to know me. I didn't have to know them.

"Come on," I challenged, teeth bared as my base priority surged forward, displacing guilt and transmuting fear into a bright spark of rage. "This time I'll make sure you don't get up."

For a long while after that, I was not Fern or 8E. I was merely an android.

When my name was Ruby, my cover was blown. In the end I had to silence the entire camp.

My base protocol receded as I stood over the last body, wearily but meticulously hacking it into pieces and kicking the fragments into the river. A black shape parted the current, but I paid it no mind. It seemed content to chew up whatever I threw in, and I was content to be ignored by whatever counted for a fish in hell.

I was alone again, left with the new problem of my dangerously high core temperature. Auxiliary ventilation had become a constant roar in the back of my senses.

I didn't see a place to cross the river, and the other side didn't look like it promised a cooler climate anyway. Should I go back to the woods? Could I go back to the woods? The answer was probably no on both counts, but I didn't have much choice. It was a struggle just to stay upright. If I came to the end of my flagging strength out here, I would combust.

As soon as I turned away from the river, a stained and steaming cord looped around my neck.

My hands flew up, fists turned out so I wouldn't be strangled. But the cord did not attempt any such thing. It yanked me back off my already tottering balance and into the river instead, reeling me down like the day's catch. Temperature warnings blared even as I held my breath and forced my extra vents shut. The blood was too thick for me to make out anything but darkening shades of red. With one hand, I groped blindly. Found something hard and pulled myself up, gasping as I broke the surface.

I'd latched onto a spire in the middle of the river. It freed me from the threat of drowning, but it would not save me from being boiled alive. Between those two, the slick cable around my neck was almost an afterthought.

Something rumbled and the current swelled suddenly. The river's denizen crested like an eel, blood cascading down its back like waterfalls. It was more force than creature. A living tornado pocked with skulls and honeycomb holes where it had none or had lost them. Dozens of pairs of chitinous legs twitched from its swirling shape. I was almost cold at the prospect of being caught in whatever kind of sight this blood-swimming centipede had, but I wasn't going to be able to swim my way back to the shore.

I let go of the spire to flail out and grab it. I barely saw the joint stress warnings—the pain as I tried to keep my grip with one hand and remove the wire with the other was all the notice I needed. We dived, and in the fresh surge of temperature, I lost all sense of my body in relativity to itself. My motor functions stalled.

I can't swim in water, my scrambled thoughts bleated. I won't be able to swim in blood!

Another stone smacked into my chest, forcing a moment of clarity out of my half-cooked processors. I looped the cord around the leg of the centipede, and the next time we broke the surface, I leapt toward the first solid mass I could identify. I thrashed in the strong current, every bit as unable to swim as I thought, but determined to keep my head up and my eyes on my destination.

It was just another piece of debris. Some mass of what might have been a bridge or building. By then, I would have taken anything. I managed to pull my torso out, but no more. My body lurched and smacked me into the stone. I managed to roll onto my back, and blood sputtered from my vents, and then I was still. No motor response, despite every signal and sluggish reboot attempt.

Above me, the thing on the other side of the cord was yanked along as the centipede swam on. It didn't resemble an android at all.

My consciousness slipped away.

My name was Rattlesnake the first time I used the wire program.

MEMORY UNIT: YELLOW

VITALS: SEVERE ABNORMALITY DETECTED

BLACK BOX TEMPERATURE: HIGH

BLACK BOX INTERNAL PRESSURE: HIGH

POD CONNECTION FAILED TO INITIALIZE

MULTIPLE SYSTEM FAILURES DETECTED

Someone was carrying me.

Who…?

Instead of my voice, I issued a desperate wheeze. Pressure and pent-up heat escaped in a spray of crusted blood. I could barely hear it. My internal UI was scrambled. Pixels danced like fireworks across my vision, and my head rang with a high-pitched keening from my black box.

My body came to rest on cold stone that nearly brought me to tears with relief. I struggled to look up and saw someone squatting casually beside me. Too big to be V. I rolled and scrabbled, but the highest I could climb was to my hands and knees.

"Easy, Iris."

