4 (bones)
He works with a scattered, feverish intensity, doing many things at once, the workstation that he has built for himself - that they have built for him – spread over with papers, littered with tools. Rosie always used to say he needed another pair of hands, and now he has two of them: constantly shifting, snaking, twining around him like lovers. But they're too cold, too sleek, to love.
They carry him; he does not walk. They carry him from his broken-nest makeshift bed to his scattershot workstation, to the hulking skeleton of the half-built reactor, which sits cold and curled around itself, like a spider dead on its back.
They wake up of their own accord in the inksmudge-gray chill before dawn; he wakes to his bad back and sore joints being peeled out of bed, the warmth of sleep dissipating off them, the unwashed flesh-smelling covers falling away. They pull him, half-awake, to his work. He coaxes them to bed at night, or in the bleak of dawn, or after he's been up so long he can't tell what time of day it is anymore, and they whisper, it isn't finished. We are not finished. You must finish. You must.
"Yes," he says. "Yes." Sometimes he is angry, petulant like an exhausted child, telling them he can't, he can't finish without rest. He screams at them, and they rear back, open their claws and train their harsh unblinking eyes on him, defensive. He screams until he is hoarse and they listen, hissing mechanically, and say, You must. For us. You must.
Sometimes he is too exhausted to put up a fight. He hangs his unshaven (prickly) sleepy head, hangs in their senseless metal parody of an embrace (a sudden urge), nodding and startling awake, and lets them use him. They drag him around, an appendage himself, a vestigial outcropping of flesh. They were built, after all, to make him obsolete.
He wonders if this will be the end of him. He wonders if they will work him to death. He imagines his corpse hanging off of them, only marginally more useless than he is now. He imagines them satisfied, no longer beholden to the fickleness of his flesh, his many inconvenient needs. His body would decay away, a relief, a release, drooping and withering like an old bouquet. No one there to cradle his spent-sagging face, no half-smile to start his heart again, he would rot down to his core, steel and bones, a skeleton dragged through its paces, emptily haunting his life's work.
He imagines them shaking loose his bones, scattering them to the stray wharf-dogs, and scuttling triumphantly away, reborn.