Noise washed over my vision like a film.

I got that name from a bulky android with a soft voice who had treated me like a little sister. Her death was sloppy. I didn't mean for it to be. I wanted to kill her quickly, without her ever knowing anything was wrong. But I was exhausted. And she was so, so full of light. I'd hesitated and it cost us both her death in slow motion.

Corn…flower…?

She laughed at my no doubt dumbfounded face, and my throat clenched. I knew it couldn't really be her. It was another illusion. Another demon or maybe hell itself wearing her face. But it was the same. Her laugh was the same.

She had laughed at me just like that for crying over her while she died. Like it was silly of me to be upset at completing my mission.

She was the only one who forgave me.

I choked on an attempt to speak her name and crawled laboriously toward her. Fighting my way out was impossible. I knew it before I was even out of the woods, but I finally accepted it. I was going to die here. Just to touch her again was all I wanted. I wasn't too proud to beg God, or whatever demon was haunting me—just this one mercy was all I asked.

How could I still be so gullible?

A sword covered in thorns pierced through her chest, spraying me in a fresh coat of blood. She kept smiling. Even as she came apart like a cheap toy.

The stupidest name I ever had was Red. Plain and unimaginative. It came from a painfully trusting girl not so different from that comms unit. She never saw me coming.

I roared to life on burnt-out limbs.

The thing I knew was not Cornflower was already rotting into the stone, but the android behind her remained. Its head did not feature a face or the blur I had gotten used to, but a diamond shape void filled with concentric neon lines, like a warped hallway into infinity inside its skull. I got the feeling that it was grinning at me as I lashed out ineffectively. I had to rely on my sword instead of my fists, and even then it danced easily out of the way of most of my attacks. Only when I rushed at it blindly did I score my hit. The impact sent us both over the edge of a pit I hadn't even noticed.

Leaning heavily on my sword, I fought my way up from the pile of decay it left behind, gasping for air that refused to cool me.

In my delirious eyes, I saw Briar's terraced gardens again. Stripped bare of greenery and the perfume of flowers new and old. This version was all ancient stone and deep trenches connected by iron bridges and plagued by a stench I couldn't begin to describe. Demons swarmed in the pits at each level. Some were scuttling blue shapes that resembled both machines and segmented insects. Others were tall and insultingly humanoid with red horns and red spines jutting from ash-white scales. A couple carried pitchforks.

Frenzied laughter brayed bounced out of my synthesizer. Not even I had believed in the 'red demon with a farming tool' bit about hell, but there they were. There must have been humans down there somewhere for them to poke with those things, but I no longer had the energy to do anything meaningful about that.

Even if I had, I would have chosen to conserve it. Another devil in the shape of an android stood on the other side of the nearest bridge.

The demons that swarmed the concentric rings below started to chatter and cheer.

They were the crowd. This was the arena.

The ugliest name I ever received was Dust. I got it in a coliseum, from someone who spat it at me like a curse. She had laughed at me as she died too, with a mouth full of oil and her sword in my leg, assuring me she'd see me in hell with her last breath.

The devil who wore her face was in no hurry. When I stumbled backward, it didn't close the gap at any pace greater than a stroll. When my vision broke down to shades of black and white, and I floundered with sparks dying beneath my blood-soaked clothes, it allowed me to re-orient myself.

Maybe it knew I was tired. Or that I didn't have much more than feeble defense left inside of me. Maybe it took pleasure in backing me across the bridges while demons screamed and jeered.

My vision lost focus, and I thought I could almost see the true shape of the thing in front of me. The sword shook in my hands. I raised it, and in one clean strike, it pinwheeled out of my hands. Down into the pit below.

My NFCS did not respond. Trying to materialize my fists was like trying to strike a wet match. I could jump and get the sword, but it didn't matter anymore. That was just choosing whether I wanted to die down there or die up here.

I fell to my knees.

A serrated sword sawed through my leg. The pain sent fire through my veins that turned my vision into strobing white flashes. The demon decayed right in front of me, and I was left bent over on the stones, my voice sizzling in my throat, unable to articulate any sound.

Enough, enough. This was enough.

"Is it?"

The one in front of me was me. She still had her long hair, tied back with a black visor as though it was only a stray bit of ribbon. Nervous and earnest. Jaded and blissfully ignorant. She was my last name. It wasn't what V chose for her, but it was what he called her, and what I called myself.

"It's not who you are though, is it?" the other me asked. "Just another mask."

I nodded mutely. I no longer cared about what tricks hell could play on the mind of an android. I was so tired.

"What are you still wearing this one for, YoRHa Unit 8E?" Gloved hands grabbed my face with nothing but curiosity. The absence of intent to cause pain almost felt like tenderness. "Who are you trying to be this time, YoRHa Unit 8E?"

I shut my eyes. Croaking, I answered, "I don't know."

The gloves dropped to my throat and the thing that was not Fern anymore than I was laughed.

"Liar."

A pressure warning fought for my attention against a crowd of other dire messages in my self-preservation systems. It hurt. The cables that connected the fusion reactor to an android's brain ran up the neck. Every bit as vital and vulnerable as the arteries that lined the necks of our creators. The panel at the back of my neck cracked, and my external UI warped.

Just a little more. Just a bit more, and it would be over.

A flash exploded against the other me's side. The illusion peeled back, exposing a demon with a crest covered in eyes, a vicious grin on its face as it enclosed me in red wings. A familiar blue shape clawed into its face. It spoke in a caustic tone, but the words were little more than irate white noise. Animal screeching reached me from a distance as brilliant but colorless light razed the pit.

I found myself floating, weightless as the bridge shattered and tossed devils and iron into the air. Someone took my hand and pulled me. Magic pulsed in brilliant starbursts as I came to rest on something tarry but solid.

"Her status?"

"MULTIPLE MALFUNCTIONS DETECTED. ALERT: BLACK BOX DETERIORATION WILL OCCUR IF UNIT TEMPERATURE IS NOT LOWERED IMMEDIATELY. PROPOSAL: JUMP."

A thrumming pulse and the clamminess of barely dried sweat touched my cheek. I let my eyes close as we entered freefall.

PHYSICAL CHECK COMPLETE. MEMORY CHECK COMPLETE. MAINTENANCE MODE COMPLETE.

YORHA UNIT DESIGNATED 'FERN', ACTIVATE.

Cold air washed through my body like a divine wind. My scratched reflection greeted me along the familiar silver edge of a cane. It crossed over my chest like a seatbelt. The fever of imminent meltdown was gone, but an empty buzz remained to mark where mental and physical strain had pushed me past what simple maintenance could undo.

My senses reasserted themselves in the unexpected silence, like deer stepping cautiously out of a grove into an unprotected meadow. They found clothes that were sticky, stained, and stiff. Skin that was tight with cold, coagulated blood. Low warmth that permeated my back and all down one side of me. I was leaning against someone, and I realized I could still feel a pulse against my forehead.

V's breath was calm under his hood. A swirl of steam, an empty beat, the subtle push of ribs against my shoulder, and another swirl of steam. Rhythmic and soothing. The old Fern had done something like this without permission. Pressing her cheek to his chest while he slept and stealing the sound of his heartbeat to keep as a memory. And here I was, held within the sphere of his concerns by no will of my own.

Ideally, I would have gone back to sleep and not awakened. A perfect death at the perfect interstice between punishment and contentment, and between wanting to help V go home and wanting him to stay for as long as he could. But that was the problem with everything about having V around. It never ended in the place that would have been easiest on me.

"What are you doing here…"

He stirred with a twitch but didn't immediately put distance between us. "I think that should be fairly obvious."

"How did you find me…?"

"I had…assistance." Pod sat inert beside us, but V's hesitation suggested something else was at play. I was sure I'd hear that story soon enough. "A good thing. You managed to fight your way quite far in."

The sky above our heads was clear. Not a single star to be found. A husky shadow of a laugh fluttered out of me, and I struggled away from him to lean against the opposite wall. "So now we're both down in…wherever it is that hell decides to freeze over. How reckless can you be? What kind of person does all this work for someone whose been talking about dying since the day they met!"

The cane pushed against my mouth, and he held up a finger to his lips. "Do not mistake the quiet for safety."

I avoided his gaze, just like I had before. I couldn't stand it. That look of quiet, bewildered concern ever since I attacked Theta. That patience.

"It failed," he said simply, knuckles folding together in an unusual show of uncertainty. "The attempt to return me without use of the red dragon opened a hell gate in the night kingdom. Far bigger than any of the ones previous. I do not have the power to fight off an invasion of the size occurring there."

"But you have the power to invade hell all by our damn self?"

"Hardly." A haughty smirk appeared despite the humble words. "But it is curious what motivation can accomplish, isn't it?"

"You had Theta with you." I didn't need to be someone he was concerned about. I just needed to be useful. Only I didn't know how I should do that under the circumstances here or the ones that awaited us back in the night kingdom—so what exactly was the point of me? "And Scheherazade, too. You didn't need to come here. You don't need me."

"I disagree."

I swallowed thickly. I could still taste blood. "Why do you keep…saving me?"

"I assure you the first time was not my intention," he answered dryly. "As for the rest…because I have that power. And because watching you grip your own desire for self-destruction as though it is a ward against the rest of your nature is uniquely irritating to me."

"I've been like this since the day you woke me up."

The wind blew between us. He stared at me for so long I thought he would just drop it, but the cane stabbed down into the ice beneath us. I'd miscalculated. Right then and there at the bottom of hell with all his plans in the trash and his next move uncertain, he had time to turn the full breadth of his attention on me.

"No," he whispered, quiet and piercing as a knife slipping between soft tissue. "You used to mean it, to a certain degree. Since then, you've imitated the position of a familiar, flirted with becoming companion, made quite the case for being a partner, and on several occasions beggared the place of confidant. And backed down from each. Seeking and finding and retreating in turn."

There were compliments in there. Acknowledgments that made my heart jump so high I thought I would choke on it. "So what? You don't need a friend, V. The point of sending 49 to space was precisely so that if he ended up in trouble, you wouldn't feel compelled to do stupid crap like this. It defeats the purpose if you do it for me."

"Do not be obtuse. You," He pressed the cane to my chest. "Are already 'going my way'. Retrieving you does not take me backward, especially now, when the way forward is unclear at best." I almost wanted to applaud how well he could hold a grudge. I'd said those words to him the day he woke me up, and apparently, he'd held onto them. He was still the same asshole he was then, but somewhere along the way, he decided I was worth more than utility or convenience. "The point is not whatever bond we do or do not have. The point is your increasingly erratic responses to the idea that I do not hate you, nor consider you beneath my concern."

I almost bolted.

It terrified me that I found more solace in those words than in all the sunny thoughts of imminent, painful destruction I had when I thought Gamma was going to kill me for certain. I knew how to live as that person—desperate to end, terrified to disappear, happy to let punishment or sacrifice come along and solve the problem. But what the hell was I supposed to do with this?

"Hopping into hell for someone like me is still—"

"Someone like whom," he said, tilting his head with a hard expression I couldn't read. "A being so weak as to manipulate others into doing what they wish? Or perhaps one who set in motion events leading to uncounted deaths?"

I hesitated. I couldn't tell exactly who he was talking about.

"Someone whose existence courses with meaning that was not asked for, bearing consequences beyond their control. A harbinger, ultimately incapable of protecting their own self or those harmed simply because they existed in too close a proximity, whether they attempted to be kind or not." His hands folded over his cane, a subtle glow from his arm lighting the space between us enough for me to see the cool mask that took those inward aimed barbs that could easily have been for me without flinching. "Someone like that?"

He saw me.

When he said that we weren't that different—that my way of thinking was familiar to him, he'd already seen right through me. Down to the parts I really didn't want to be seen that read to him like an unpleasant reflection of someone he had been for a long, long time, and might not have grown past being to his own satisfaction. We might have run to opposing solutions, but ultimately we ran away from the same things. And he had looked right at it, while I opted to look at nothing at all.

Something in me loosened and came apart and I found the strength to shove him back against the frigid cliff. Steam vented from my body. I wanted to tear out his eyes. I wanted him to make him unsee it, but all I could do was lash out at the ice on either side of his head with all my barely restored might. It spattered. Cracked. Landed in chunks on his clothes and refused to melt.

Dead people didn't want things. I wasn't supposed to want things. But I was the same hypocrite I'd always been. Everything about being found and about being worried after and about the warmth of the little world that only existed inside a shitty truck abandoned in the middle of nowhere reminded me loudly and terrifyingly that I was alive even though I didn't know why or how or whether I had any right to be.

But I knew I wanted to save someone.

I knew I wanted to protect someone.

I wanted to be with someone I wouldn't betray.

I wanted to treasure something I couldn't destroy.

I wanted everything that was stolen from me by the parameters of my manufacture. Everything that was forbidden to me the moment I was designated an executioner, my being and presence a promise of violence that was inviolable and inevitable. I wanted to be the opposite of everything I was, but the only version of me that came anywhere close was gone and I was walking around with her name.

Tears escaped in a sudden shower that cut through the grime on my cheeks. My energy seemed to flow out with them. Exhaustion caught up, and I could not find it in me to hide them or even begin to hold them back.

"I hate this," I cried, tears freezing on my cheeks. "I hate you."

"I don't believe that's true." He gingerly pressed me back and climbed to his feet. "But if it is. All you need to do is not follow."

I snatched his coat before he'd even taken a step. He didn't shake me off.

I didn't want to die doing what Fern did. I wanted to live doing what Fern did. But I couldn't deal with what that meant. Not yet. "I don't… know what to do with the feeling of wanting to live for myself. I don't know how I should do that."

"Who does? I can't say I am particularly good at it and I've had a great deal more time to try."

I wiped my face and immediately wished I hadn't. It just smeared old blood and frost around. Leaning heavily against the wall, I managed to climb to my feet. "…Hold out your hand."

He squinted at me and cautiously did as I asked. I cupped my hands beneath his and accessed my materialization protocols. With a spark, my black box flickered into being in and sank against his palm.

He went very still.

"There's no home I'm trying to return to," I rasped. "And I don't have a treasure I'm trying to reclaim. My treasures are dead. I killed them all. There's nothing in this world for me. Except you."

"Me," he repeated slowly. "The human."

"You, the human. I know you've hated that since the old Fern. But I need something to hold onto. And it won't be you forever, which is—" I sniffed and tried to laugh but it just tracked fresh tears over my face. "It's really damn scary! More than any machine, and so much I really do think dying would be the smarter thing to do. I really admire that stupid part of you that will fight god just to live another day, but I'm not…there yet."

"And you would like assistance?"

I nodded. "I can do being needed. But I need you too; as a human more than anything else. Even more than a confidant or a partner or whatever. So can you… can you just let me have 'defender', maybe?"

His fingers closed around the box and was I momentarily dazzled by unexpected tactile feedback. They weren't supposed to do that. They didn't have any nerve sensors. But I felt that same heady cloud over me that first brought me to him. Stranger than magnetism and sharper than smell.

Magic. It wasn't his touch, but his magic.

"The weak in courage is strong in cunning."

"I'm a little overtaxed here, Shakespeare. Fighting through hell and all? Gonna have to clarify that means."

"It means there's a human in front of you who will probably get shot if you aren't there." He pressed the box back against my chest. "But do not go so far as offering me this. It should not be given away."

The box de-materialized, settling back where it belonged. I didn't know what would happen when V was gone. But as long as he was here, and as long as I believed he was human, and as long as he needed me, I could think about the rest later.

I wanted to. I chose to.

"I can always change my mind," I pointed out.

He smirked and hooked the cane over his shoulder. "If your spirits are so high, perhaps we should find our way out before we freeze to death?"

"Yeah uh…" I took a step and my legs nearly dropped from beneath me. "You might…have to help me a little with that. Still sort of un-cooking."

"My defender and you're already asking for my help just to stand? You truly have no idea how to conduct yourself, do you?"

"Shut up," I grumbled. "This is hard."

He lent me his shoulder and answered with unusual benevolence, "I know."